I recently updated to Internet Explorer 8, and it just rocks! One of the new shiny features that’s been added to IE8 is Web Accelerators. I’ve just written some to make my life easier a bit. Hope you find them handy.
Search category:
SEO category:
Check Google Pagerank of the page by its link – just right-click on any link, go to Accelerators, hover on “Check pagerank” and you’ll get it’s pagerank directly fetched from google.
Check Alexa rating of the page by its link – the same instructions – right click on a link, go to Accelerators, hover on “Check Alexa rating” and you’ll see this page’s Alexa rating in a preview window.
Check Alexa+pagerank – a little bit more useful Accelerator which combines both alexa and pagerank checks in one accelerator, but is hosted on my server – and again it shows Alexa rating and Google Pagerank on the preview screen.
Web-development:
PHP manual for selected property – just select a function name on the page, wait for the Accelerators icon to appear, click on “Search definition on php.net” and you’ll get a page with php.net manual loaded for this function
Validate a page – right click on any link to get the context menu, go to Accelerators and select “Validate a page” and you’ll get w3.org validator checking this link!
Remember, Accelerators work only in IE8, and clicking on these links in other browsers will just show the XML source of accelerators :)
It took me really half an hour to grasp the manual and write these six accelerators – thanks Microsoft for such an easy and productive platform.
Some useful links:
P.S. And I've just created another one accelerator – “Find broken links on a page”. It allows you to use W3C links checker utility to quickly check if any of your links on the page are broken – just right click on a page to get the context menu, go to Accelerators and press “Find broken links” :) May be really useful.
I submitted four of my IE8 accelerators to a IE8 Addons gallery today and now waiting for approval :) Hope they will be approved and I’ll create more!
P.S. To submit your new Accelerator or Webslice, you need to register at ieaddons.com, then go to the Upload page, provide name, description, screenshot and XML of your Accelerator and then wait for the approval :)