Snapbomb is a simple and easy to use service that brings together bloggers and advertisers on a common platform resulting in a win-win situation for both.

Using Snapbomb, bloggers can write reviews for products/services that they like and in turn get paid for it. This might similar to other services like PayPerPost or SponsoredReviews, but Snapbomb does some unique stuff.

Unlike other services, they use an ‘automated’ algorithm to determine which reviews are potential matches for your blog and it also dynamically determines the price to be paid to you for writing the review.

Quite unique and interesting.

As advertisers, you can make use of this website to do all your blog marketing to generate the require level of buzz.

IF you are a blogger or an advertiser looking to get some additional press coverage, and haven’t tried out Snapbomb yet, do give it a shot.

You can get to know some more about Snapbomb from their blog.

Many times we don’t realize that the DNS server/lookup can be very time consuming. This can add to a few seconds of delay for every website page that you load. This happens because the default DNS servers provided by your ISP is crappy, overloaded or just not configured correctly.

There is a solution to improve all this though.

Use a combination of FastCache and the OpenDNS DNS configuration.

FastCache is a caching DNS server that runs on your local machine and handles any DNS request that your computer makes, from Internet Explorer to your favorite FTP client. Rather than specifying the DNS servers of your ISP, you can use the ones provided by OpenDNS.

This combination will help speed up the connections significantly.

The Mozilla Foundation has introduced a new plugin for Firefox called Personas. This brings about a long awaited improvement in the way themes are handled in Firefox.

Personas allows you to change themes on the fly without requiring a browser restart. It also ensures one central location for finding themes for Firefox. The set of themes currently available are limited since the APIs have not yet been opened to developers. This will be changing in the coming days and will surely give Firefox a significant face lift!

The plugin is still supposed to be in Beta, but during my testing I did not find any major glitches to worry about. I did not have to download any themes separately. Just point and click on the theme name using the plugin and in a couple of seconds, Firefox makes the transition to the new look-and-feel.

The plugin works with Firefox 2 and above.

 

The Mozilla Foundation has released Firefox 2.0.0.10. This version addresses the following security vulnerabilities

• MFSA 2007-39 Referer-spoofing via window.location race condition
• MFSA 2007-38 Memory corruption vulnerabilities (rv:1.8.1.10)
• MFSA 2007-37 jar: URI scheme XSS hazard

If you are not yet on this version of Firefox, I would highly recommend that you download the update.

On a different note, don’t you think we are seeing far too many security releases for Firefox these days? Are these signs of lapses in their development and testing processes or just the fact that Firefox popularity and its resultant hack attempts are on the rise?

Amazon launched its $399 wireless eBook reader a few days back and its had a mixed bag of reviews. The eBook allows you to download and read books, newspapers and browse the web on-the-go. You can buy books online from the Kindle Online Store.

Rather than providing my own set of comments on the reader, its best you read opinions on it from leading blogs:

• Amazon Kindle at ProductWiki
• TechCrunch gave it a thumbs down. The web browser took as long as 55 seconds to load the TechCrunch page!
• Read the specs at Engadget

The Mozilla Foundation has released Beta 1 of Firefox 3. There is no official announcement yet on their website though. The link provided has installers for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

Do note that several plugins will NOT work with this beta version. This is just Beta 1 so don’t expect it to be very stable at the same time. I believe there are over 700 critical bugs that still need to be ironed out before the official release of Firefox 3.

The Mozilla Wiki has the complete feature list for Firefox 3 along with its current status.

Here are some extremely useful Firefox add-ons that you should use:

Download Statusbar [home page]
It is a browser extension that allows you to keep track of ongoing and completed downloads in a hide-away status bar.

FireFTP [home page]
It is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

FlashGot [home page]
It enables you to integrate Firefox with download managers.

Foxmarks [home page]
If you use multiple PCs you will love this add-on. Foxmarks is a bookmarks synchronizer which allows you to synchronize your bookmarks across multiple PCs.

Forecastfox [home page]
It is an extension that brings international weather from AccuWeather.com to your Firefox web browser

Greasemonkey [home page]
It is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function. Hundreds of scripts are already available for free.

IETab [home page]
It is an extension that embeds Internet Explorer in a Mozilla/Firefox tab. There is no need to launch Internet Explorer separately! You can configure which websites should automatically open in an IE Tab.

iMacros [home page]
Just automate your clicks using iMacros. It takes care of repetitive tasks quite easily.

MeasureIt [home page]
A tool for website developers which allows you to draw a ruler across any webpage to check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels.

PDF Download [home page]
With this extension, every time you click on a link, it checks if the target is a pdf file and in this case let you choose what you want to do (open pdf file inside or outside Firefox, download it to the file system or view it as HTML).

Screengrab [home page]
It is an extension for Firefox that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image. With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window - from a small selection, to a complete page. There is no need for expensive tools to do this when you have a free extension embedded right inside Firefox!

SearchStatus [home page]
It lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Compete.com ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Split Browser [home page]
This splits the content area of the browser window as you like. It will help you in various cases. For example, to compare multiple webpages, to show a calendar always, and so on.

StumbleUpon [home page]
Do I really need to say much about what StumbleUpon is?? Get the add-on for Firefox.

Tab Mix Plus [home page]
Enhance your tabbed browsing with this add-on.

Web Developer [home page]
It adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. A must for all website developers.

I personally use all the above add-ons and many more!

UPDATE [20-Nov-07]: I have left out AdBlock Plus from the list, since I personally run a lot of websites with the aim of monetization using advertisements. I have mixed feelings of using an add-on like AdBlock due to that! Just a personal opinion though.

Firefox 2.0.0.8 was released yesterday with several security fixes.

If your version of Firefox has not been auto-updated yet, please do download it right away.

I found a wonderful post at ProBlogger on how to find domain names. If you’ve been looking for a tool to help you accomplish your search for the ultimate domain name, try one of the three mentioned in the post:

Bust A Name

Domains Bot

Name Boy

Happy hunting!!