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If there is one thing that people in this industry rely on more than the images we post it's the tools that we use to ply our trade as webmasters.

Fortunately these days there are lots of very useful tools that we have available to us and most of them are either free or have a free component to them and just lately I've been going through my tool chest and adding a few new ones.

I've had to do that rummage through my tools because I finally bit the bullet and moved from Firefox to Chrome. I must say that it did take a lot to get me to make the move but the bloated mess that is Firefox these days certainly pushed me to the point where I was right on the tipping point of making a move.

That tipping point came when a disk failure made it easier to download Chrome and start afresh than to wade through my list of Firefox plugins, find and install them and then still be unhappy with Firefox. Once Chrome was installed it was time for some extension shopping and here are a few of the interesting ones I found.

How hot is it in the kitchen
If you read any of the reports coming from SEOmoz these days you will often see some references made to a tool they have that measures the "temperature" of the search results. Low "temps" indicate that there isn't much happening as far as ranking changes are concerned while high "temps" indicate that something serious is happening ... perhaps even the release of a new algorithm update or a rerun of something like Penguin.

Well, now if you're running Chrome you have your very own Mozcast temperature extension that displays next to the address bar. You can pick up the extension for free at Mozcast.com and you don't even have to open it to see what's happening because it displays a numeric temperature value.

When you do open the extension you will see a bar graph that shows what has been happening over the last 30 days. It's more than just an interesting little toy because it will alert you to changes that might be having an impact on your websites.

Loading time
That's something that we are being bothered by right now. We have a very basic site for a client that is taking almost 20 seconds to load and we can't see what the problem is because other, very similar, sites on the same server aren't having anything like the issues that this one is.

We didn't even notice that there was a problem till the client contacted us and now we're busy digging to see where the problem is. So how is the loading times for your websites?

If you do a search in Chrome's extension library for one called "Page Loading Time" you will find the one we are now using. It too sits up next to the address bar and gives you the loading time in milliseconds for every page you visit. Click on the extension and it will give you even more data about the page you're viewing.

You can never have too many toolbars
Well maybe you can have too many toolbars and there are certainly a lot to choose from but if you're into search engine optimisation then the Ahrefs toolbar is definitely worth having. I did have the SEOmoz toolbar when I was using Firefox but the Ahref toolbar seems to provide better data and doesn't take up so much room.

You can pick the Ahrefs toolbar up from the Extensions list in the Chrome web store and you can turn it on or off at any time.

And then there's Buffer
If I wasn't already in a relationship I think I might like to marry Buffer.

I sat at home last night and wrote and scheduled a week's worth of posts on Facebook for one of my own projects. Yes, I know that Facebook gives us the ability to schedule posts but you have to do that for each individual post and that's fiddly.

With Buffer you set the times you want your posts to appear and you set the frequency and then you just start writing posts and they are automatically set to appear at the time you preset. You can add images, you can edit posts and you can delete them too.

You can even write a post that links to the web page you're looking at without leaving the page and even though you may have updates set up in a queue Buffer will let you jump that queue and post something immediately without even going to Facebook.

It just makes life so easy and it's free. If you want to have more than one social identity then you are going to have to pay but at ten bucks a month it is very affordable.

To get started just head over to Buffer.com and set up an account, grab the app for Chrome and you are in business.

If you need to work smarter rather than harder ... and who doesn't ... then these tools will really help you get more out of your day.