Wikipedia is a huge timesink if you enjoy learning about things. At the end of the night, when I am winding down, I'll fire up wikipedia to look up something. It doesn't stop there. One thing leads to another and before you know it you've learned everything wiki knows on, oh, neolithic history. 

When I expand my mind like this I manage to retain 10% or so of what I think I learn. The rest is being tossed around in the back of my brain. Sometimes I want to go back and remember how I got where I ended up on wikipedia, but the back button only takes you so far. 

A year or so ago Jason Kottke had a meme based on a post by Matt Webb called wikipedia contrails. It was a neat exercise, but I found it tedious to have to scribble everything down.  There are a couple of existing Firefox extensions that track your browsing on wikipedia: Wikipedia History and Wikimedia+. They let you look at the last six or ten pages you browsed in wikipedia, but there is no history or context to it. 

AXS tracking software is a great package to use for tracking the visitors that come to your site. It installs simply, is open source and has very many uses.

The program will install itself onto your site and learning to use it is simple. Here is a screenshot of some of the results:

Notice that I highlighted the Firefox 2.0 entry. AXS doesn't ship with Firefox 2.0 support, which is due to the fact it hasn't been updated since 2004. Yes, that's right, AXS hasn't been updated since 2004.

There have been reports of users losing all their Gmail while using Firefox. This is an interesting issue when it comes to webmail and the repercussions of using a centralized service.

It's an unfortunate fact that there isn't a way to backup your Gmail like you can your Yahoo Mail. One has to wonder why people would use a service that didn't offer backup.

Then again, how many of us actually backup on a regular basis?

What I can tell you is that Google did a good job responding to the issue and trying to fix it for the people affected. 

Firefox rocks, but due to the fact it changes the way you browse you sometimes end up with tab rot. Tab rot happens when you leave too many things in your tabs waiting for you to go back and read.

In the past, I've tried to make sure that everything is off my tabs and either read or put into bookmarks, but it rarely happens. 

You can break down the types of pages in my tabs so they look like this:

Pages to read later: I have two pages up right now that really look good, but I need to find the time to read them. The first is the Vanity Fair piece on Norad during 9/11 and the second is a PC World article on neat sites. The problem is finding the time to read them.

Firefox is the browser I use and love, but I've started noticing something that is very frustrating and I'm not alone. Form information isn't being saved after you exit Firefox and any possible fix isn't planned until late 2007.

Saved form information is the words you type in for an online form. The easiest way to see this is by going to Google, putting your mouse cursor in search box and the hitting the down arrow. You should be able to see all the words you've typed into the Google search box. This is an extremely handy feature since it retains information you've used in the past.

Firefox is my browser and I'm proud to admit it. The availability of features, the breadth of extension and the simplicity of use make it a good choice, but when things go bad, they go bad quickly.

My flash plugin quit working in Firefox, but it sort of quit working. Sometimes it'd work. Other times it wouldn't. This went on for about a week and then it completely died. Instead of seeing flash, I'd see nothing.

I tried to fix it by doing the following:

1. Reinstalling the flash plugin. You can reinstall the flash plugin for Firefox at any time by going to the Macromedia site. After reinstalling twice it didn't help.

Firefox rocks as do the extensions. Extensions extend the power of Firefox and are a great way of adding value to the browser. Two of the more popular extensions are Forecast Fox and Bloglines Toolkit. Unfortunately, the latest update of Forecast Fox breaks the Bloglines Toolkit.

After I installed the latest Forecast Fox I noticed that my Bloglines Toolkit no longer worked. This was extremely impacting as I count on it to help me subscribe to feeds I find.

The latest test version of Firefox is called Deer Park and it bring to light many improvements to Firefox that users should love.

The Firefox development team is very keen to implementing features that are impacting and meaningful and it looks like the new version, Deer Park, won't disappoint.

This is an alpha version, which means unless you want to risk everything you've built into Firefox, you shouldn't use it.

There are three new features that look to really help Firefox expand it's base:

Google Adsense is a way for web publishers to make some money off their sites. You paste a little code into your HTML and Google servers up context sensitive ads. If a visitor clicks on one of your ads you make a little money. There are people who claim to make tens of thousands of dollars a month with it, but most people just pick up money for hosting.

When you sign up for Google Adsense you quickly find yourself with GAD disease. Google Adsense Disorder. It's like ADD, but it's different in that you constantly find yourself reloading the Google Adsense page to see how many more cents you made.

A new version of Firefox was released yesterday and it's version 1.03. This version of Firefox addresses some security issues and also makes the update process smoother by limiting the number of Firefox versions showing up in the Add/Remove section of Windows based systems. Usually there are no issues when updating, but this time two Firefox extensions aren't working. Dictionary Search and Copy Plain Text.

DICTIONARY SEARCH
Dictionary Search is an extension that allows you to highlight a word and get an instant definition through a number of dictionary services. It's great for learning about words you don't know.