Tools
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Monday, February 5th, 2007
A nifty way of keeping track of any comments you make around the Blogosphere is with
coComments, a useful thing to have in your browser bar if you are anything like me and can never remember where you posted.
It really helps in becoming part of the conversation, letting you know whenever there are any additional comments made so that you can check back and see what others are saying on articles you have found interesting.
Try it out, I'm sure you will enjoy it. Are you using a similar service? I would love to hear about it.
Saturday, February 3rd, 2007
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I have been a bad blogger of late. One of the main reasons for this is that the "new" second hand computer that I got for myself has gone kaput. Meaning that basically I broke it. And I don't know quite how.
This has led to me having to resurrect/rebuild my "older" second hand computer and install a few of those programs that I had come to rely on in my newer machine. So basically my being missing wasn't voluntary.
The main trouble I have with this old machine is the slowness of it, even opening up the Windows LiveWriter program can take up to two minutes, and it's even worse with something like Photoshop Elements. Sometimes the "click" hasn't registered and so I try and open it again, sometimes I think this is the problem only to click again and end up with two instances of the same program trying to open which eventually leads to a crash. Gorram it.
Which just goes to show just how essential a reliable computer is, so I guess at some point soon I will have to dig deep and splash the cash for a brand new machine with a bit of power behind it. And at a not too terrifying price.
Anyone got any suggestions?
Friday, February 2nd, 2007
One of my favourite tools to use as I go around the web is
Faststone Capture, it allows me to get quick pictures of some webpage or just capture something on my desktop screen that I want to show people.
I hope that including an image in this way helps to make my blog content more interesting and helps, in certain posts at least, to show more clearly what it is that I am talking about.
Do you use an image capturer? Are there any out there you would like to recommend?
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
One of the tools that I have found useful lately is "
Fleck", an on line application that allows you to make notes on just about any web page and save it to your account. You can then share these with others or just keep them to yourself for future reference. See screen shot:
Fleck actually saves a copy of the page to your account to make the notes on, so it does not work on most password protected pages such as forums. I have found it very useful to keep track of various applications, widgets and items that I want to blog about at some point, or just to save a page that I want to read more fully at a future date.
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007
At the moment I am trying out some of the widgets at
widgetbox, there seem to be plenty of gizmos over there, some of which could be useful, or just plain fun!
I came across them over at
profy.com in an article on the growing use of widgets, there are also some other useful links over there that are worth checking out.
As to the usability of the widgets, well at the moment I seem to be wrestling with them a little. They are probably idiot proof, which in my world is defined as being yet further proof that I am an idiot.
Tuesday, December 19th, 2006
I have been using "
BlogDesk" to compose and upload my posts since I started running WordPress on my own site, and though I have found it to be pretty good a lot of people seem to recommend "
Windows Live Writer", so I thought I would give it a go for a while.
The main improvement I am immediately seeing over BlogDesk is that the writing environment is a little less harsh. The fact that it loads the Theme settings right in to the editor is helpful as you can see more clearly what your finished product will look like.
Here's a screen shot for those who have never seen it in action:
Link to Windows Live Help
Friday, December 15th, 2006
If you take a look above there should now be a little image in your browser bar. The picture is what is called a favicon.ico (
Favourites
icon), and I think it looks kinda neat.
I put the picture together using
Photoshop Elements 2.0
, but I still needed to save it as a .ico file which isn't one of the extensions used by this software. I am not sure if the later versions can handle this format, but for a while there I was stymied.
Eventually I found this handy little site,
chami.com, that has a favicon generator that is free to use. I also discovered that the
Irfan viewer does handle .ico files, and as this too is free I thought I would download it and give it a whirl. It seems to work pretty well.
If you dont want to make your own favicon but fancy using the standard WordPress logo used on their own sites you can download it from
wordpress.org/support by entering favicon.ico in to the search box and hitting enter.
Setting the favicon up to work properly was a bit of a trial for my level of competence, but as you can see I got there in the end.
Once you have uploaded your icon via your FTP client to your root folder you then have to insert this script: <link rel="shortcut icon" xhref="http//yoursite.com/favicon.ico" mce_href="http//yoursite.com/favicon.ico" > in to the header section of the theme you are using. If you decide to change themes don't forget to add the script again!
Monday, December 4th, 2006
Well, at the end of last week I changed my theme to one that allows for widgets, I was quite pleased with this one but I have modified the top bar slightly.
I liked the
Black White and Red theme as it suited my (bad) sense of humour, as in "What is Black White and Red/Read all over?", it also goes quite well with the
"Firefox 2" theme that I am using at ther moment, "
rubyFox", but I wanted alittle more red at the top than was provided.
Looks Shiny to me!
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Fleck actually saves a copy of the page to your account to make the notes on, so it does not work on most password protected pages such as forums. I have found it very useful to keep track of various applications, widgets and items that I want to blog about at some point, or just to save a page that I want to read more fully at a future date.
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