Facebook allows you to quickly and easily import an external blog from another website. See the Facebook help pages if you want to find out how to do this.

This is great, but after a blog post had been imported as a note, Facebook users are likely to comment on it in Facebook. If you are using blogging with WordPress and want to have all your comments in one place, there is a WordPress plugin that can help you: Facebook CommentsTNG. It will automatically scan your Facebook notes for imported WordPress blog posts and bring the comments back into WordPress.

This is an excellent plugin which builds on the idea of the Facebook Comments plugin, which no longer works (probably due to changes in way Facebook notes are marked up).

Check out the author’s page for the plugin: Facebook CommentsTNG.

If you’ve ever had music on your iPod or iPhone and wanted to copy it onto your PC but couldn’t find out how to do it, SharePod is the way to go. It is completely free, easy to use and allows you to add and remove music, videos, playlists and artwork on your iPod.

To find out more and download it visit http://www.getsharepod.com/.

Here are 22 free Windows downloads, grouped by categories which seem to make sense to me.

Computer maintenance
Defraggler – file defragmentation tool
CCleaner – system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool

Internet
Firefox – web browser
FileZilla – FTP client
Skype – Internet telephony

Media
CDBurnerXP – CD & DVD burner
iTunes – music player
Picasa – digital photo manager
VLC Media player – video player
Paint.NET – image editor
Spotify – on demand Internet radio

Misc.
7-zip – file compression/decompression
MozyHome – online backup service
File Renamer – Basic – file renamer

Security
avast! Antivirus – virus protection
Spybot – Search & Destroy – spyware detection and removal
Ad-Aware – spyware detection and removal
SpywareBlaster – spyware protection
Sunbelt Personal Firewall – firewall

Text/office
NoteTab Light – text editor
Adobe Acrobat Reader – PDF reader
Bullzip PDF printer – PDF printer

The three most popular web browsers in use today are Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE) and Safari. IE comes pre-packaged with Windows and with Window’s share of the operating system market slightly under 90%, it is not surprising that IE is used by 70% of Internet users. Firefox and Safari, the two other major browsers, account for 20% and 7% of Internet traffic respectively [1, 2].

I’m one of those Windows users who have decided that although IE comes installed with Windows, it isn’t the best browser available.

While some of the features in Firefox, such as tabbed browsing, are now available in all major browsers, there was a time when Firefox was the only browser that offered them. After getting my eyes, mouse habits and fingers used to using Firefox, even when other browser caught up with Firefox, I saw no reason to switch. The following are reasons I use Firefox as my main browser.

Customizability with add-ons/extensions
The number and range of extensions that are available for Firefox is substantial. Most of these are produced by an enthusiastic band of third-party developers. Some of my favourites are AdBlock Plus, Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, CustomizeGoogle, FoxClocks and Mouse Gestures Redox.

Tabbed browsing
Let’s me have multiple webpages open in one browser window. Now available in IE as well, but ‘too little, too late’ for me.

Adjustable page zoom
Page zoom; not just text zoom.

Smart keywords
Smart keywords are a fast way to search a website right from the Location Bar. For example, if I’m looking for ‘Tailor of Gloucester’ on Amazon, I type ‘a The Tailor of Gloucester’ and it sends me straight to the search results on Amazon’s webpage. Find out more: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/smart-keywords.html

Spell checker
Greatly decreases the likelihood of me leaving misspelt message on my friends’ walls on Facebook or sending embarrassing web mails. Also lets me know why the word I’m searching for on Google doesn’t give me any results.

Security
While no browser offers 100% protection, I find Firefox does a better job than the other browsers.

Reliability + standards compliance
Firefox works as it is supposed to and breaks relatively infrequently.

Incremental or ‘find as you type’ search
This means that while viewing a web page, I can find any word on it by just starting to type the word. No need to click Edit > Find or Ctrl+F to search.

---

While I enjoy using Firefox for the majority of my Internet browsing, I haven’t given IE, Safari, Opera and Chrome the boot yet. Sadly, some websites only work properly with one of these browsers.

If you want to give Firefox a try it’s a free download from http://www.mozilla.com/firefox

—

[1] http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=1
[2] http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8