Toolbars - How Many Do You Use?

If you've worked on a computer for any amount of time, you most often find that you need a toolbar on top of the browser screen for something. There are almost as many toolbars as there are search engine sites. Every major search engine has one. Here are few of my favorites. All have the search engine part built in, but all have different other parts to them for more tasks than just searching. There is even a quiz addict toolbar if you're in a trivia mood, and it's great for coming up with idea's for articles too.

Google Toolbar

This has to be one of, if not the most popular and useful toolbar around. From the toolbar, you can check out the web, get pictures, check the news....and anything else you need to do.

Stumble Upon

Here is another hugely popular toolbar. You get a chance to surf the web with this one. You need to sign up first, check off a list of you favorites, as in things you do, things your interested in, and hobbies. The more you check off, the more sites you 'stumble' through. There are also 'like and dislike' buttons that you can rate the sites by. There s also a button that you can stumble through your friends fav's.

Dictionary Toolbar

Every writer needs this one! No matter if you write articles, columns or The Great American Novel. You get word search for Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Thesaurus, Reference...all kinds of stuff. You also get search history, so if you need the same word again, you can go back and see it. If your working on something, you can have the results show either in the same window, or another window from which you are working in. This one only works with IE. Does not work on Firefox.

Triond Toolbar

Since there are many of us on AC writing for multiple sites, thought I'd include this one. I love the 'new' Triond toolbar! It's a Firefox add-on, and I use it almost as much as the Stumble toolbar. I put new in quotes because I'm not sure just how new it is, I just found it a couple day's ago. My favorite part of it is the Random part. Click this, and it takes you to different area's within the Triond website. From there, you see all the different sub-categories there are too. Which is great for thinking of what to write about.

I never noticed there were so many sub-categories before. I normally find a topic and write it up, then put it in the place it fits, but now I think I will try it the other way around... find a sub-category and write up an article for it.

The toolbar also has your money amount that you make too, which I like. Also, your friends and what they write on. And any comments left by your readers.

Now if only Associated Content had a toolbar too!