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If you, like me, have problems with Firefox Beta 3 (all of the versions so far) and the Wordpress plugin WP-Stats where the plugin won’t let you login on Wordpress.com to get the stats right on you Wordpress Dashboard, no sweat, here is the solution.

First, clean your cookies, you don’t have to erase them all and maybe you don’t even need to clean them at all but this is a step by step of what I did to make the plugin work again. Then go to Firefox Preferences > Privacy (See image at the bottom of this post,) and make sure that the “Accept third-party cookies box is checked.

Refresh your browser or close it and re-launch it, go back to your Wordpress dashboard and you should be able to login to your Wordpress.com states within your Wordpress.org dashboard.

Ever since I started using Firefox 3 I haven’t been able to use this plugin, I now feel so silly as the solution is so simple. If you still have problems with this plugin in Firefox 3 or you know of any other tip to work better in Wordpress and Firefox 3 share it with us and help our community.

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More than often applications track their own updates, this is part of job of a developer when building good and secure applications. If you are unsure, check any of your applications and either in the Help menu on Windows or Application menu or Help menu on a Mac you will find an option line for checking for updates.

The other option is to have an application version tracker on your computer, this little application can help you track the version of your software to keep you up to date and secure. I don’t have much experience on this kind of applications for Windows, but there is a Version Tracker Pro, which is not free ($29.95 USD) and some people seem not to like according to Download.com.

For Macintosh there is the same Version Tracker Pro but it cost $49.95 USD, other options like AppFresh (Free) is another applications that despite a couple minor bugs it works great. I use AppFresh and the couple of issues I have are because of identifying versions that do not exist on some applications, after tracking the behavior I can see that is not really a problem with the software but because we are still transitioning from PPC to Intel.

Let me talk to you about a third method of tracking updates for the applications that you like the most, this is really the tip I want to give you. If there are application that you can’t live without, find out who the developer is and try to subscribe to his/her blog or newsletter. This often lets you know in advance, about when updates will become available, also you will learn about what other applications they are working on to get more great application.

Let me give you an example, the one application that I use the most that is not Apple brand is Firefox, this people have a blog, which you can find at blog.mozilla.com. At their blog you can find updates notifications, beta software notifications, warnings and security issues, and information about other projects they handle other than Firefox.

It is a great idea to subscribe with all the developers that work on your favorite applications, especially if your income depends on that particular application. Give it a try, get all of them and unsubscribe if you think is not worth it, but I guarantee that you will find most of them a useful tool to have around. Tell your friends about this article if you like it, stay subscribed and thanks for reading.

I just finished updating and setting up the latest version of iStat Pro and I decided to talk about it a little bit, this application has been very handy for me as I’m running some medium size applications on a Mac mini. The latest release of iStat Pro version 4.5 add several features that are a must have on a tool like this for the everyday user of Apple computers.

First let me talk about what iStat Pro can do for you, iStat Pro 4.5 is a utility software that loads on your Dashboard as a widget. It tracks your computer activities to give you fast access to statistic information about the performance of your Mac as well as hard drive space, temperature, networks available, etc.

Is a very useful tool for me because on my Mac mini (Intel) I can’t run applications like Photoshop Elements, Firefox, and Microsoft Office at the same time without having issues. This is just one example of applications that will consume all my resources very quickly, I can monitor memory usage and processor performance to identify when I need to close some application to be able to finish my tasks faster.

When I was running the same applications on my previous Mac mini (G4) I was having problems where everything would slow down on me for some reason from time to time, I installed iStat Pro and notice that my problem was Firefox. With Firefox updated and my recent purchase of an Intel Mac mini, now I’m running more applications at acceptable speeds.

I make good use of it when encoding movies, you can tell if your processor have some clocks speed available to check your email or not, you can tell if you network is moving information when is suppose to be static. The amount of information you get from this app is priceless, and everything is customizable. You can add and remove modules, monitor only some networks, and it even has a shortcut to Activity Monitor for more details.

The new version 4.5 brings some great new features, like details and controls for PPP/PPPoE connections, improvements to temperature monitoring service, shortcuts to access drives from the widget, and some bug fixes. Visit iSlayer.com for more details, I strongly suggest everybody to get this widget. I have used it for some time now without any problems and it’s FREE. Consider donating some money to this developer if you like this application, I think is worth it.

If you feel adventurous today, know that you can download Firefox 3 Beta 2 today, as before Mozilla team is strongly suggesting that only developers and testers download this version of web browser. The list of new features that they are trying to test is available on this link, the developer team wants to make sure the new additions are ready for prime time.

Some of the enhancements are cross-site data leak protection, malware protection, anti-virus integration in the download manager, and version checking for insecure plugins. Improvements to work better with Windows Vista and some rendering enhancements are making this version of Firefox a desirable one for me.

As always, this new Beta version of Firefox is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms. The final version of Firefox 3 will be available in early 2008. A not for you IE user, get Firefox you wont regret it.

I was once again about to take Firefox out on my computer, it was behaving really slow to the point that I needed to wait from 1 to 5 minutes between page changes etc. It was killing me, I’m not paying a broadband connection for this slowness in my system, and once again it was my entire fault. The first thing I did was to go to my Activity Monitor on Mac OS X, in a pc you would have to go to Windows Task Manager.

After that find out how much system resources is Firefox holding, I immediately notice that Firefox was using 248 megs of ram and the virtual memory was up to 3 gigabytes, I couldn’t believe it, not even Photoshop had done that on my computer as I’m not a big Photoshop user. Than day I spend sometime upgrading my Wordpress to 2.2 and testing some Themes for Wordpress.

So I immediately went to the Firefox preferences to take a look at them, mostly I was looking on my cache files, on a windows computer you would have to look under tools, options. On the privacy tab the option for “Remember what I’ve downloaded” was selected, killer, this option can get your system and slow it down to hell if you have been downloading stuff all day. So I unchecked it and that was it, my Firefox was flying again.

One cool thing that happened to me was when searching around on Google I was clicking into a website that was marked as unsafe by Google, I immediately took a snapshot at the screen to show it to you. I feel really good when I know someone else is looking after users making sure that we don’t get in trouble when hanging around the Internet.

I want to take this opportunity to ask you for your opinion about my website. I’m still upgrading it, moving stuff and I’m concern about it’s looking, please leave a note on this post, send me a message at lumencreativegroup@gmail.com I would really appreciate your input. Thanks.