Lost In Cyberspace

Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category

In the Official Google Reader Blog today there was an interesting post that mentioned that Michael Bolin had created 'Your Page Here', a gadget for iGoogle that allows you to embed the Google Reader, Calendar or just about any web page on its own tab in iGoogle. This seemed like a pretty nifty idea to me so I thought I would give it a whirl, and it seems to work very well. You can only have six tabs on the iGoogle homepage (though there is a hack . . .) so if you are already at maximum you may have to have a bit of a sort out, you can't really have anything else running in the same tab. I now have my Google Reader and Calendar along with Docs and Spreadsheets running in their own tabs, as well as a tab with this blog in it which allows me to run this site without ever leaving iGoogle. There were a few problems getting Gmail to work in its own tab, but that may just have been me, feel free to give it a whirl yourself and let me know how you got on. With the Remember The Milk now working offline via the Google Gears application I thought I would see how well that worked too, so I added that into a tab as well and it synchronizes fine when you go back online. All in all I think that the addition of Michael Bolin's'Your Page Here' gadget will go a long way to helping me be more productive, especially if I can work out how to get Gmail to work! What uses do you think you can make of it? Do you think this will increase your productivity? Let me know in the comments.

I was just checking my Google RSS feed and noticed that there is now has a new feature available, Google Gears, that you can use offline to read your 2000 most recent articles, which is more than you should need unless you're Robert Scoble. ;-) I haven't had a chance to fully check this feature out yet, but if it up to Google's usual standard it should be pretty nifty. Is this a feature you think you will use? Do you use Google for your feeds or do you prefer to use another application? Let me know in the comments if you think online or offline is the best way to read your feeds.

One of the tools I find myself using more often these days is the Picnik online image editor. It's a pretty nifty editor that can be used for your images on your own computer or those you find as you browse the web. It integrates well with your Flickr and Picasa accounts, allowing you to save your images direct to your profile or save straight on to your computer. You can also email your images to individuals and even certain websites that can be configured to receive images via email such as Photobucket, ImageShack and Typepad. The site is still in Beta but runs very smoothly, though you do have to have Flash 9 installed. Just about any image you find online can be pulled in to Picnik, either through using the images url or using a tool such as the Firefox Picnik extension that adds a menu option and/or a toolbar icon to make importing images into Picnik that much easier. Just what can it do for you? Apart from the usual resize, rotate, and crop it can take care of red-eye in your own pictures, fix your colours and contrast/brightness, sharpen and even add some special effects on their "Creative Tools" page. There are plenty of great effects to play around with at the moment, though a few of these will only be part of their "Premium" package once the site is out of Beta. Picnik, alongside of Faststone Capture, takes care of just about all my web image needs. I recommend you go give it a try, you don't even need to join up to test it out, so go have some fun! Seeing as there are quite a few online image editors out there, are there any you use and would recommend? Let us know in the comments.

Over at Performancing they have relaunched their pMetrics service, this looks as though it could be very useful little service. I have been using a couple of plugins to monitor my site and so far they have been pretty useful, especially Counterize II, but I realize if I want to expand my blog at all I obviously need to look at something a bit more powerful. Having taken a brief look at the service it definitely seems to one of the more comprehensive out there, even more so than Google analytics that I have been considering trying out. The basic service is free, you just need to have set up an account with performancing.com, but this is not the full package and limits you to only 1000 page views per day, though that's hardly a problem for a site of my size. The main benefits of paying out the $14.99 for a year (or $1.99 a month) is having an allowance for 10,000 page views per day, acess to your statistics via RSS, "Spy", outbound link tracking, and download tracking. You also get to have the text ads removed from your pMetrics homepage. No doubt as new features are introduced they will mainly be for premium users, but lets hope there will also be some additions for the basic users. This is hardly a complaint though as the service they provide for free is already excellent. Performancing have also allowed all new users a 21 day trial of the premium service, a very good way to find out which service is best for you. They are also offering a free 12 month upgrade to the first 100 blogs that post a review of pMetrics, making sure it is of adequate length (250+ words) and is left up for the duration. All in all this seems to be a very good service that I would recommend to any bloggers that are serious about their stats. Thanks to the Blog Herald for the heads-up.

I had been resisting the urge to sign up for the latest web phenomenon, "Twitter", but no longer! Tonight Greg Yaitanes, the Director and executive producer of the new TV series "Drive", will be Twittering during the premiere of the show, basically a live commentary, and as I am a big fan of the star of this series, Nathan Fillion, and of the co-creator Tim Minear, I could no longer resist! This seems to me to be by far one of the best ways this new service has been utilized so far, and I wonder what other new uses people will find for this. For more information about "Drive" check out my Joss Whedon blog. Do you Twitter? What is the best use you have found for this service so far?

I installed the latest version of the Opera browser yesterday, I usually stick to Firefox but I like to check out how my blog looks in Opera when I make a few CSS changes or add a new plugin. With this latest version I must say that I like their new "Speed Dial" page that opens up when you click for a new tab. :smile:

The idea is obviously to keep your favourite pages at your fingertips, and I must say it seems to work pretty smoothly. The idea of using a webpage as you would the speed ial on your phone seems so obvious. . . once someone else has done it. The set-up is easy, you can just drag-and-drop your open tabs in to the numbered positions or just right click in the box and choose the url you want to add from your most frequently visited pages, you can even set it up so that the thumbnails reload every few seconds or whatever time you customize it to so you can keep an eye on several web pages at once if you feel the need to.

So far I haven't found a setting to be able to turn it off, some might still prefer to be able to just open to a blank page, but maybe they will build that option in to a later version.

Overall I was quite impressed with this update, though I think it will still remain my second option as a browser rather than my primary, I just love my Firefox too much! :wink:

Which is your favourite browser? Have you tried the latest Opera? If so what do you make of it?

So March has blown by, I cant say as my challenge for last month of a comment a day went totally according to plan, but I did post more comments than I otherwise would of done so that's not so bad. :wink: For April I have set myself the challenge of getting this blogs look more finalized, if you have visited before you will notice that I have changed themes again, this theme is based on the RockinSuckerfish by Nathan Rice of RockinThemes.com, but I have adapted it fairly extensively with my own preferred colours. I have also added "Sweet Titles" and I have moved around the RSS and changed the date/authors name layout. That was all in the CSS, I have also added a couple of extra plugins such as "smileys" for the comments and a tag cloud of my categories for my sidebar. Also as a final touch (for now) I moved Robs Translator from my Sandbox site to here, you can see it at the very top of the page on the left hand side. I hope you like the new look, please let me know what you think in the comments, also if you notice any problems that I may have overlooked. Thanks. :grin: