It has been a long time since I last posted. It’s tough to find time to write when you’re traveling through Brazil, going to the Del Mar Race tracks and winning big, and styling a beautiful mustache in Vegas, so I’m sure you understand why it’s been quiet over here… heh
Now to business. I want to talk about creating something extremely useful on your own, a personalized toolbar. Doing this will save you time and space in your browser.
Before I start, keep in mind that this is not a post about my favorite Firefox add-ons, or toolbars. This is about putting all/or most of your most frequently used resources/tools at your fingertips where you can access them easily and quickly.
In this demonstration, I will go over how I built my personalized toolbar. The tools I like to have at my fingertips (in the toolbar) are the ones I use the most, but there are a lot of other useful tools out there. Don’t think that just because I didn’t list something here I don’t use it, it’s just not in my toolbar. Now, to the demo:
This tutorial on creating your personal toolbar (actually you’ll be recreating mine) is meant to be used on Firefox. Once in Firefox, make sure you have the following toolbars installed:
- Google Toolbar – You will want to have access to info from the source (cache dates, PR, etc)
- StumbleUpon Toolbar – Because Stumbling is fun
- SEO Book Toolbar – Aaron Wall’s SEO Toolbar. Not super accurate info all the time, but close enough
Now, make sure you have the Firefox Add-on Firebug installed. It’s a sweet web dev tool, very useful and a real time saver.
Once you have all of the items above installed, open a Firefox window and click on “View”, “Toolbars” , then “Customize”.
Now that you’re here, click on “Add New Toolbar”. You will be saving a new Firefox toolbar that you get to name whatever you want. If you read this post you must name it “Ricardo’s Toolbar”.. Alrigh alrigh, nevermind, you can name it whatever you want! 
At this point, you can sort through the different features and drag and drop them from other toolbars right into your personalized toolbar. Here’s what my custom SEO toolbar, aka “Ricardo’s Toolbar”, looks like:
In it, I have my most used stumble upon buttons:
I also have the icons I use from the Google Toolbar:
… other miscelaneous tools from the SEO Toolbar and Firebug that I use frequently:
And last but not least, I also have the printer button, downloads and my bookmarks folder:
The coolest thing about my toolbar is that it has my most frequently used features from three different toolbars, but it only occupies the space of one! I just love it. Even though this seems like a simple and maybe even obvious thing to do, I bet you that most of you reading this post don’t have a customized toolbar. I can’t tell you how much time I save with this everyday, it’s awesome! So go ahead, put together your new [Your Name] Toolbar today!
