Squidoo Lens Editing

Greasemonkey – This lets you add little mini scripts to your browser (don’t worry you have to push one button and that’s it). In a less frightening description, it makes web pages look and work cooler. As a corollary, you must download The Fluffanutta’s script that soups up your Squidoo Dashboard and Workshop. (It only works for FF right now, IE support is supposedly on the way..)

Scribefire - I’ve written about Scribefire before and what I said then still holds true. I use it all the time when flipping between tabs in FireFox and I want to keep data or content in one place.

Squidoo Plugin – The official plugin released by HQ. It allows you to add your current page as a link on any one of your lenses, placing it in either a link list or a link plexo. This is incredibly useful if you remember you have it available..

SEO / Analysis -

SEO For FireFox – Awesome plugin by Aaron Wall at SEO Book. Shows backlinks and other relevent data on top of your search results as well as lets you easily see which links are no-followed on the page.

SEO RankChecker - Part two of SEO Book’s must have plugins is the SEO Rank Checker. Use it to monitor your search engine rankings for specific terms on all three search engines by domain and by keyword. Awesome Tool.

Compete.com Toolbar (aff.)- Shows you estimated people counts and site rankings for whatever site you are on, also adds more cool information to your search results. This is a good one to check out if sites you are looking to submit links or content too actually get any traffic.

Bookmarking / Networking -

StumbleUpon Toolbar – I use this a lot for doing market research with StumbleUpon as well as for reviewing and tagging sites (and lenses). Don’t go ‘thumbing’ all of your lenses at once, but when used judiciously it can pack a punch. Oh yea, and it’s a great fix for when you are feeling burnt out.

I usually have another toolbar of whatever social bookmarking site I’m hot on at the moment, but the only one I’ve consistently used over the last year is StumbleUpon.

I would also advise getting a Google/Yahoo/MSN toolbar just for easy searching and bookmark management as well.

This isn’t a comprehensive count of all the plugins I use, but these are the ones I use most often. Try a few of them out and see if they improve your performance or researching for Squidoo.

Got a plugin I’ve clearly missed? Let me know!

The Co-Brands are nice, but what if you could go the extra mile and use some custom text sizes, colors, lines and more? Yesterday, Fluffanutta (web, twit, FB) released� lens on CSS Tricks for Squidoo. Focusing on ways to easily create columns and float different elements around your modules, it’s definitely a must read for those of you using affiliate programs or linking pictures in modules.

Fluffanuttta’s sweet new lens should not be confused with Glen’s monstrous Advanced HTML tricks for Squidoo. While Glen’s is great for anything and everything to do with text formatting, Fluffanutta’s is great for learning how to move blocks of pictures and text around in your text/write modules.

Fluffanutta’s Lens receives a hearty Arrrrr from Captain Squid and is now enshrined in the Captain’s Picks.

If you have a lens that you would like to have the Captain review for a chance to make Captain’s Picks, leave the URL in the comments. Be warned though, if your lens isn’t up to snuff, I might make ye walk the plank…

There’s a new Lens Royalties Tab!

Click on it and you get a huge list of your earnings for your lenses for a particular month including groups. There’s also an export button

For all of you stat lovers out there (and I know there’s a bunch!) this is a great tool that replaces all those manual reports we used to run on Payday. It’s also a good substitute for the Dashboard Extension (Sorry Magicality, but it takes up to 3 minutes to run on a dashboard of 270 lenses..)

Have a Piratey Monday..

-The Captain