Globex Designs has released a free Firefox plugin that reskins Gmail and Gcal and makes them look snazzier. But of course, sometimes beauty only runs skin deep. Many users are reporting less than glamorous performance.

Kevin Wilke and Matt Gill of Nitro Marketing are launching Nitro Quattro soon, so you can watch some cool free videos in the mean time. Like the PGA players of online marketing, you should take advantage of what they’re teaching for free. These guys are good. And in case you were wondering how Nitro Quattro compares with Ryan Deiss’s Self-Liquidating Offers, Ryan, who is also one of the internet marketing elite set the record straight. Yesterday, he emailed his own list to say that, no, the Nitro guys are not ripping off his ideas. If anything, they taught him some of these important concepts. And indeed these direct marketing principles have been around forever, or at least since Al Lasker learned that advertising is salesmanship in print from John E. Kennedy . . . in 1904.

We’ve got a link to a list of some of the best illustration-based designs on the web today, thanks to Abduzeedo. These wonderful illustrations can inspire you and give any web designer some great ideas, so be sure to bookmark this one.

Next, we’ve talked about Firebug, the free web dev tool for Firefox, before. But a lot of people haven’t tried this really powerful tool. If you want to make cool sites yourself, you should check it out This is definitely one powerhouse of a plugin.

Turning to the blogosphere, is content king when it comes to your blog? According to Jonathan Morrow, the answer is a resounding no. In “Why No One Links to Your Best Posts (And What to Do About It),” Morrow explains that making friends within the blogging community is the key to getting readers. According to Morrow, blogging is a lot like high school — it’s not what you know, but who you know and more importantly, who you are seen with. The friendlier you are with them, the more receptive they will be to your work. “It’s hard work,” he writes, “but it’s worth it. If you put as much effort into building relationships as you do writing great content, you’ll have a popular blog in no time.”