Some time ago I wrote about the AboutUs widget for your web browser and as you remember I said that it was good.

I’ve been doing some thinking since then and I figured out that I wanted some more from a toolbar, like all the web sites I use when looking up a web page I visit. So I asked my co-workers what databases and tools they used in their daily work here at Xavier Media, started working on the toolbar and here it is: the Web Page Toolbar for web professionals in the need of a toolbar to look up web sites The working name was at first Xavier Toolbar, then AboutUs Toolbar but as more features was added I liked Web Page Toolbar much better. Don’t you?

The toolbar lets you look up web sites at Alexa, AboutUs.org, BuiltWith.com, Technorati, WebSiteValued, Compete, Quantcast, eXavier, WayBack machine and many more. You can also add sites you visit to your watchlist at Aboutus.org, check out the AboutUs article and view the change history of the article (this feature is a little bit buggy at the moment ).

The toolbar is free and can be downloaded from Mozilla (click on the button below).

Some screenshots

It’s a bad day on the Internet today and you may notice that many of your favourite sites are down today . That’s because of an electrical fire with The Planet (a server hosting company if you’ve never heard of them before).

The fire is causing a lot of sites to be down during the day and the downtime can in worst case be as much as 12-24 hours .

Entrecard.com is one of the effected companies and here’s the email I got from them:

Greetings,

Unfortunately, there has been an electrical fire at the data center housing Entrecard’s servers. The servers have not been damaged, but the site may be down for as long as 12 hours.

Entrecard is hosted with ThePlanet, and this fire has effected over 9000 websites, as many of the world’s most popualar websites are hosted with ThePlanet. They are working around the clock to get their data center back online, and we are hoping that they get it back online fast.

Thank you for your pateince and understanding with this rare and frustrating problem. Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing we can do but wait for The Planet to get their datacenter back online.

Please check back with Entrecard in 12 to 24 hours.

Thanks,

Entrecard Team

None of Xavier Media’s websites are hosted with The Planet, but this will still cause problems for us since our sites using Entrecard will of course not function as planned . For example you can’t join our contests at Entrecard Contests during the fire

On the 15th of May I wrote a post with some suggestions on how to improve the domain name wiki AboutUs.org and yesterday I noticed a ping-back from the AboutUs blog with a link to my post with suggestions. Guess what: They’ve actually followed one of my suggestions and created a plugin for your browser so you can look up domain names and web sites at AboutUs.org with just one click in your web browser .

To start looking up the sites you’re visiting in the AboutUs wiki you simply just drag this link to your bookmark bar (if you’re using Firefox that is):

—->> AboutUs <<—-

If you got IE you need to right click on the AboutUs link and select “Add to favorites”.

Whenever you visit a site you would like to know more about, write some comments about or just want to have a look at what other people think you simply just click on the bookmark and you’ll instantly be taken to the AboutUs page for the domain you’re visiting

This is a good and handy tool, but it’s not completely working without problems. If you for example visit www.xaviermedia.com and click on the bookmark you will be redirected to www.aboutus.org/xaviermedia.com (the page about xaviermedia.com). If you for example instead visit this blog (blog.xaviermedia.com) and click on the bookmark you get an error message instead of the page about xaviermedia.com

This little tool is a good start, but they need to make it work with subdomains too because more and more sites are using subdomains for different content pages instead of directories.

Still with the little “subdomain bug” I’m going to award this tool 4 out of 5 possible X’s for this innovative tool, fast work implementing it and for a good wiki Get it you too and don’t forget to spread the word so we can build a much better community at AboutUs.org together.

BTW, don’t forget to check out the page about XavierMedia.com when you have a few minutes to spare.