DomainersToolbar Makes Accessing Domain Sites Easy
Friday, February 8th, 2008
Simple toolbar makes accessing forums, sales, and news easier.
If you’re like me, you spend much of your day surfing to the various domain news sites, marketplaces such as Sedo and Afternic , and forums looking for good domain deals and heated discussions. It’s tedious.
Now there’s a simple toolbar that makes accessing updates from these sites easier. Called DomainersToolbar, it provides an intuitive interface directly in your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser. Just click on a heading, such as “News”, and then quickly scan news headlines from various sites and click through to read more. If a headline interests you then click on it to be taken to the article.
The toolbar was developed by domainer Patrick Miller. I originally hesitated to download the toolbar for a couple reasons. First, the DomainersToolbar.com domain had whois privacy protection, so I couldn’t tell who was behind it. Second, I’m always wary about downloading software and toolbars from companies and people I don’t know. These two problems have been addressed. Patrick removed whois privacy at my suggestion. Also, the toolbar is managed through a 3rd party service that counts as customers Major League Baseball, TechCrunch, Discovery TV, and others. So you don’t have to worry about Patrick stealing your data.
In theory, you can do much of what the toolbar does by using a RSS reader. But the toolbar makes it much easier. If you received all domain threads, news feeds, blogs, and marketplace listings through an RSS reader you would be overwhelmed. DomainersToolbar organizes all of this information in a simple manner, making it easy to quickly scan items to find what interests you.
The toolbar is free, so it’s worth taking it for a spin.
Above: accessing Domain Name Wire through DomainersToolbar.
It would be great if you could integrate a page rank bar into the toolbar as well, that would make it awesome!
Toolbars still scare me. So many of them “phone home” in some way. Is there any way to verify that this one is not sending domain search data to “the Sri Lankan Investor’s Group” or some such?
DomainersToolbar Makes Accessing Domain Sites Easy…
If you’re like me, you spend much of your day surfing to the various domain news sites, marketplaces such as Sedo and Afternic, and forums looking for good domain deals and heated discussions. It’s tedious….
@ParkQuick - Leonard, I don’t use the toolbar to check for domain availability, so I’m not too concerned. By doing anything over the internet — even checking availability at a registrar — you risk that information being sold by your ISP.
The only thing that could be specific to this toolbar is if actions you do in your browser are somehow captured by the toolbar company. I’m comforted by the clients the company has, but there are no guarantees.
[...] Domain Name Wire [...]
I do like the toolbar. I noticed that the small graphics for the toolbar get pulled from the net every time you open FireFox. I opened it once when my connection was down and the toolbar had no graphics.
@ParkQuick - Didn’t notice that, but it takes a while to load as all of the “numbers” are updated.
If you only track a couple forum topics and sales sites, it might be easier to just use a RSS reader.
It was taking a while to load because there were 60+ feeds to load.
But now, I did some improvements.
1. All news feeds combined to 1 feed (Latest news are shown at the top)
2. All blog feeds also combined to 1 feed (Latest posts are shown at the top)
I’ll do the same improvements to Marketplace feeds also, but they will be categorized, for ex. Domain Sales Under $100, Domain Sales Fixed Price, Domain Auctions, etc. and each category will contain only category specific offers from different marketplace sources.
Stay tuned,
PM
If you liked the toolbar you may like the Domainer plugin for Firefox.
http://www.adixx.net/domainer/