About a year ago, coinciding with the launch of Safari 5.0, I purchased and relaunched the stagnant PimpMySafari.com. It was an exciting time for the Safari browser, and the website got quite a lot of traffic and interest. Encouraged by this, I continued on with the project with the goal to make the site look great as and to document tips, tricks, news, and information about the Safari browser, extensions, and plugins, for both end users and developers alike.

With the help of a new logo (from Crowdspring.com) and a template designed around it by the talented Leanda Ryan in the UK (hat tip to Brett Terpstra for the referral), we took care of the "looking great" part.

However, after slogging away at it for a few months on the content side, I realized that keeping a Wordpress blog up-to-date with all of the new Safari Extensions (hundreds of them) and other information out in the world wasn't going to be something that was going to be easily done.

The custom Wordpress theme did make extensive use of meta data to store Safari Extension details so the author, URL, icon, and description could be displayed in a consistent manner, but getting those entered in was tedious at best. The pain was too great. Workflow too slow. The effort died off.

Enter Shareist

Another project that we've been working on is a digital content curation publishing platform called Shareist. It works as an alternative to Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous, etc. as a place for collecting great information from the web in a much more customizable fashion. (We're accepting beta testers. See the Shareist site for more info.)

It's been a long time in the making, but it's finally ready to take a website like this one. With it, in addition to pulling together great articles and blog posts (as well as create posts like this one), I'm able to pull in Safari Extension files, read the information inside, and create a post automatically. So I imported all the wordpress posts into Shareist. The design moved over quite nicely (we lost some of the finer details, I'm sure. Sorry Leanda).

PimpMySafari is back to life.

We're a few weeks in and the site has more than doubled in content, and we haven't even started the project to get every Safari Extension included in the database. That's the next project, and you'll soon see dozens of extensions getting added in.

If you've been sticking with me for the past year (and the former site owner before that), thanks! If you're new, I hope you take a look around.

Extension developers, please drop me a note via the contact form and let me know of your project.

Here's your most recent dose of Safari goodness from the interwebs. Only the good stuff...

monkeyFly
This has got to be the extension with the lowest documentation to usefulness ratio. MonkeyFly transforms the twitter web interface. You got to try it. Tumblr Notifier Safari Extension
Heres a button to keep you alerted to new posts in your Tumblr dashboard. (Just what I need, another counter in my Safari toolbar.)

jakepaul Simplr
This extension hacks up Tumblr (nicely IMO) to make its dashboard, well, simplr.

Shortenz Linkz
Multi-protocol link shortener. Supports bit.ly, goo.gl, gush.es, hex.io, is.gd, j.mp, linkbunch.com, migre.me, sl.pt (PunyURL), shrt.st, tinyurl.com, zi.ma

shrt.st url shortener - How do you say this one, short street? Yet another URL shortener. Tweetie Share
Shortens the url of the current tab with your own bit.y account (via the bit.ly ) and submits it via Tweetie. (This guys a tweetie user. perfect!) Extensin para Safari: acortador de urls con Lessn
Get your short on en espanol. URL shortener con lessn. rnm.me // Rename a too long url
button to create short urls with the Rename!me url shortener Weble | Blog | KWICK!
Achtung! a URL shortener for the Germans. Thurly App URL shortener
Where this extension lacks in novelty, it makes up for with pretty. Yet another link shortener. FARP.ME Safari Extension
button to create a quick farp.me short url for the current page. liten.be - en kortere digital hverdag
Another link shortening service, this one the Norwegian service liten.be. Unfortunately the word for small in Norwegian isnt terribly small. I suppose compared to other Norwegian words it is. Short 'N Little bit.lie (Krakenstein Mass URL Shortener) with more 150 active services and update Krakenstein Official Blog
The mother of all Safari URL shorteners (so far) will let you choose from at least 150 short URL services. If youre not paralyzed by the choices, youll save lots of time with this extension. Shortly - URL Shortener for Safari - ZZHC Studio
This URL shortnener goes the extra mile and will create a somewhat context sensitive short url. It has special URLs for Youtube (youtu.be), Flickr (flic.kr) and Goo.gl or Bit.ly for any other urls. (configurable) Goo.gl URL Shortener - Safari+ | Ragnarok Studio
Another goo.gl link shortener

Here are some daily links for Jun 28 2010:

• Instapaper Tools ; elastic threads - Safari Extensions - A couple of tools to makt the awesome Instapaper awesomer. Greystyled makes it prettier. Instapaper Article Tools makes it easier to use.
• This Window: Close It - Safari 5 Port of Helvetireader - Helvetireader changes the look of Google Reader
• ScribeFire and Safari, Sitting in a Tree - Scribefire: Fire up your blogging - Scribefire is a bookmarklet turned extension that allows you to quickly post to just about any blog.
• Safari Reload Button - Whenever I use a different browser for a while, I can't find the reload button when I come back to Safari. This gives you an actual reload button to put wherever you wish.
• Feedly for Safari 5 Building Feedly - Add a feedly button to safari. Button launches feedly and shows unread counts.
• IMDB Links - adds some additional links to IMDB movie pages.
• Better Google Reader - Adds a number of features to Google Reader, like actual unread count, colorful list view, and more.
• Google Reader Mac OS X Snow Leopard + Delicious - Makes Google reader pretty (and pretty usable)
• grantheaslip's twitter_scroller at master - GitHub - Nice add-on to Twitter.com, brings you to the oldest new post after clicking the "x new tweets" link.
• Plugin Blocker Safari Extension - Removes all web plugins like Flash, Silverlight, etc. from webpages. Will also convert some flash video sites (like Youtube) to html5 videos.
• Twitter Image Loader - Displays externally hosted images on Twitter pages.