One of the issues that you may experience on today’s Internet are sites which change the visited link color via CSS so that it looks like to the normal link color on the site.

Visited is a Firefox add-on that paints all visited links in a color of your choosing. It overrides the defined link colors on all websites, so that visited links can be distinguished from unvisited ones.

The default link color has been set to gold, which should highlights visited links clearly on most pages, but not all. It is possible to change the color in the advanced Firefox preferences (and unfortunately not in an options menu via the about:addons page).

To change the link color, you need to enter about:config in the Firefox address bar to open the advanced configuration of the browser. Filter for the parameter extensions.visited.color.visited and change the value with a double-click. You can enter a color name or color code beginning with # in the value field. You can for instance change it to #800080 to turn the visited link color to purple.

The feature can be activated or deactivated with the shortcut code Alt-v for text links, or Alt-Shift-v for image links. It is unfortunately not possible to disable the painting of links on selected sites (it is for instance irritating in admin consoles and interfaces).

Firefox users can download and install the add-on at the official Mozilla Add-ons repository.

Page Queue offers a simple alternative that some Firefox users may prefer. It can be used to add links to a page queue. The advantage here is that the links are saved but not opened directly. The queue works on a first in first out basis.

You can add links from an article that you are reading to the queue to open them later in the Firefox web browser. This is done with a right-click on a link and the selection of PagesQueue > Add link to queue.

Queued links are saved over sessions, and links from the queue are opened automatically in new tabs when the option to open a queued link is selected from the right-click menu.

The extension lacks features that would improve it significantly. There is currently no way to display the list of queued pages. An option to display the list (for instance to open a page further down the queue or to remove pages from it) is missing. Keyboard shortcuts or a button to open a queued page would be useful as well.

Firefox users can download the Page Queue extension from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

IsItOld takes a link and checks if that link has been posted on Twitter already. It is not a 100% giveaway if you have the intention to post the link on another site, but it could very well be an indicator.

All you need to do is to paste the link into the form on the IsItOld website. You can paste in any link regardless of the web page’s actual contents. This works for YouTube videos, images, plain websites and even applications.

The link scan on Twitter takes a few seconds tops. The service displays information about that link on the result’s page.

Ratings range from OK over Kinda OK to Dead. IsItOld displays the number of shares on Twitter and the time of the first share. In this example, the link was tweeted more than 3000 times in the last two years.

IsItOld cannot make decisions for you. At its core, it is nothing more than a script that checks a link’s popularity on Twitter. Twitter is however often a good indicator if something has already made the round or if it is brand new. This could be interesting for webmasters and writers who are not sure if they should cover a certain topic on their blog or website.

It is probably easier to ignore the “old” sayers on forums and social networking sites than using the IsItOld site regularly. You can run your own Is It Old checks here.

Plain text links from a user perspective are not nearly that ambivalent. Instead of clicking on the link to open it, users either have to copy and paste it or use other means to open it in their favorite web browser. This means that it will take longer to open those links.

The Firefox Internet browser has a nice feature that can be used to open non-HTML links. Just select the link text, right-click it and select to open the link in a new tab. The browser can identify plain text links automatically to display those options in the context menu.

While that’s a great workaround if you encounter those links on an irregular basis, it may become an annoyance if you happen to encounter plain text links regularly.

That’s where the free userscript Linkify comes into play. The script turns plain text links automatically into clickable HTML links on all http pages (it is not working on https websites).

The script supports http, https, ftp and email address links that are displayed in plain text instead of the HTML code version.

This is the plain text link of the screenshot above.

And this is the very same link after installation of the userscript.

As you can see, the script has modified the plain text link on page load and turned it into a clickable link.

I have tested Linkify Plus under Firefox with Scriptish installed. It is likely that the script will also work under different web browsers, Opera or Chrome for instance. Please note that Linkify Plus can only work its magic if JavaScript is enabled for the particular website you are visiting.

You can install Linkify Plus directly from the official userscripts website.

Mapping that functionality to the right-click button comes at the expense of the context menu which can then only be opened by holding down Shift, Ctrl or Command.

The add-on speeds up the opening of links in new tabs by eliminating the need to hold down the Ctrl key to do so if no middle mouse button is available.

I would like to use this article as a guide to list all the options that Firefox users have to open links in new tabs and windows, beginning with basic mouse operations and ending with add-ons that add new options or change existing ones.

Built-In Link Opening Options

• Left-click: Opens the selected link in the active tab
• Middle-click: Opens the selected link in a new tab
• Right-click: Opens context menu with options to open link in new tab or window
• Left-click + Ctrl: Opens link in a new tab
• Left-click + Shift: Opens link in a new window

Link Opening Add-ons

• InstaClick – Maps the middle mouse button’s link opening functionality to the right mouse button. The Add-on Right-Click offers a similar functionality.
• Link Alert – Displays link information by changing the mouse cursor when hovering over links.
• Link Sidebar – Displays all links of a web page in the sidebar along with search options.
• Linky – Adds options to open all links in tabs and to copy them to the clipboard.

• Mouseless-Browsing – Browse the Internet without the mouse. Adds IDs next to all links on a page. These links are then opened by typing in the Id on the keyboard.
• Multi Links – Adds functionality to open multiple links at once in the browser. This is done by drawing a rectangle around all links that you want to open in Firefox.
• Plain Text Links – A right-click on a text link, a link that is not directly clickable, opens a context menu with an option to open that link directly. Functionality seems to be (at least partially) included in Firefox 4+. Linkification is a similar add-on.
• Playlink – Open links in external programs, for instance media players or other web browsers.
• Quick Drag – Open links by dragging and dropping them in the Firefox Internet browser. Automatically opens dragged links in new tabs in Firefox. Drag Url Link is a similar extension.

• Text Link – Open links in the web browser by double-clicking on them. Useful for links that are not displayed as HTML links so that they cannot be opened with a single mouse click.

As you can see from the list, there are lots of options to work with links in Firefox. How do you open links in Firefox?

The service rates websites in the categories trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. Web of Trust today announced a cooperation with Facebook, that could multiple the company’s popularity and user base in short time.

Facebook has integrated Web of Trust’s reputation ratings into their security system. From now on, all outgoing links on Facebook will be checked by Web of Trust to protect users from accessing malicious or dangerous websites.

Facebook users may see an intermediary page when they click on an outgoing link on the social networking site.The notification reads:

Sorry

The link you are trying to visit has been classified as potentially abusive by Facebook partners. To learn more about staying safe on the Internet, visit our Facebook’s security page. Please also read Wikipedia articles on malware and phishing.

Website reported for spam, malware, phishing or other abuse. This warning is provided in collaboration with Web of Trust. Learn More.

Facebook users can ignore the warning to visit the page, get additional information about the warning by clicking on the learn more link, or go back to the page they were previously on.

All links that have been rated as untrustworthy by Web of Trust will show this or a similarly looking notification message.

The warnings are currently added on Facebook US. Other countries will follow next week after which the new security system will be available globally.

The addition of an outgoing link scanner improves security for Facebook users considerably, especially since there was no system in place before. Facebook has now added a powerful tool to their site that checks all outgoing links to warn users of potentially dangerous websites.

The integration of Facebook should give Web of Trust a noticeable boost. It is likely that the install base will rise significantly shortly after the roll out of the security system on Facebook.

This will have an effect on reports and ratings as well, considering that an increase in users should increase those numbers as well.

Interested users can read the announcement over at the Web of Trust blog. Facebook has not made an announcement yet on their website. It is likely that this is going to follow soon.

That’s were the new add-on Multi Links comes into play. The add-on offers the same functionality as Snap Links with the difference that it is compatible with the latest version of Firefox without having to force compatibility. Some users reported that Multi Links processes links better than Snap Links.

Links can be selected by right-clicking and drawing a rectangle around them. It is possible to cancel the operation with the left mouse button or pressing Esc. One interesting option is the ability to only open some of the links on the page by pressing the CTRL or Shift key to draw smaller rectangles around links.

Options are available the add-on options of the web browser that cover those of Snap Links.

• You can choose to open links in new tabs or new windows.
• You can choose whether to go to those new tabs/windows or stay on the current tab/window when they open.
• You can choose to copy to clipboard or to bookmark selected links.
• You can choose a selection and link box colour from the preset colours or in put your own hexadecimal colour code.
• You can choose the thickness of the link nd selection box borders.
• You can choose the line style of the box border to be solid, dotted or dashed.
• Smart selection is for search engines. It helps you by only selecting search listing results rather than including other links such as “similar”, “cached” or “filter” as well as other links that the search engines display.

Multi Links works perfectly and has replaced Snap Links Plus on my computer systems.

Opinions about those sites differ from letting them do what they want with your content to contacting lawyers and suing them. Clever webmasters can use content copying websites to their advantage if they play their cards right. Since most of those websites use RSS feeds to automatically post the copied contents they include links in those posts automatically. Some even post tags or related posts of the original site as well.

This means that every link that you post in the original article will be posted by them as well if they have automated the process which in turn means free inbound links to your website. It gets better. If they do link back to your site as they should they usually use the title of the article to do so. This means free targeted inbound links to the article on your website.

There are some sites that copy your content but do not post links at all. Experience has shown that contacting the site owners directly asking them to either remove the content or add a link using the article titles will be successful in most cases. There is not an easier way to get free targeted links than this way.

Here is one of the emails that we send out usually to offenders who do not link back to our site although they use our content on theirs:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I’m writing on behalf of the technology blog ghacks.net. It has come to our attention that a blog located at http://***/ is publishing articles without authorization.

We are asking that the person responsible either

a) gives credit where credit is due by linking to the articles properly and visible using the title of the article as the link anchor or
b) removes all content that has been taken from ghacks.net

best regards

This is usually enough to receive a response in less than 48 hours. All that have been contacted so far have added title links to the original articles.

How To Find Content Copying Websites:

There are several ways to find websites that copy your content. You can copy a passage of one of your articles in a search engine or use services that will list most of the sites that copy the content. Some of the services are Fair Share or Copy Gator.

Fair Share does offer an RSS feed that lists all the websites that have been using at least 20% of the words of an original article on their website displaying if the copycats link back to the original post or not. This makes it easy to identify those sites that do not link back and contact them.

Options if the site owners do not comply

Webmasters have a few choices if site owners do not react at all to the request. They could contact the hoster of the domain, lawyers who take matters from there or even advertisement companies who display their ads on those websites.

Final Thoughts

While some webmasters do not want to see their content at all on other websites others can take advantage of the fact that content copying websites exist by getting free, valid links from those sites. These sites might also send in traffic to the original site. The number one site that is using our contents is sending more than 3000 unique visitors per month our way.

Webmasters should not worry to much about search engine positions as search engines usually do a very good job of identifying the original site and the copycats. Duplicate content penalties will hit them and not the original site.

But this is naturally not the only way how work gets reproduced on the Internet. Other websites may cite passages of an article in their own articles which is a totally legit thing to do.

Keeping track of all the websites and discovering new websites that use your articles can be a time consuming task. A manual way to track them would be to enter key sentences into Google to find the websites that are indexed in Google that are using at least that sentence of your article.

An easier way is to use a service like Fairshare. Fairshare monitors RSS feeds that the user enters into their form on the homepage. It creates another RSS feed that will add all the websites as feed items that copy at least 20% of the words of an article of the initial RSS feed.

FairShare lists the percentage of the article that appeared on the other website, if a link back to the original site is present, if ads are displayed on the website and the url plus title of the article. Those information are excellent to discover the sites that are copying your articles.

It usually takes a few hours after adding a new RSS feed before the first feed items appear in the RSS feed of the copied articles. Fairshare will create another feed that posts a weekly summary of all the discovered items.

While FairShare is surely not discovering all websites that make use of other author’s articles it does a pretty good job at discovering the majority. The information provided are great to help webmasters depending on their use policy. Some webmasters probably only want to contact webmasters copying articles without linking back to the original content, others might want to ask websites that use ads to remove the content while some might want to ask all sites that copy 100% of their articles to remove them immediately.

Actions can be opening all links in new tabs or windows, bookmark them, copy them to the clipboard or initiate downloads. The function can be set to the right, middle or left mouse button. The rectangle will be visualized with a green border and the links that are selected with a red border. The selected action will be performed as soon as the mouse button is released.

The good news is that Snap Links finally got updated. It is now available directly from the official Mozilla website (and not Rapidshare or other third party sites like before). The developer has translated the add-on to 17 languages by now which is another bonus.

Snap Links is compatible with Firefox 3 including the soon to be released Firefox 3.1. Definitely one of the best add-ons if you regularly work with multiple links that you want to open or download.

Users installing the software need to have administrator rights to do so and should note that only NTFS drives support the creation which means that it cannot be used on partitions formatted with FAT file systems. It should also be noted that Link Shell Extension is compatible with 64-bit editions of Windows XP and Windows Vista.

The type of link that is created depends on the source that is picked by the user. Picking files will create hardlinks, folders will create junctions and a partition will create a volume mountpoint. The benefit of creating that file system is that files and folders can be accessed in multiple places instead of just the source location.

In addition to the three link types specified above the Windows Vista version of Link Shell Extension supports the creation of Symbolic Links which have been introduced in the operating system.

The creation of remote links within SMB mapped network NTFS drives is supported by the software program as well. The easiest way to get an overview of the capabilities of Link Shell Extension is to visit the homepage which lists all supported modes and functions.

Most webmasters have the decency to cite their source when they write about a topic that they have encountered on another website which is a good and honest thing to do. Almost all of them on the other hand use anchor names like via or sitename to link back to the website which is probably helping a new blog that wants to establish a name for itself and might help experienced visitors identify the source by reading the name.

It is however not really helping the webmaster who is maintaining the source website.Most search engines (still) rely heavily on anchor names. What you do is you tell the search engines that the source is about via or the sitename but do not give the search engine a single hint as to what the article is really about.

Lets take one basic example. Ghacks writes a post about the latest Firefox update. A brand new story that has not reached the masses yet. Instead of linking to that story using via or ghacks webmasters would do me a much bigger favor by using anchor names like firefox, firefox 3 or firefox update because this would give my article more weight in the search engines.

I have therefor decided to link to other blogs that I cite in my articles properly from now on. The link will contain one major keyword (a keyword can be comprised of one or multiple words) that I have identified in the post on the other website. This will help the other website in their search engine rankings in the major search engines. I will furthermore contact webmasters who link to my articles and ask them if they would like to consider doing the same.

Websites with thousands of pages make it impossible to manually check links on each and every page. That’s where software programs like Xenu’s Link Sleuth come into play. The software is able to check all links on all pages of a website for broken links and reports them accordingly.

It naturally takes time to check thousands of pages and all the links that point from the to internal and external pages. The software takes good care of everything and offers enough options to configure the link checking process.

The webmaster can enter one or more urls that should get checked for broken links. Those are the starting points and the bot follows all internal links and level 1 external links he can find and reports on their status.

The report can be sorted by status which is also indicated by a color. Green usually means that the link is working while red indicates a broken link.

It is possible to get the properties of every broken link to be able to fix it by either removing it or replacing it with the correct one in case the website the link is pointing to has been moved.

Take Back Control Over Your Right Click Menus

An article over on Make Use Of which I particularly  liked as I’ve been looking around for a application to do this for a while.

Philipp Lenssen’s Top Google Apps Tips

Some great tips for using Google’s applications and services like Google Docs, Gmail and search. 

7 Beautiful Themes (Visual Styles) to Customize Windows Vista

As Long Zheng was saying yesterday, “Personally, the idea of using a third party visual style in Vista has never even crossed the mind and I’m someone who wouldn’t think twice about using a custom style in XP.” Even so, there are plenty of nice themes you can try, and Life Rocks has put together a list of what they feel are the 7 best visual styles for Vista. It’s a good list, I wouldn’t really disagree with any of the items on it.

Newsgator – The Most Complete RSS Solution

And some shameless self-promotion from me, this is my article, again on MUO, I spent a fair bit of time researching and writing this one so check it out!

What is rundll32.exe And Why Is It Running?

The How-to-Geek had a great post as always on troubleshooting a runaway .dll through the task manager. He also did a very useful post about useless Vista tweaks on Lifehacker.

How One Would-be Web Friend Turned Into a Stalker In Months

Louis Gray outlines a creepy experience with what seems to be a whacked-out entrepreneur. While reading it you’ll probably find yourself asking the same thing I did; Why the hell did Louis put up with this guy for so long?

The most underhyped Silicon Valley success: Meebo

In perhaps one of the best posts I’ve seen Robert Scoble write, he descends from his normal early-adopting, Friendfeed loving position and takes a very real look at an extremely successful service we never hear anything about; Meebo. Did you know they had 20 million monthly users? I sure didn’t.

Why don’t we hear anything about such a runaway web 2.0 success story?

“That A-list bloggers don’t use IM or chat much, so don’t get passionate about it the way they do about, say, Twitter (although Twitter has about 1/10th as much traffic [as Meebo]).”

…

“If you are an entrepreneur and you want to reach a mainstream audience, you should hang out on Meebo more to do your research, not on Twitter or FriendFeed.”

Some good advice there.

Once you have quick links enabled, all you need to do is create some custom searches. Now let’s see what you can do here. For example I get a lot of comments on some of my Youtube videos and I like to take a look at them and keep track. However I don’t like them clogging up my inbox, so I have a filter that archives them right away. I could create a filter for the comments, even a filter for comments on separate videos, but I can also search for them, and create a quick link to that search page by clicking “add a quick link” to the side. The major advantage of this method is that you don’t need to create a lot of labels. I find that labels are great for organizing, but if you use too many, it’s the same as not using them at all.

You can use these quick links for much more than just listing comments. Since you can list any search page, why not list all the video’s you’ve received either by attachement or from youtube? Just create a search for these items and add them to your quick links. This can be of great help if you’ve been emailing with a collegue and you know he sent you the traffic analysis, but can’t remember when and where. Just create a quick link to all doc files sent by that person and you can browse through the files easily.

All you need is a Greasemonkey compatible browser like Firefox, the Greasemonkey extension and the Annotate Links script that adds the functionality. The annotated links are not visible when browsing websites but will become visible once you print the website. Each link gets a unique identifier (number) which corresponds to a link in the link list at the end of the printout.

Only plain HTML links are added this way to the document. JavaScript links or relative links are not included which makes a lot of sense obviously. You can preview the output if you select Print Preview from the menu of your browser, the way the links are prepared and added should be visible there if the Greasemonkey extension is running.

Update: The Annotate Links script is no longer available on the author’s website. The link is returning a 404 not found error.

The Printable userscript is an alternative that you can install instead. You still need Greasemonkey installed in Firefox to make use of the userscript. It is likely that the userscript is also working in Scriptish for Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and other browsers supporting custom userscripts.

This script automatically adds link references to the end of the printed document. This way, the linked information are visible on the print out which may help in research later on.

In my opinion though the loss of privacy does not justify the gain, because in the end it does not really matter that much if you know if someone read the email or visited the link you send him. Tracking users, no matter if its done in large scale by companies or in smaller scale by individuals, is not right. Not for this purpose anyone.

Enough of the ramblings. I’m the last to tell you what you can and cannot do on the Internet. I just wanted to make my position clear before posting the links to the following two websites.

Linkblip and UrlVi are two online scripts that convert links into urls that are tracked much like tinyurl but with tracking included. If someone clicks the links you will be notified by email if you have been using Linkblip or by accessing a page of statistics if you have been using UrlVi.

Both bring fourth another concern that i have. They disguise the original link which is a technique used by spammers as well. Instead of showing the link url www.ghacks.net they display http://lburl.com/dcgdy or http://urlvi.be/rus2k which do not reveal any information about the destination.

I would be very cautious about such a link even if a friend would be sending it to me. My first reaction would be to call, chat or reply to that friend asking what the link was all about.

I guess the best application for a service like Linkbunch is if you are restricted to a certain amount of characters. Twitter for instances comes to my mind or sending someone an SMS.

The principle is easy to grasp. Just add as many links as you want into the text field at Linkbunch and click on the Bunch button afterwards to create a random link pointing to that link collection. Take a look at one of the links that I have created to get an idea of the concept.

The links themselves are really short, always starting with http://linkbun.ch/ and random chars afterwards. The only thing that needs to be taken care of is that everyone may access those links by guessing the random chars. They seem to be using three chars for the links currently which means a very limited amount of possibilities.

Let me give you an example to make this clear. If you search for Click Here in Google you will see that the first result is a page at Adobe, to be precise the download page of Adobe Reader. You won’t find the phrase on that website but it still ranks as number one for that term. Why is that ? Because other websites that link to this page are using the keyword Click Here as the anchor text.

And here begins the dilemma for the average webmaster, Adobe could care less because they are a huge company. Lets say you write an awesome article about Windows 7, the new operating system of Microsoft. If someone links to your blog with the anchor text Windows 7 or Windows 7 review you will get a vote from that website for that keyword and your ranking in the search engines might improve.

It actually will improve if you get enough votes. The article is about Windows 7, you get votes for that keyword, that’s awesome. Right ! That’s the correct way of linking to another website because it is helping the other website in the search engines which attracts more visitors that visit that website.

Many websites however use a sites name, or even worse phrases like here, website or click here to link to other websites. Those average terms do not help the linked websites at all. They do not hurt either but they cast votes in a field with a competition in the hundreds of million. Not that helpful.

So, if you want to help a website and write an article about a story that you found on another website you should use a related anchor tag to help that website – that is, unless you want to rank better for that term.

Some users might already be using the so called Quick Launch toolbar in their taskbar. This is for example the case when you see some icons in your taskbar that open programs like the Internet Explorer or the Windows Media Player. If you do not see the Quick Launch toolbar you can enable it by right-clicking your taskbar and choosing Quick Launch from the Toolbars menu.

This Quick Launch toolbar can be customized. If you want to remove a shortcut you right-click it and select delete from the menu. New folders and applications are simply added by dragging and dropping them in the Quick Launch area.

It is possible to change the icon by right-clicking the shortcut, selecting Properties from the menu and choosing Change Icon there. I have added several of my most commonly used applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird, WinSCP3 and Putty.

The second taskbar enhancement are Links to websites that you can add there. To add it you right-click the taskbar, select Toolbars there and choose the Links entry.

Once that is done you can get rid of the Microsoft links in there if you do not use them and drag and drop your own favorite sites to this section. It is then possible to access those sites by left-clicking on them which is a very convenient way.

The last screenshot is showing both my Quick Launch toolbar and my Links toolbar.