Misbehaving: Delicious hijacks Firefox bookmark buttons

This is one of the many reasons why people distrust browser add-ons. One of the latest del.icio.us bookmark add-ons for Firefox hijacked the CTRL-D and CTRL-B buttons from Firefox for its own use.

This is BAD BEHAVIOR! I know that Yahoo is desperate, but this type of thing can only make things worse. They've already gotten a bad rep for sneaking a Yahoo Toolbar in a Java update, and now this.

Well, Delicious Firefox add-on, it was nice knowing you, but now you are getting UNINSTALLED.

Blog Tip #29: Thesaurus is your friend when desperately looking for unused names

We already mentioned in Tip #28 that getting into a creative mood can help you, but that's not enough, because a lot of the "good names" are either taken or have an unknown or dubious history.

So in order to accelerate your creative process, I highly recommend using an online thesaurus and dictionary combo. Start searching for words that convey what your new blog or website is going to be, and keep opening words that sound promising in new browser tabs. Repeat this process until you go crazy or your browser crashes :-)

This process may take an hour or two, but if you are able to concentrate during this process, you will end up with some really good names. Some you can use right away, others you can save up in the future. Or if they are too good, you can make some money on the side by using the new AdSense-for-Parked-Domains or perhaps sell them in the domain buy/sell market.

Subscribers dropped in Feedburner? Fear not, it's not you!

If you have noticed the last couple of days that your number of RSS subscribers in Feedburner has dropped below the usual weekend drop-off, it's not you! Don't worry! Cancel the panic! Your readers have not abandoned you!

Take a deep breath and look at your detailed statistics in Feedburner. There you will notice that Bloglines is reporting ZERO readers instead of your usual number of subscribers. If you factor in your typical Bloglines reader-count, you will see that your total subscriber-count is back to where you would expect it to be :-)

Blog Tip #28: How to pick a unique domain name

Yes, at first look, all the good domains are taken. Sure, if you want to grab profit.com, or money.com, or television.com, you betcha those names are taken. A lot of the good two word domain names are taken as well.

But hope is not lost. There are still plenty of combinations of two to three words, or memorable variations of, that you can come up with.

The trick is being able to come up with it. Sitting at godaddy.com and searching for domain names is one way to do this, but it's not very creative.

A better way to find creative and available names, is to take a break from the computers, turn off all distractions, or go to a coffee shop, take a pen and paper with you, and start writing down words that describe what your new blog is going to be.

Then start thinking of creative ways to combine 2 or more of those words, and come up with creative but memorable alterations. For example, money.com is taken, but how about themoneyist.com? It's not taken as of right now.

So the bottom line is, take a break, grab a pen and paper, and get creative!

And one more thing, be sure to check Blog Tip #18, keep your user name at 15 characters or less, because some websites, like Digg and Twitter, limit your username to 15 characters or less.

Blog Tip #27: Promote RSS feeds after blog outage

Think silver lining here: If your blog suffers an outage, whether it's 20-minutes or 2 hours or longer, your readers will be frustrated at some level. This is a good time to offer them an additional option, remind them that if they subscribe to your full-text RSS feed, they'll have your latest posts cached in their newsreader so they do have another option when your blog is down!

Special $25 bonus for new Widgetbucks members

If you have been thinking about joining Widgetbucks, but have not decided yet, there is a special promotion with a $25 bonus when you sign up for Widgetbucks and generate at least $50 in ad-revenue in your account. This special promotion ends at midnight pacific time on September 21, so don't delay!

Google AdManager goes in open beta

If you are looking for a free remote-hosted ad-management solution and you were anxiously waiting for Google's Ad-Manager or hosted OpenX to go live, you are in luck! Google Ad Manager is now in open beta. We don't know if OpenX has set a date, if you know, please let us know.

If you have an Adsense account, you can sign up for Google Ad-Manager and get started right away. As with all Google products, it has the spartan and lean Google user interface and the "Google way of doing things" interface (mentality). So you will feel at home (excited or frustrated) if you are familiar with how other Google-developed product look and feel.

Of course free service means no customer support, so if you want fast, efficient and knowledgeable service, you have to use a for-pay service. Adspeed is one we have been using for a few months and we like very much. The best way to get started is the 100,000 ad-impressions for $10 per month plan starting with the 10-day free trial. Here is our long AdSpeed review.

But FREE is something we love! As soon as we can set aside a few hours, we will experiment with the Google AdManager and post our first impressions. And once we become familiar with it, we may post a comparison between AdManager and AdSpeed. Time permitting.