Archive | September, 2008

Google Reader Notifications for Windows, Mac and Linux!

Sep/22 in Desktop

I got an e-mail the other day from somebody wanting to know if I knew of any programs for Windows that would allow a user to get popup notifications when Google Reader was updated.

Want to keep up to date whenever your Google Reader has fresh new content to read through?  There are several browser plugins that will do this, but not many for the operating system itself.  I have three solutions though to cover all of the operating system bases:

Google Reader Help

Now you should have no problems at all keeping up with my RSS feed.  Feel free to subscribe and pass it around to others. 

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Zelda Fans? Here is Your Own Personal Triforce Icon!

Sep/19 in Custom Icons, Desktop

I have been a big fan of The Legend of Zelda series of video games for a long time, but could not for the life of me find and nice desktop icon of the Triforce.  For those of you who have no clue what I am talking about, Wikipedia comes to the rescue:

The Triforce consists of three distinct entities represented by the three smaller triangles, each of which is also referred to as a Triforce when considered individually. The triforce has also been known to exist somewhere in the southern hemisphere of the globe, in human form. It is speculated that the identity of the triforce share the initials DJC however these speculations have never been truly verified. The triangles are referred to as the Triforce of Power, the Triforce of Wisdom, and the Triforce of Courage.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I decided to create my own Triforce icon.

triforce-desktop-icon

Download the Triforce Desktop Icon (.ico and .png)!

The icon comes in both png and ico formats, and the following sizes:  256 x 256, 128 x 128, 64 x 64, 48 x 48, 32 x 32, 24 x 24, 16 x 16.  Hope you enjoy! (Just in case there are any other Zelda fans out there reading)

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A Better WordPress Admin Layout?

Sep/18 in Web Development Tutorials

There is a new poll, put out there by the WordPress team, seeing if you would like to change up the WordPress admin interface any. 

It seems like they would like to move all of the stuff currently across the top to the side, creating more room for you to view your pages inside of the WordPress admin space, without scrolling up and down.  I like the idea, but I want to do it now – not later.  If you find yourself seeking the same type of WordPress admin interface, give the Fluency Admin plugin for WordPress a shot.

2327969179_3613dd4c10

As you can see, the menus are rearranged, main menus down left, sub menus across the top.  If you are using WordPress 2.6 and up, then you should not have any issues getting going with this awesome plugin.  I added this to one of my smaller sites the other day, and love it.  I might have to be adding it to others later on. 

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Find Out More About Any Site!

Sep/17 in Online Apps

Abouthisite.com offers a very unique look at the world of domain lookups.  They not only give you the standard WhoIs-type information.  They also offer you homepage information, general information, location (with a map!), IP neighborhood, and a little frame to check it all out yourself within the web site layout.

abouthisite

It has plenty to love, but would like to see even more tools avaliable.  Right now DomainTools is still my favorite domain lookup tool.  So if your looking for another way to do a little more research about a favorite domain, give abouthisite.com a shot.

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VLC Gets Better FLV Support and New Look

Sep/16 in Desktop

vlc-win32 I have always been a big fan of VideoLAN – VLC media player, and with the most recent upgrade it looks like the best just keeps getting better.

The biggest improvement over past versions is that the FLV support is much better.  So if you download a lot of YouTube (or any of the other video sharing sites) videos, you will no longer have to reload the player if you try to fast forward or rewind.  You can check out the full list of features too for this tiny player, if you are not impressed yet.  For more on this most recent release, check out the “What is cool in 0.9″ page or check out this video:

VLC media player 0.9.2 – Grishenko from Antoine Cellerier on Vimeo.

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Search in Tabs with Search!o

Sep/15 in Online Apps

There isn’t much more you can do to re-invent the search engine that others haven’t tried before in the past.  What you can do is improve on ideas that are already out there.  You have all seen the pages that search multiple search engines at once, and they all pretty much suck.  Well, I have finally found one that does it right – and Search!o is its name-o.

searcho

The front page is pretty slick, you have the search box, the “go” box (to get your search started) and then you can pick from a number of search engine groups such as: audio/music, blogs, books, css galleries, fonts, images, jobs, news, search engines, social bookmarks, videos and more.  Each group will search a different series of web sites.  Doing your basic “search engines” search will give you results from Google, Live Search, Ask, AOL, Dogpile, Clusty, Alta Vista, Lycos, and All the Web.  Each source has it’s own tab inside of the web site, so navigation is as easy as clicking the tab or the Alt + a number combination.

The address it gives to you is the last feature I want to share with you.  Look at this:  http://search.io/search-engines/web hosting show/

The address is based on the search group type I used (“search-engines”) and then my phrase I searched for (“web hosting show”).  Only thing that lack that I would like to see is an easy way to add them to the search box via the browser.  Play with Search!o today, and let me know your thoughts on it.

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Hurricane Ike Takes Out Geraldo Rivera

Sep/12 in Hot Web Topics

Can’t wait to watch more Hurricane Ike coverage tonight. If your confused as to what I mean, check out this clip from Gerardo Rivera earlier on Fox News.

Hurricane Ike, 1. Silly newscaster, 0. Lets see what else develops tonight.

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Akismet Help and How-tos

Sep/10 in Web Development Tutorials

raid19b Out of all the years I have been using WordPress, I have probably not used one plugin more often than I have used Askimet.  Now that might be because it rocks, or because it came with WordPress, so it was kind of always “there”.  Love it or hate it, it does get the job done when it comes to filtering out spam comments from your WordPress blog.

The way it works is it checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not, then you can review if necessary. 

Akismet Says I Need an API Key.  Where Do I Get That?

WordPress.com has what’s called “API keys” which allow you to use services and enhancements built on the WordPress.com platform. This allows you to leverage the power of WP.com while still hosting your blog elsewhere.

All you have to do is sign up for a WordPress.com account, and you will get your API key to add to your Akismet settings so it will work.

I Deleted Akismet Before I Knew How Awesome it Was.  How Can I Get it Back?

You can download the spam comment fighting plugin here:

http://akismet.com/download/

How Can I Show a Badge of How Many Spam Comments I Have Filtered Out?

If you want to put the Akismet fear of God into any spam commenters looking at your site as a target, just cut and paste this tag into your template:

<?php akismet_counter(); ?>

That will display how many spam comments Akismet has caught for you.

I Am Getting a Akismet 2.1 Parse Error.  How Can I Fix It?

You can find a fix here or better yet, upgrade Akismet to the latest version, which fixes this bug that was in the Akismet 2.1 release.

Where Can I Find More Help for Akismet?

Try searching the WordPress.org forums.  Using the “akismet” tag, you are bound to turn up a lot of results to browse through too:

http://wordpress.org/tags/akismet

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Saving You Green on Your Hosting Bills

Sep/09 in Web Hosting

Had a very fun podcast this week, all centralized around myself being a big cheapskate.

On today’s edition of the podcast I am going to teach you how to get your dollar’s worth in many different ways.  Do you really need to spend extra cash to add JSP to your hosting account?  Get four money free ways to search the file hosts out there.  All that and so much more on this penny pinching edition of the Web Hosting Show.

Here are a few of the topics we discussed on this week’s show:

  • Ever heard of JSP? What is it?  What Can it Do for Me?
  • 4 More Ways to Search Rapidshare, Megaupload and More!
  • Fundraising to Get Cash for Your Next Web Project
  • Web Site Monitoring with Site24×7.com

Check out Getting Your Dollar’s Worth – Podcast 164 of the Web Hosting Show!  Speaking of penny pinching, if you need another dose of it might also check out Lower Your Hosting Costs – Podcast 160.  Your wallet will thank you!

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URL, E-Mail and Text Shortening with kissa.be

Sep/08 in Online Apps

If you have been looking for an online service that does a little ‘bit of everything when it comes to shortening your content, Kissa.be might be the solution.

They not only offer URL shortening services (taking your long URL and creating a shorter one that is easier to share).  They also offer e-mail address shortening and text shortening too.

Here are a few use suggestions for Kissa.be via their web site.

  • Shorten web addresses for emails, forum posts, blogs etc. which cannot handle long URLs and might wrap them, making them unclickable
  • Lower the character count when texting web addresses to a mobile phone
  • Hide the real URLs of affiliate links from visitors to your site
  • If you dislike a web site and have to mention it (e.g. when complaining about it), link via kissa.be so that your link does not help the site’s search engine positioning
  • Clean up bookmarks for social bookmarking sites or sites with low character limits like Twitter
  • Obscure your real email address from bots which harvest them to spam (enter an address like mailto:user.name@example.com)

Kissa.be is different in another way too.  They have opened themselves up, and put up their code on Google’s Code web site.  Kissa.be’s code has been released under the GNU General Public License v2.

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