Owner: TechSnack.net URL:http://www.techsnack.net Join Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:05:40 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: Anything related to Technologies, IT, and computer, Web2.0, How To, Tutorials, Downloads, and more. Site statistics:Click here
How to detect invisible Yahoo Messenger’s Friends 2007-11-12 07:36:19 Nowadays, people sometimes purposely change their IM status to “appear offline/invisible
”. Xeeber is a website which can let you find out who is online and who is offline. Just enter their name and Xeeber will show their status.
This service really cool as it can easily show your contact’s status by just key in the yahoo ID. But, sometimes people switch their status to “invisible” maybe they got urgent things to do and don’t want people to disturb them. So, please use this carefully and don;t disturb your friend if they really busy.
Another website which provide similar service is Invisible Scanner, which is developed by Vietnam user.
Both of them can actually grab the display picture of your contacts, even they are not online. Cool huh?
Read more:Yahoo
, Messenger
, Friends
, Yahoo Messenger
10 steps to convert your website from web1.0 to web2.0 2007-11-11 07:25:23 Nowadays, people like to talk about web 2.0. Many website
try to redesign so that their website look more web 2.0. Here, i would like to share some tips on how to make your website look like a web 2.0 website.
Change your website’s font size from 10px to 12px.
Use “tag” instead of “category”.
Create a web 2.0 logo for your website. If you don’t know how to create or you don’t have such software, visit web 2.0 logo creator.
Change your website font style to Arial or Georgia.
Use “RSS” instead of “Subscribe to our newsletter”.
Use CSS to design your website. This will also boost up the loading speed of your website.
User Permalink in your blog/website.
Let user comment what you write.
Add “Social bookmark shortcut” and remove “Add to Favourite icon”.
Use blog or any open source CMS to built your website.
The 10 tips above will only make your website look like a web 2.0 website. It won’t Read more:steps
BuzzWord - free flash-based word processor 2007-11-10 23:40:12 Abode had bought BuzzWord which is developed by Virtual Ubiquity.Inc. Now, public user can start to use this application.
There are a few web-based word processor
which base on AJAX and HTML. Among them are Google Doc, Zoho Writer, ThinkFree, and etc. Now, BuzzWord introduce a flash-based word processor which has advantage on its user interface. Definitely, flash’s design is more intuitive than AJAX design. But, if we compare the features between BuzzWord and other web-based word processor, obviously BuzzWord still has a lot of space to improve. For example, they can not suppost Chinese or Japanese input.
Currently, BuzzWord can only supports RTF, MS DOC and Word 2003 XML document import and export. I believe they still working on how to import PDF document, as PDF technology is developed by Adobe. So i believe this is another advantage of BuzzWord over its competitor is they successfully implement it.
The screenshot above shows BuzzWord main page. As a usual word processor, it
SortFix - Start dragging stop typing 2007-11-09 09:55:32 SortFix is a new search engine which provide user better search results. Their search results are base on Google and Yahoo.
In the future, search engine technology will continue to develop until they can really understand what user wants and return the appropriate results. Currently, Google search results is base on PageRank, but sometimes they can’t really work perfectly. But, SortFix introduce a brand new search engine, their slogan is “Start
Dragging Stop Typing”.
SortFix’s search results are base on Google and Yahoo. But, they include “Power Words” in their search results so that the search results more specific to what user wants. “Power Words” is terms introduced by SortFix, which are words that related to the search. User can drag and drop the “Power Words” to “Add basket”, “Remove basket”, and “Dictionary basket”.
The screenshot below shows the search results for “Wordpress&r
Top free file hosting server 2007-11-08 08:42:00 Do you like to share your files with your friends? Do you frequently use free file storage? If yes, which website you normally go? Here, i list out top 10 free file hosting server
for you.
Are you still using Rapidshare? Rapidshare1 provide a search engine to search any files host in Rapidshare server. But, after you finish download a file, you have to wait for some times before download second file. And sometimes i found that the servers load are quite high until i get a few kB/s for my download speed.
So, why not we try to use other free file hosting service? Some of the website even not set any limitations. They allow multiple file download at same time and allow you to use download manager.
Among the 10 file hosting, i like FileFactory most, because it always give me stable speed and i no need to wait in order to download second file. If you want to know more information about them, please visit this article, they compare the PageRank, Alexa rank, and space provided of t
SkreemR - free mp3 download 2007-11-08 02:25:55 SkreemR is an audio search engine. They allow you to listen to the mp3 online or you can download the song.
The result page will list out all audio files that match your search criteria. You can look at the details of each song. Furthermore, you can find more informations about the artist at LyricWiki, Wikipedia, Amazon, Youtube, gruvr, and flickr.
The screenshot below show the embed music player from SkreemR:
When you move your mouse cursor to “File:“, the details of the song will appear. When you click it, you can download that song. Click here to start search for free song!
VirSCAN - Free web based virus scanner 2007-11-07 09:03:20 VirSCAN.org is a free online virus
scanner using several antivirus engine. Currently, they support up to 39 antivirus engines which include NOD32, Kaspersky, Symantec, McaFee, and etc. Almost all famous antivirus engine are supported by them.
VirSCAN provide user to upload suspicious files and they will use the antivirus engine to scan them. From the website, i can see that their virus definitions are quite updated. But, when you use this service, please put this in your mind, “they can only help you to scan the suspicious file, and they are not responsible for the results. And if the results shown that the file uploaded is free from virus, it may due to the malware is new and all antivirus engine can’t detect it.”
VirSCAN support up to 10MB per file upload, which is quite enough because normally document size is less than it. They support RAR/zip for mat also, which means that you can zip your files and then upload to the server. But, the maximum number of files con
Customize your Youtube player 2007-11-07 07:11:01 Now, you can customize your Youtube player
when you embed them in your blog or website. They allow you to customize the player’s toolbar color, border, and whether want to include the related video or not.
When you open the Youtube video, you can see “customize embed” button beside the embed code. Click it and you will see the customize options as shown below:
After you customize the video, paste the embed code in your post and you will see the result.
Zamzar - Free online file conversion 2007-11-06 07:58:41 Zamzar provide the ability to convert between different file format on the fly. it support conversion between video file, image file, document file, music file, and zip file.
Previously, i write an article about Wobzip, it provide the ability to uncompress zip file and let user to download it. Now, Zamzar provide another service which is file conversion. Both of them are online
service, which means user no need extra software to run
After the conversion done, Zamzar will send a link to user’s email address. User can download the output file by using that link. This link will last for 24 hours. The good thing is your can upload the file, convert it, and send your link to your friends. But make sure you don’t upload copyrighted material!
There are only 4 steps to user this service. First, upload the file, then choose your desired format, then enter your email address and start converting. Currently, the file size is limit to 100MB. You can see the file format support here.
How to increase traffic for new blogger 2007-11-05 07:57:46 This article will discuss how to increase traffic
for new blog site. There are a lot of ways to increase your traffic, which you can found on internet. However, most of them are not suitable for a new blogger. So, i decide to to a summary on these methods and list down the strategies for new bloggers.
Join blogger community such as MyblogLog and BlogCatalog. Create your own community and ask your friends to join. Try to join community which related to your topic and communicated with the members of those community. Don’t just join and wait. Take initiative to visit their site and give your comments. You can join my community at MyBlogLog and my neighborhood at BlogCatalog.
Add ping to Technorati. You can either manually ping each post of let wordpress ping for you.
Join Feedburner and let your users subscribe your blog using Feedburner. Feedburner offer a lot of service including ping to some search engine and Technorati.
Try to create link within your pages and also link to other s Read more:increase traffic
Why i install Top Commentators plugin 2007-11-17 07:41:03 Top Commentators plugin shows a list of visitors who give most comments on your blog during certain duration.
There are a few top commentators plugin for Wordpress. Currently, i am using Top Commentators Widget v.0.999 from webgrrrl.net. It works with Wordpress 2.3. As shown in the scrrenshot, it will list out top commentator’s name and the number of comments that he/she posts on my blog.
Why i use Top Commentators plugin? For my readers, if they post comment frequently, their name will appear in the top commentators list, and will bring incoming links and traffic to their website. So, this actually act as a free link exchange program for the top commentators. For me, Top Commentators plugin encourage more readers to join the discussion, as more contribution they make, their link will get higher chance to appear in the list.
The reason why i choose Top Commentators Widget v.0.999 from webgrrrl.net is it provide a good configuration menu. The screenshot below show the configur Read more:install
YooRL - Start tracking your link now 2007-11-16 20:56:50 YooRL is an online tracking service which let you to track an URL, to monitor the spread of the links to others in real time.
Do you share your bookmarks with your friends frequently? Do you share new website or interesting website with your friends? If so, how to know who visit the link or where the visitors come from? Now, YooRL provide these service for you, and it is free!
YooRL can monitor the spread of the links to web resources and their popularity in real time. This can be view via the “Dashboard” of the link. Users can also know where the visitors come from. YooRL will record the IP address of each visitor and then determine where they come from.
Once you share the link, YooRL users can start to watch what is happening to that link. From the dashboard, you will a map with a few red dots. The red dots show the visitors’ location and you can know how many visitors had view this website.
Beside these, you can also use YooRL as a bookmarking tools. Other YooRL u Read more:Start
13 tips to boost your firefox speed 2007-11-15 09:00:45 There are a lot of tricks and tips that can make your firefox run faster. But some of them are quite confusing. So, i would like to compile a list of useful tips which can really help firefox users to increase the browsing speed.
First of all, you need to go into firefox configuration by enter about:config in the address bar.
Tip 1:
Type network.http.pipelining in the filter bar and set it to true.
Tip 2:
Type network.http.pipelining.maxrequests in the filter bar. The default value is 4. Change it to 8. You can also change this value to larger number, which means firefox will make more requests at once.
Tip 3:
Type network.http.proxy.pipelining in the filter bar and set it to true.
Tip 4:
Type network.dns.disableIPv6 in the filter bar and set it to true.
Tip 5:
Type plugin.expose_full_path in the filter bar and set it to true.
Tip 6:
Create a new integer named nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set its value to 0. This is the amount of waiting time for browser to wait before it process th
SpellJax - Ajax spelling checker 2007-11-14 07:56:33 SpellJax is a free online Ajax spelling
checker with a very simple user interface.
Type your text in the textbox. After finish typing, press the “Check spelling” link. SpellJax will automatic check the spelling for you and any wrong words will be displayed in red color.
When you click on the wrong word, the suggestions will appear. The screenshot below show the suggestions for “techsnack”:
SpellJax can automatically detect HTML syntax and also URL. You can also copy the whole document and then paste it inside the textbox and click “Check spelling”. Currently, SpellJax only support English.
I believe there are some software which able to do spell check which can be installed into our PC. So, i think this service is mainly for people who use public computer or office PC.
Comments bring traffic? 2007-11-13 08:26:14 Do you believe that by leaving comments on others’ blog bring more traffic
to you? Caroline Middlebrook proofs this theory. She manages to increase her traffic from 3000 in September to 11,000 in October.
Caroline Middlebrook did a lot of wors in order to increase her traffic( including commenting and StumbleUpon). Although StumbleUpon bring her more traffic compare to commenting, but what i want to say is, a lot of websites send her links too. And those visitors actually view her site after reading her comments.
Why comments can bring traffic? It won’t bring you traffic if you simply spam other people blogs with meaningless comments. You should join the conversations on that topic, and add your own opinions. When other users read the comments, they may click your name if they found your comments is meaningful.
For me, before i post a comment, i will go through all previous comments. After i post my comment, i will browse the commenter’s website if i found his/her com Read more:Comments
0rz short URL generator 2007-11-22 07:33:57 0rz.tw will make an URL shorter by giving you a short URL similar to this: http://0rz.tw/3e3p1. It basically is an URL redirection service which provide a very short but NOT easy to remember URL.
Do you use TinyURL? If yes, then you will know what is URL redirection, right? 0rz.tw is a similar service with TinyURL. Both of them support a preview to the website before redirect to there.
So why we use URL redirection? If we want to post something on our blog, forum, or even send an address to your friend through IM and the address is too long, we may miss accidentally delete 1 or 2 characters and the whole URL can’t work anymore. So, many people choose to use URL redirection to shorten the URL before writing post or send to friends.
Let use take an example from Youtube movie clip:
Source: Hitman (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQhtaf05T5g)
After shorten: http://0rz.tw/7b3ih
So, how to use this service? Simply drag the link below to your Bookmarks Toolbars( Firefox user). When you
ComeStat - Online user and statistic widget for blogger 2007-11-21 22:52:23 ComeStat is a lightweight service which provide a small widget
for bloggers to track their visitor.
Similar with Whos.amung.us, ComStat provide a small widget for bloggers. What you need to do is just paste the Javascript code provide by them into your blog and ComStat will track the visitors for you. The button is look like this . It shows total connections to your website currently. When you click on the button, you can find more details, as shown in the screenshot below:
Although some free visitor analytic program such as Google Analytics, Sitemeter, and StatCounter provide more details on you visitors, but the main advantage of ComStat is it does not require user to register and easy to install. The main purpose of this widget is for visitors to see how many people are on the site now and also can know the popularity of the website by looking at the details for past 24 hours.
For bloggers who like to let public know basic visitors details but hide important details, this widget i
SnapYap - Call your friends from web browser for free 2007-11-21 07:30:25 SnapYap is a free live video calling and video messaging service. Now, they open member registration for 1000 users. Click here if you want to register now.
They provide a small widget that let bloggers embed into their blog.To use SnapYap, what you need is a webcam, a broadband connection, and a web browser
which has flash plugin. You no need to install any software in order to use their service.
Their main page provide a textbox for you to enter the SnapYap username of the person you want to call. As a SnapYap user, you can:
Participate in live video calls in your browser.
Send and receive video messages.
Embed the SnapYapTM application directly into your webpage to record video messages.
Instantly connect with friends and family through video technology.
They provide a movie clip which is a short tutorial on how to use their service in their main page. Currently, the widget function is not yet ready. The screenshot below show the interface after you log in to SnapYap:
The interf Read more:web browser
PipeBytes - Free online file sending 2007-11-19 09:05:39 PipeBytes is a free online
service which let you to share files with your friends. This service is web-based, which means no plugin/software installation required!
Many instant messenger(IM) such as Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype, or mIRC provide users to send file to their contacts. But what happen if you want to send a file to your friend which doesn’t use same IM as you? I don’t think a Live Messenger user can send file to a Skype user, right? So, can we make file sharing simple? Yes, you can. By using PipeBytes, The file sharing is really simple. With just 2 steps, you can share you file with your friends.
So, how PipeBytes works? When yougo to their main site, you can either choose Send File or Pickup File. Let say you want to share an image file with your friend. Then you choose Send File. After that, you click the Browse to select file that you want to share. Then, press the Start Upload button and PipeBytes will generate a 12-digit Pick-up code and
QuickRibbon - Create free ribbon for your blog! 2007-11-27 08:01:51 QuickRibbon let you create a ribbon for your website or blog for free. It will generate a javascript code and all you have to do it paste the javascript code in your HTML document.
Nowadays, people talk about Web2.0. Many web developer use stripe, reflection, and ribbon in their banner. There are a lot of free online tools to generate these effect. Some of the example are Stripe Generator, Reflection Maker, Web2.0 Logo Creator, and QuickRibbon.
With QuickRibbon, you can create a nice ribbon quickly without the knowledge of graphic design. All you have to do is type the words that you want to display at the ribbon banner and choose the settings. There are a lot of settings that you can modify to suit your website. Among these settings are: Font style and color, Ribbon style, Background color, and Link options.
The screenshot below shows the main page of QuickRibbon:
After you finish your settings, hit the Generate Ribbon! button and they will provide you a javascript code. Paste these
Live Documents - A “live” Microsoft Office? 2007-11-25 23:30:10 Live Documents
is created by Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail, before Microsoft
bought it at 1998. Now, he formed a new company called InstaColl and compete with Zoho, ThinkFree, BuzzWord as an online document processing application.
If you read my blogs often, you sure know BuzzWord, a free flash-based word processor. Nowadays, most of the online application either use Flash/Flex or AJAX beside server-side programming language. Live Documents is similar with BuzzWord as both of them are built using Flash/Flex.
Bhatia claims that more and more people start using online application now and by 2010, people will not buying software. As you can see, there are more and more applications go online. The most significant is word processing software.
Live Documents are similar with Microsoft’s traditional application like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but they are built with Flash and Flex so that it is cross platform. For Microsoft Office
user, they provide a plugin called Live Docum
Save2pc Light - Grab Youtube video easily 2007-11-24 21:32:52 Save2pc Light let you grab online video
such as YouTube, Google Video, Myspace Video, Break.com, DailyMotion.com, and etc. It is a free tools and you can save the movie in your local computer in different formats.
There are a few website which provide user to grab and download online movie like Youtube, MegaVideo, Dailymotion, and etc. One of the example are ClipNabber. However, ClipNabber not support format conversion, which means that the movie file downloaded is a .flv extension. You need another software to convert it if yiou want to save them in your portable movie player.
Here, save2pc combine downloading and conversion into one software. Before you start download the movie, you can select to save the movie as various format, including .flv, .avi, .mpeg, .wmv, and etc. The user interface of save2pc light is very simple but it provide powerful function. Beside the light version, the pro version contains more features such as preview a movie before download. The screenshot of a pr
SeeToo - What you see, i see too 2007-11-23 23:29:40 SeeToo is a web application which allow you to invite your friends to watch movie together through web browser. With SeeToo, you stream your video privately with your friends.
There are a lot of people sharing video and there are a lot of video sharing website include Youtube, MegaVideo, MetaCafe, Dailymotion, and etc. But, their video sharing is not real-time. Now, SeeToo provide this service by let its user to share video files with any size with their friends in real-time.
By using SeeToo, you stream video directly from your computer to your friends. You can share the movie with 2 friends at the same time. You can share video, audio, and image with your friends. The supported format are:
Video files (.mpg, .mpeg, .avi, .mov, .3gp, .flv, .mp4)
Audio files (.mp3)
Image files (.jpg, .jpeg, .bmp)
The screenshot below show SeeToo main page:
There are 2 steps to start streaming video with your friends: Select a video and Invite a buddy. After you choose your video, SeeToo will give y
Name In Lights - Create a “Flash” name for yourself 2007-11-23 00:24:00 Name In Lights
can create a very cool “Flash
” name for you. All you had to do is enter your name and they will generate a Flash animation which contains your name.
After you create your animate name, you can share this with your friend by enter their email. You may put the animation on your blog too. There are totally 4 different type animation generated: Standard animation, Silent animation, No-intro animation, and No-intro silent animation.
I had create a Standard animation for myself as shown below:
Click the picture to browse my animated name. You can go to their website and create 1 for yourself too!
Doodlekit - Free online website builder 2007-12-03 09:56:52 Doodlekit is a free onlinewebsite
builder which can help a novice to develop a professional website.
Back to year 2000, if you want to built a website, you need Dreamweaver or Frontpage, you need to know HTML and Javascript, you need to know PHP/ASP if you want to create application for your website. It take a lot of time to built a website. Now, you can use Content Management System(CMS) to built website. The process continue and now you can even create website online!
Doodlekit provide a lot of features for its users. Some of the example are: blog, photo album, RSS Feeds, Site Searching, Forum, Shopping Cart, Adsense Too, Register User, and etc. But, there are only limited features for a free user. You can view the full feature list to compare the features for different packages.
Users can easily customize their website’s layout such as the color themes, headers, background patterns, and much more. Doodlekit is made for novice user. So, no server-side scripting or complicate
SHARE - Adobe’s Flash-based file sharing 2007-12-01 20:11:19 Adobe launch SHARE Beta, a flash-based file sharing application in September 2007. They still in beta testing but the interface is quite nie and easy to use.
There are more and more file hosting service around us. You can read about Top free file hosting server from my blog to look at a few examples. Now, Adobe launch its own file sharing server called SHARE, which has a nice interface. After you register, they will provide you 1GB storage, but they won’t limit your single file size.
The embedded previewer now allows embedding of image files (including jpeg, gif, png) and more interesting also allows embedding Flash
Movies (.SWF) on websites, wikis or blogs. After you upload the file, you can set the access level to either Open access or Limited access. If you set to Limited access, only your recipient can access the file. But, they need to own an Adobe account in order to access them.Adobe SHARE still in beta testing, so there are limited information that i can get from their Read more:Adobe
GIFUP - Create animate picture online 2007-11-30 09:10:07 GIFUP can easily import pictures and then compile into animate GIF file. User can also import pictures from flickr or any website.
GIFUP let you create animate pictures instantly and easily. You can choose to upload the source from your own PC, grab images from Flickr gallery, or get images from website. The maximum file size for single picture is 1025kb.
You can eaily create animate banner, forum avatar, or pictures slide show in seconds! Let us take an example from grabbing images from Flickr. We search for keyword “computer” and found 5880 records:
To add images, simply click on the result found. After you added images, you can change the animation settings including the size and speed. One interesting point the GIFUP offer is that they let you edit the images selected.
Although some GIF application can create better animation, but GIFUP is good enough for creating simple animate pictures. For a beginner, it take no time to learn! So, why not create an animate picture Read more:online
EatLime - Free online private file sharing 2007-11-29 08:49:03 EatLime let you share any files with your friends or family much faster. The download process can start immediately when you start upload.
Like other file sharing service, EatLime let users to share any file types but limit the file size to 1GB. After you choose the file that you want to share, a link will be given to you. You can then give this link to your friends and they can start downloading the file. What make EatLime different with other file sharing/hosting application is, they let your friends to download the file immediately when you start upload, which means that they don’t need to wait until you finish upload the file. This make the file sharing much faster than other similar services.
Another interesting feature that they offer is you can delete the file after your friends finish download. As shown in the screenshot below, there are a “x” button after the file name. After your friends download the file, you can then click “x” to delete the fi Read more:online
MailFreezr - Freeze your mail and send it future 2007-11-28 07:47:09 MailFreezr let you send your mail after a few years, ranging from 1-100 years. It will stores your email in their server and will automatic send it when it reaches the date.
You can write anything include your feelings, declare your love, or reveal something you are afraid of disclosing now or don’t dare to talk now. Everything will be stored in the server and delived to your recipient after a given number of years.
As shown in the screenshot above, it is as simple as sending a normal email, but you need to type the verification code because they want to prevent mail spamming. The author promise that user’s email will be kept secret and nobody will read the mail. Besides this, the email will be sent automatically when the date reach.
If you want to check whether your email is in their system, you can go to this link. I wonder why they don’t let user to choose the exact date to send the mail. Let say if i want to send this mail after 3 months, then i cant use their s Read more:Freeze
Humancalendar - Amusing calendar with pictures of real people 2007-12-11 07:47:45 Humancalendar.com is an interesting website which show a photo based calender where the calender is actually make up from pictures of real people
looking at each other.
As shown in the picture, the person who hold number 11 look forward while the other people will look at her. From this picture, we know that today’s date is 11 and today is tuesday!
If you have a website or blog, you can put a small widget to display the humancalendar. You can choose up to 4 styles: 3×3 - 275px, 3×3 - 150px, 2×2 - 275px, and 2×2 - 150px. The website will generate the code for you. Below is a screenshot for 2×2 - 275px:
Click here to go humancalendar.com or get widget for your website!
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