The beauty of this is that it allows you to use StumbleUpon on computers where you wouldn’t be able to add a toolbar, ie. work, school, or other public computers. Plus, he included my favorite part of Strangej and Thlayli’s StumbleUpon Add-on Toolbar, the rating selection option. If you’re like me, and usually keep your settings on SU set to G, being able to switch easily to R to visit someone else’s page is a great addition. If you do normally keep your ratings set to G, I would recommend adding both G and R to your bookmarks if you use this. That way you can force a change back to G without resetting anything or restarting your browser.

There are some other great options in the Add-on Toolbar if you don’t mind adding another toolbar to Firefox. It includes the ability to go to a random archive page, back up your SU blog, Advanced photoblog, and a box to type in the name of a SU user and go to their blog.

Technorati Tags: beginner, Toolbar, Toolbarless, StumbleUpon, SU,

Pseudonym, a friend on StumbleUpon, once told me: “Coming to SU was *definitely* the best move I ever made in my life…the experience has given me ever more confidence in myself, in what is possible, in what is available, happening, knowable, fascinating, and just plain *fun* out there in cyberspace.”

This is the what the StumbleUpon toolbar looks like when you first download it…well, maybe not so squished, but I wanted it big enough to see.

Clicking on the stumble button will take you to a web page that someone else has already discovered and thumbed up. A number beside the SU picture, or icon, shows how many pages your friends have sent that you haven’t viewed yet. Only your friends can send pages for you to view, so you don’t have to worry about a stranger spamming you.

The thumbs are the most important buttons on your toolbar. Giving a page a thumb up means “I like it,” but in a broader term, it means “I like this type of page and would like to see more.” By the same token, giving a page a thumb down means “I don’t like pages like this. Please don’t send any more.”

The Send to button let’s you share the pages you’ve been visiting. You can send a page to anyone that you are mutual friends with or anyone who’s e-mail you have.

And the Comments button let’s you read what everyone else has said about a page, or add your own comments. SU refers to this button as both the comments and reviews button, depending on whether you have text turned on for your toolbar or not. Either way, it takes you to the same page.

The Channel area gives you several options to choose from. If you are only wanting to stumble news, or friends, or one of your interests, you can choose an option from the channel area. Clicking on the word All brings up a drop down list that let’s you choose any of your interests to stumble.

Favorites is another button that will get a lot of use. It takes you to your StumbleUpon blog, where you can see the websites you’ve commented on.

Friends takes you to the same page that the Friend’s tab does. You can see up to ten friends who are online, up to ten people that you are fans of, and up to ten people who are your fans.

Finally, Tools brings up a drop down menu…

…that looks like this. There are several sections on the tools menu that you’ll want to note. This is where you come to invite a friend to SU, and on the rare occasions that you need to sign out of StumbleUpon for some reason.

Let’s look at more at the Toolbar Options for now.

For the rest of this video, I will be focusing entirely on the Appearance tab. Under the configuration tab, you can set whether SU shows if someone has discovered the page and what the page rank is when you use a web search such as Google or Yahoo. The default is to show this information, but if you prefer not to get it, unclick the first box under Search.

Now that you know what the buttons on the toolbar do, it’s easy to create a toolbar that fits you.

There are several buttons I recommend keeping on your toolbar, in addition to the permanent Stumble and thumbs buttons.

The inbox puts a mailbox icon on your toolbar. If you have mail, the flag on the mailbox stands up. I love knowing when to check my inbox, without having to wait for an e-mail notice.

The Channel Menu puts everything from the channel area into a drop down menu, so it doesn’t take as much space on your toolbar. If you’d like, you still have the option of adding to the toolbar the channels that you use most.

Send to so that it’s easy to send web pages to your friends.

Reviews or Comments

Favorites, which gives you a fast way to get to your blog

And lastly, the Tag icon, which lets you easily add tags to any page. Once you’ve added tags to a page, the icon will turn to the right, and will turn from blue to red. Hovering over it will show the tags you’ve selected for that page.

One thing I LOVE about the StumbleUpon toolbar is that they let you add it to other toolbars. The easiest way to do this is to click on “Drag to position,” pull the SU toolbar in front of the Google toolbar, and click OK. You can also choose a different position from the drop down menu, but just as a note, all toolbars don’t play as nicely as SU and Google, so you may have to try several to get it to work.

Happy stumbling!

Need more help? Check these out:

StumbleUpon Comments
TaggZilla
Teeg.StumbleUpon

Technorati Tags: StumbleUpon, Stumble Upon, SU, Toolbar, Pseudonym, Thumb up, Thumb down, Reviews, Favorites, Toolbar Options, Stumble, stumbling, StumbleUpon Comments, Taggzilla

I thought I’d create an introduction page to help you find your way around my blog. So far I have information on the fonts that I like to use (and links to download those fonts if you don’t have them and would like to) and some helpful guidelines to stumbling my pages. If there is something you’d like to see here that I don’t have listed, feel free to mention it. If you have a question about something, feel free to ask it here also.

Periodically I like to see what the last page of my StumbleUpon blog is. Currently the last page is: 2780. If you’d like to see it, simply go to: http://teeg.stumbleupon.com/archive/3670/. If there is a particular page you want to see, use this formula instead: http://teeg.stumbleupon.com/archive/(insert page number here).

For example if you want to go to page 1100, then you’d use:
http://teeg.stumbleupon.com/archive/1100/ (make sure to include the last / or it won’t work). Have fun exploring!

Every once in a while I’ll post something using a font color or a font style that someone finds difficult to read. A few of you have been gracious enough to let me know when that happens, and I’ve tried to change my habits accordingly. While I was changing some of my posts the last time, I got to thinking about the different people who view my pages, and wondering how many of them see the pages the way I intended. Since Windows XP is my OS (operating system), I’m sure that people who use Macs or Linux probably have a hard time seeing the various fonts that I like to use. And often, the right font can mean the difference between something appearing thrown together and something that is aesthetically pleasing. So, I thought I’d create a font list and hopefully, eventually have links to each font where you can download it for free. If you have other fonts you like, please let me know. I enjoy playing around with various fonts (as you can tell from my page).

Here are the fonts I may use. I haven’t used all of them yet, but I’m listing them just in case I ever decide it’s the perfect fit for whatever I’m posting:

Arial
Arial Black
Batang
BatangChe
Book Antiqua
Bookman Old Style
Bradley Hand ITC (This is one that I’ve been told is hard to view at times. Some of my old posts have it, but none of my recent ones do.)
Century
Century Gothic
Comic Sans MS
Copperplate Gothic Bold
Copperplate Gothic Light
Corida New
Courier
Courier New
Curlz MT
David
David Transparent
Dotum
DotumChe
Edwardian Script ITC
Engravers MT
Eras Demi ITC
Eras Light ITC
Estrangelo Edessa
Eurostile
Felix Titling
Fixed Miriam Transparent
Franklin Gothic Book
Franklin Gothic Demi
Franklin Gothic Demi Cond
Franklin Gothic Heavy
Franklin Gothic Medium
Franklin Gothic Medium Cond
FrankRuehl
FreesiaUPC
French Script MT
Garamond
Gautami
Georgia
Gulim
GulimChe
Gungsuh
GungsuhChe
Hansa
Impact
JasmineUPC
Jokerman
Juice ITC
Kartika
KodchiangUPC
Kristen ITC
Latha
Levenim MT
LilyUPC
Lucinda Console
Lucinda Sans
Lucinda Sans Unicode
Maiandra GD
Mangal
Matisse ITC
Microsoft Sans Serif
MingLiU
Miriam
Miriam Fixed
Miriam Transparent
Mistral
Modern
Monotype Corsiva
MS Dialog
MS Dialog Light
MS Gothic
MS Mincho
MS PGothic
MS PMincho
MS Reference Sans SerifMS Sans Serif
MS Serif
MS SystemEx
MS UI Gothic
MV Boli
Narkisim
NSimSun
OCR A Extended
Palatino Linotype
Papyrus (This is a favorite of many writers on SU, it really is a beautiful font.)
Perpetua
PMingLiU
Raavi
Rockwell
Rockwell Extra Bold
Rod
Rod Transparent
Roman
Script
Shruti
SimHei
Simplified Arabic
Simplified Arabic Fixed
SimSun
Small Fonts
Sylfaen
System
Tahoma
Tempus Sans ITC
Terminal
Times New Roman
Traditional Arabic
Trebucket MS
Tunga
Verdana
Vivaldi
If you come across a free version of any of these fonts please let me know, I’d love to include links for Windows, Macs, and Linux so that anyone who wanted to would have the ability to view the fonts.

Finally, periodically I’ll add links to any other helpful posts I’ve written. The most recent one will be at the top:

SU FAQ #1 – Working with Pictures