photo credit: knitsteel

I really only enough about web design to be dangerous- I’ve just been far too busy/lazy to learn how to be a good designer, and there’s really no point in aspiring to mediocrity. Except of course, to know enough about whether you’re hiring a good designer.

Nowadays, I am still able to tweak a pre-packaged design, but i frequently get annoyed by two things.

1. Not knowing what a particular color hex code combination corresponds to in the browser
2. Not knowing the hex code of a color or group of colors I’d like to use

The two tools that helped me were Color Combo’s color combination tool and a color chooser.

The color combination tool not only gave me suggestions of what colors play nice together, but also let me cut and paste different colors in and displayed them – this helps a lot in that situation where you want to get rid of one grey but not another.

The color chooser made it easy for me to find more colors to fill in the gaps when switching out one color for another that fit better into my design ideas.

What kind of tools do you use when you’re messing around with your blog design?

Okay.

So you’re browsing around, looking at this and that, and you stumble across something that you think might be pretty cool, mysterious, entertaining, what ever.

Yup!  Mislead again.  You land on a page that set’s your spyware software into a tizzy.

How are you to know where you’re gonna land?

Ah!  What a conundrum.

Guess what – The “Big Mo” can help.

Here’s another Firefox Add-on that will make you happy you stopped by. It’s called

LinkAlert

Here’s a review from one happy user:   “This needs to be a feature of Firefox proper! The ability to know what kind of URL is hidden behind that innocent-looking hyperlink is obscenely useful and this implementation is seamless. I would not go back to the time before I found this addon.”

Check it out!

MorganLighter

Web Automation, Web Testing and Data Extraction?

Well, do you?

Here’s a quote from Rick Broida at Lifehacker blog -

“This powerful tool has countless applications. You can use it to fill in forms that stretch across multiple pages, to automatically log into a site and perform specific activities, or even to extract data from a site and save it as a CSV file. It’s particularly useful for web developers looking to test the performance and functionality of their sites. Macros can be edited, controlled with JavaScript and combined with other extensions.”

So, what is it? It’s Imacros from Firefox.

What more could you want?

MorganLighter

Have you heard about the “Bitty Browser”?

Well, check this out!

Bitty Browser helps you keep track of your favorite Web stuff by enabling navigable windows directly within your favorite sites – it’s like Picture-in-Picture for the Web.

For example – Try opening Bitty in: Google, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Windows Live, Protopage, Typepad, WordPress, webwag, 30 Boxes, Widgetbox, AOL’s AIMPages. (In a couple of sites you have to log in – but it’s no big deal). Or add Bitty to any other site or blog via a simple HTML copy/paste.

It’s also a platform to Widgetize and Syndicate activity – how cool is that?!?

For all you Web developers, bloggers, advertisers, publishers, Bitty Browser is a smart way to widgetize and syndicate interactivity.

You’ll reach a wider audience by making your content or service available out through windows on other Web sites all the while maintaining closer relationships by enabling your content or service within personal start pages. And if that isn’t enough, you’ll provide your visitors with extended content and services without driving them away from your site.

Check it out for yourself.

MorganLighter

One of my struggles in moving from a PC to a Mac is that there are very few suitable screen capture programs that can be used in the native Mac environment. I bought Camtasia Studio back in the day, and it works fine on Windows in Mac, but only within the Windows environment. So, if I want to film a video to show Mac users who don’t have/like Windows how to do something in a Mac OS X environment, I’m stuck with clunky tools, or SOL.

Sure, there’s Screen-o-matic.com, but they only publish in online public SWF and for download MOV, which I then have to convert to AVI. The sound also tends to suck, which may not be their fault, as I often have to apply post filming audio filters.

And I could use Screenography, too. But besides being a memory hog, and occasionally having unreasonable file sizes, it’s just not as smooth an interface as Camtasia.

Then there are the times when I’m on a PC, or a Windows computer, and I want to do one quick video screenshot, one quick time, or brag about how great I am via a screenshot, one quick time, and it doesn’t warrant the full version of Camtasia Studio. I want to be able to save the file to my computer for editing or safe keeping, and be able to share it quickly.

So what do I do?

Until recently, banged my head against the wall, which only made my headache worse.

Now, I use Jing, the software from the Jing project, which is compatible with Windows and Mac, and also gives you free hosting space for the duration of the Jing project, which is currently open-ended.

I wrote a review of Jing, which I later updated.

Now, how cool is this going to be?

Way cool!

I know you’re probably wetting your pants right now, here’s the scoop -

Having a Keyword-Rich domain name is an important factor of Search Engine Optimization. Choosing the right domain could boost your search engine rankings. This tool will suggest keyword rich domain names. Are you kidding me?

I think I’ve gone to heaven.

Let me at it!

MorganLighter

Here’s a puzzler for you.

Many people wonder why their websites don’t rank well in Country specific Search Engines.

Most of the Search Engines (including Google) determines the country of the website based on the physical location of the website’s IP Address. You would probably rank well in a Country Specific Search Engine if your website is hosted in the same country.

This tool helps determine the Country in which the specified website is hosted.

Procurare a lui qui. Capire?

Signore MorganLighter

Oh, this is a sneaky little tool.  Don’t you just love it!

How it works – he-he-he.

Find out the Yahoo WebRank of your and your competitors websites.

This tool help you evaluate the importance of a URL as perceived by Yahoo.  

Sshhh! Don’t tell anyone. It’s our little secret.  Mums the word!

MorganLighter

As you all know, Keyword Density is the percentage of occurrence of your keywords to the text in the rest of your web page. It is important for your main keywords to have the correct keyword density to rank well in search engines. This tool will crawl the given URL, extract text as a search engine would, remove common stop words and analyze the density of the keywords.

Stop words – Most search engines do not consider extremely common words in order to save disk space or to speed up search results. These filtered words are known as ‘Stop Words’. For a list of these stop words – go here. Be prepared, there’s a zillion of them.

Keyword Cloud is a visual depiction of keywords used on a website. Keywords having a higher density are depicted in a larger fonts. Ideally your main keywords should appear in larger fonts at the start of the cloud.

If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times – - – - – it’s free.

Check your keyword density here.

MorganLighter

For those of you with an interest in language translation in your searching, Google has released a test version of their search translation service. What this service will do is translate queries to perform multi-lingual searches of the Internet, and then converts the results to the searcher’s language.

The languages currently included in the service are English, French, Spanish, Arabic, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and traditional and simplified Chinese. The service will eventually be expanded to include other languages.

If you have a need – give it a try! I did and it was a blast!

Cindy

Google recently launched Hot Trends, their tool that lets users select specific dates to see what the top-rising searches were at any given point in time. It’s an evolving concept that Google believes is ready for prime time.

Google has produced a manually complied list of popular searches, call Zeitgeist, for more than six years. More recently, the search king launched Google Trends to show the popularity of search terms to show their relation to each other over time. Google software engineer Corey Vickrey says Hot Trends takes this list to a new level, providing an up-to-date snapshot of what’s on our collective mind.

Here’s how it works: For each Hot Trends result, the associated Google News, blog searches, and Google Web search results appear, offering users more context for each result.

Google said that its hope was that people would find this tool entertaining and interesting, yet tapping into the social capabilities of search may bring you real business value. Google’s data can be used to find current hot topics or relevant information in a timely fashion – timely is always a plus.

Have tried this one out and liked all of the information provided for the search. Give it a go and see what you think!

Cindy