Archive | February, 2008

How Quick Are You With the Keyboard?

Feb/29 in Online Apps

Ever wonder how fast you could type?  I remember in middle school learning on these old DOS games how to type, and here lately I have been looking for something equal to those to help tech my nephews the same skills.  Keybr.com is an awesome free solution that just might save my day and answer my problem.

learning-to-type

Not much to talk about, because here you see the entire site.  You can click on the "chart" graphic to get a chart of your most recent performance and the speed reads out how many words you can type per minute.  You can also click on the "level" graphic to go between 3 different levels of typing, setup how the words come out or even import an RSS feed.

The highest speed ranking I’ve gotten thus far is 48 – how about you?

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Can’t Beat Web 2.0? Copy Them Instead!

Feb/28 in Web Development Tutorials

How does it go again, if you can’t beat them – join them? How about copying them instead? There seem to be a lot of clone scripts out there for some of the more popular destinations on the Web.

invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-movie-poster1 Attack of the Web 2.0 Clones!

* = need to pay for it
** = not really a clone, is the software used to run Wikipedia

See, even you can run your own Web 2.0 masterpiece! All you need is a little time, a solid hosting account and your own origional take, version or spin on the already popular idea.

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UploadPedia

Feb/28 in Free Hosting

free-uploads.pngI have another free hosting tool that you might want to give for a spin.  UploadPedia is the most recent to catch my attention. You can upload up to 100 files at once, with the max being 100 MB. One interesting thing that they do is list all the top downloads and recent downloads that have been added to their service. If you are looking for privacy, this might not be the uploader for you. They do have a way to password protect your uploads though, so you don’t have to share if you do not want to. You can also search the files that have been uploaded too. From their terms of service, it looks like they accept any type of file, as long as it is not pornographic or copyrighted (or I guess both).

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5 Thing to Twitter About

Feb/27 in Online Apps

twitter I have friends that come to me and say…

"Ok Mitch, I got a Twitter account, now what?"

Many people look at Twitter and either don’t understand it or use it to give me a summary of what they had for breakfast (just in case you were wondering, I had toast). Here are five ways of twittering your way to success:

  • Share with me one of your bookmarks, or an article on a site you found interesting today
  • Grab a photo from your Flickr (or any other photo sharing service) site and link me to it
  • Plug your own blog, projects and work so I can check it out
  • Use a service like Twitter Feed to bring your other RSS feed content into your Twitter account
  • Invite your interesting friends, that you think should be twittering

If your looking for your first friend on Twitter feel free to use me:

http://twitter.com/mitchkeeler

I once was one of those people who thought that Twitter was nothing more than a waste of time. I am happy to say though I am a full fledged Kool-aid drinker now. Honestly I see no reason why any person or company shouldn’t be doing this. From a marketing stand point alone it is another great way to get yourself out there.

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Create a Feed with RSS Builder

Feb/27 in Desktop Apps

rss-builder If you are looking for free software that makes creating an RSS feed as easy as filling in a few blanks inside of a program, then look no further than RSS Builder.  This simple program will make it easy to generate an RSS feed for your web site.

It provides an easy to use interface that gives you the ability to add, edit and customize topics, links, headlines and more.  Once you are done generating the feed you can upload it to your server with the built in FTP tool.  It also supports podcasting feeds too.

All in all, RSS Builder does a great job at making the confusing world of XML and RSS make sense, by wrapping it all in a blanket of easy to understand freeware goodness.

If you need an alternative to RSS Builder you might check out FeedSpring – another free solution to generating RSS feeds.

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Help Build the World’s Biggest Rubber Band Ball!

Feb/26 in Hot Web Topics

22184969 I always love things a little outside your average realm of normalcy, and that is the reason why this project caught my eye.  RuberBandTogether.com (as a part of the Stanford Entrepreneurship week Innovation Challenge) has set out to create the largest ball of rubber bands ever. 

This whole thing reminds me of the big ball of aluminum foil I created when I was a kid.  Don’t ask me why, because I no longer remember.  All I know is I wanted to create a huge ball of aluminum foil!  I was a kid, and kids sometimes do goofy things for no reason at all.  Might have to dig that out now, just got to find which closet I tucked it away in.

The Rubber Band Together crew are also accepting donations (to cover rubber hand costs probably) so if you would like to donate you have the option there. 

To get your own rubber band added, just type in your name under the "Join the Cause…" box, and you too can become a part of this odd – yet good cause.  What is the good cause you say?  To raise awareness of breast cancer awareness.  Learn more about the project over at RubberBandTogether.com.

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WordPress Help, After the Install

Feb/25 in Web Development Tutorials

wordpress-logo It isn’t a big secret that I love WordPress and feel like it could be used for just about any project out there, blog or not. There are a lot of guides out there on how to install WordPress, but not many tell you what to do after you get it on the server. Now everybody has their own methods after a WordPress install of how to configure things but this is what I do.

Configure the Basic Options

First, login to your WordPress admin interface and click on Options > General and setup the General Options. Need to check and make sure your blog title and your addresses are correct. Next go to Options > Discussions and edit your comment and trackback settings. I like to make sure I get e-mailed when anybody leaves a comments, and I like for comments to be filtered through me before they get posted. With the plugins I’ll give you in a few hopefully we will get rid of the need for you to moderate too many.

Grab Your “Must Have” WordPress Plugins

Here are the WordPress plugins I like to use on the basic install of any WordPress powered site:

Update Your Permalinks for SEO Friendliness

Now you need to go back into Options > Permalinks and choose the Date and name based option then hit the Update Permalink Structure button. If your .htaccess file is set to be writable, then it should update it automatically. If not, then you can copy and paste the permalink code from WordPress into your .htaccess file.

Past this point, you may want to go check the rest of your settings, add a blogroll and configure your theme. I think I have gotten most of the important steps out of the way. If you stumble into any problems always remember to go check WordPress.org. They have tons of information on installs, backing up, upgrading and more.

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3 Years of Podcasting

Feb/25 in Personal, Web Hosting

This week marks the 3rd birthday of the Web Hosting Show podcast. Three years later and 143+ podcasts recorded, I think we are still going strong and thankfully can continue to say we are the number one web hosting podcast out there today and the one and only voice of the web hosting world.

Here is a little more of what to look forward to on episode 143:

It is not only my birthday, but it is your birthday too. The Web Hosting Show has been rocking the web hosting industry for three year now, and hopefully for many more years to come. No surprises, no special guests no fluff will be here today though. I am just going to do my job and give you a grade A podcast you will soon not forget.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 143!

Thanks to one and all that have helped make the Web Hosting Show a winner.

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Font Style Help with CSS Type Set

Feb/22 in Web Development Tutorials

Fonts always confusing me when it comes to editing or creating a stylesheet for a web site layout. Thanks to CSS Type Set this is no longer an issue.

To use, just fire up the web site and paste in the text you wish to style. Then use the controls at the bottom of the web site to adjust the text spacing, line height, font color, font style, how it is formatted and much more.

css-help

This is turning a three hour job of playing with CSS, trying to get it just right uploading and downloading all into something you can do in about five minutes.  CSS Type Set has earned a spot in my web dev folder for sure.

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Get a Free Wiki

Feb/21 in Free Hosting

free-wiki-hosting Looking for a free place to park your wiki? The people at Wikidot.com are putting out a product that looks highly impressive. For those of you who may be outside of the Web lingo world:

A wiki is software that allows users to create, edit, and link web pages easily. Wikis are often used to create collaborative web sites and to power community web sites.

So here you can pickup something like yoursite.wikidot.com and get tons of awesome features. Some of them are:

  • easy, clean and powerful
  • allow creating interactive sites (not just static pages)
  • concentrate on tools to build communities and to communicate
  • no unnecessary fanciness but use modern solutions
  • design to scale well up to millions of users

To see some of the sites with wikis already hosted, be sure to browse through the site too. Lots of good information is only a search away. Wikidot.com is an awesome free solution if all you need is a place to park your wiki of any shape, form or topic.

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