No, the answer lies in the cleverly hidden Firefox configuration settings. which you can access by typing about:config into your address bar:

After you have typed about:config hit ENTER, your screen should look something like the image above. You now need to find and change the setting for keyword.URL, an easy way to do this is to type some, or all, of the words into the filter box. This can also be seen in the image above. Now you should see a filtered list of config settings, now double-click on the entry titled keyword.URL

Now you can enter the default search engine that you prefer. For best functionality you should use your favored providers special search URL – this varies from engine to engine. For ease of use we have provided some common ones below:

1. DuckDuckGo: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=
2. Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q
3. Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=
4. Ask: http://www.ask.com/web?q=
5. Google: http://www.google.com/search?&q=

We recommend trying a default engine other than Google. Google’s search results have become really bad in recent years. They are riddled with spam, and crappy content farms like eHow. Google refuses to put real people on the job, continuing to rely only on their algorithmic approach. Something we are very critical of. Give DuckDuckGo a go for a day – It’s a good alternative

Instead you see these links in a truncated form inside little “floating” window, making them completely useless. As if this wasn’t annoying enough, the links also flit from side to side of your monitor screen, always moving to the opposite side of the screen that your mouse is on! Crazy when you consider the eye is almost alwasys focused on the mouse pointer location. It’s extremely distracting having to look at the other side of the screen from that which you are working on.

So the part you have all been waiting for, the fix to the missing status bar and URL in Firefox 4

Hopefully the Firefox developers will come to their senses and remedy this issue, until then you need to install a plugin called Status 4 Evar to do the work for you, and then activate the tatus bar, if you have not already (as above) then navigate to View > Toolbars > Customize and drag the Status 4 Evar option on to your status bar.

And then most recently my Mom has decided she loves Hunter Douglas blinds so much she wants to review them!  Many of her friends have purchased Hunter Douglas window treatments, so I guess it’s quite easy for her to get hands-on with these and talk to people who have them in their homes. And while she is about it she can grab some good pics as well!

So I helped out with the design of Bamboo Blinds as mentioned, my good friend Violeta has written all the reviews and information for the site – I designed the Joomla template, which incidentally will be released over on Joomlabear shortly under the title “Notebook Template”.

The site is built on the Joomla Content Management System and also usesd the K2 Extension which provides a lot of additional options for organizing and formatting Joomla content. One example is Tags, something WordPress does out of the box but which Joomla is sadly lacking at this point.

K2 bridges this weakness and we can see an example of a K2 Tags page here: Bamboo Blinds for Sliding Glass Doors. The benefits of tagging are definitely worth the additional effort – Search Engines love them and users love them too – Tags provide a great way to organize and explore content.

The last thing I wanted to mention in today’s rambling post is my Mom’s site on Hunter Douglas Blinds. This is built with WordPress and is just a skeleton currently, but I like to work this way when designing because it gives me some  text based content to work with, really useful to get a feel for how the site will behave with images, long pages, etc. I also like to get my WordPress optimization sorted out first because it gives us a head-start in the search engines

I can spend weeks tweaking a layout until I’m happy with it – but it’s always good to remember search engines don’t look at all that fancy design stuff – they read the text and make an assessment of  what your site offers from this – so if the copy is on hand it’s very good to get this up immediately and then refine the layout as you go.

My next post will actually step you through my WordPress setup and optimization process so you can see exactly what I do.

Until then.

This has happened to me on a number of occasions – and has always puzzled me. Working away in Dreamweaver and suddenly it dies – It won’t open again except for a few seconds when my workspace flashes before me and then vanishes.

My resolution was this  – I deduced that it was the site directory that I was currently working in that had caused issues (Yes didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out).

1. So I renamed the directory
2. then created a new directory
3. Dreamweaver then opened
4. and I downloaded all my files again off the live server….

Now I know what really happened – as Norman explains what causes Dreamweaver to stop working is when a file in your site is exactly 8,192 bytes, or a multiple of this number. The fix is to find the file and just add a few characters to it, using notepad for example – then Dreamweaver will open again.

Read the full story at the link above. Interesting

What has bugged me about this is that if I reply in my own blog comments then any URL is also nofollowed. Thsi bothers me because I quite often link out to other sites in response to users questions and I don’t want these links to be nofollowed – I’m writing teh comment, I’m placing teh link, so why shouldn’t be considered by Google to be a dofollow editorial link?

The solution to this problem is an excellent little wordpress plugin http://www.everfluxx.com/follow-my-links/

This provides dofollow links for the authors posts. Just what I wanted.

The list:

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping