Sapiens (Mac) – Probably the most intuitive apple launcher I’ve ever used, Sapiens is accessed from either a circular motion from your mouse / touchpad or a keyboard shortcut and actually learns which programs you use the most and anticipates what you’ll need.  Sadly, it’s still not working with 10.6.

SuperDuper! (Mac) – The easiest way I’ve ever cloned a hard drive, ever.  Want to upgrade to a larger hard drive in your Mac, get SuperDuper, connect the new hard drive via an SATA to USB adapter, run it.  Pull the existing hard drive and replace with the new one and turn the power on.  Brilliant!

PixelStick (Mac) – If you do web design or web graphics, PixelStick is an amazing little app to measure distance and angles on the screen.  I can’t tell you how often I use this for laying out sites, creating banner ads and doing alignments of web graphics.

Paparazzi! (Mac) -  A small and unobtrusive app for taking screenshots of web pages.

XXCLONE (Windows) – The Windows version of SuperDuper! and it does an excellent job of cloning hard drives.

CutePDF (Windows) – Create PDF files from any printable document, for free!

EASEUS Partition Master (Windows) – Create partitions, resize, format and merge on nearly all Windows platforms, for free!

SpinRite (Windows) – Hard drives aren’t perfect, when you need to do maintenance on them or recover data, SpinRite can help.

PhotoRec (Windows / Mac / Linux) – If you’ve ever formatted the memory card in your digital camera by accident, PhotoRec will be worth it’s weight in gold.  Best photo recovery tool ever, and it’s free!

DVD Flick (Windows) – Convert nearly any video file into a playable DVD.

Mac The Ripper (Mac) – Quickly and easily rip any DVD movie to your hard drive.  This application is great if you travel a lot and need to extend the battery life between charges.  Using your built in DVD slot consumes far more battery juice compared to playing a movie from  your hard drive.

HandBrake (Mac / Windows / Linux) -  An open source video transcoder for all platforms, you can now extract video or audio or both from any video source and convert it into nearly any other source.

Vixy (Mac / Windows) – Vixy is an online service to rip YouTube videos to your hard drive, but the site can be somewhat unstable due to high traffic.  To resolve this problem they’ve released the desktop app.  Still in Beta with a few quirks, the options to save as .avi, .mov or just extract the audio as .mp3 are nice.

Pidgin (Mac / Windows / Linux) – Possibly one of the best chat clients available that loads nearly all formats of chat available, from AIM to Gtalk, Facebook to Yahoo.

FireBug (Firefox) An add-on for Firefox, FireBug is essential for anyone who does web design to quickly and efficiently track down errors with web page development.

SciTE (Windows) – Based on the Scintilla text editor, SciTE has extensions built in.  This is hands down one of the best text editors available, and it’s free!

Audacity (Mac) – Going further than GarageBand, Audacity gives you a level of fine tuning and editing that is second to none.  This open-source project is also free!

FireFTP (Firefox) – If you need to FTP data, chances are you probably already have a web browser open, so why not do it right in Firefox?  FireFTP is a small add-on that is simple to use and provide rock solid stability.

Keyfinder (Windows) – This tiny little app does one thing, sniffs out the product key of nearly any version of Windows.  Very helpful when you need to reinstall the operating system but the sticker has been scratched or worn off the case.

Foxit (Windows / Linux / Firefox) – Simply the fastest PDF reader I’ve ever used, period.  Uninstall Acrobat reader and install this free PDF reader, period.

Random Posts

20 Apps You Probably Never Heard Of originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

In this article we wish to supply you with 8 ways to simplify your home network. These solutions are readily available and easily implemented on any home network.  The basic goal is to reduce and remove the total number of wires and gadgets used on a desk or in your home office to make it a more productive environment.

1.    Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
2.    Network Hard Drive (My Book World Edition)
3.    KVMP
4.    Wireless USB Hub
5.    Cord Organizers
6.    Wireless VGA Kit
7.    Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner
8.    Computer based applications

Since the goal is to help remove cables and clutter, the first and most obvious step is to use a Wireless Keyboard and Mouse (KVM).  These come in a wide range of colors, layouts and styles to fit just about everyone’s needs.

Most homes now have more than one computer and a need often arises to share files between them.  The fastest and most efficient way to both backup data that is accessible to all users on the network and share content is with a network hard drive.  The My Book World Edition by Western Digital is a great choice, easy to configure and is very flexible to fit just about all needs.  A full tutorial on how to back-up files can be found here.

If your desk has more than one computer on it, it’s pretty silly to use separate keyboards, monitors and mice, especially when the IOGEAR KVMP will reduce the number of peripherals on your desk.  This an advanced KVM that also allows sharing of HDMI and USB devices, so it’s much more expandable, while removing duplicate input devices from one’s desk.

Most computers come with enough USB ports to fill the need of anyone, but sometimes certain USB powered devices are just a bit too far away to neatly and cleanly run a cable.  Not only does this look bad, it also opens up the possibilities to snag it, trip on it or have it pinched along the path.  A wireless USB hub from IOGEAR is a simple solution to eliminate the wires and get four open ports anywhere you may need them, up to 30 feet away from the computer.

Cords are simply a part of computers and accessories; sadly we can’t eliminate all of them.  Power cords are the most common ones, but using a cord organizer from 3M will allow you to secure them under your desk, run them down a leg and neatly to the power outlet on your wall.  Not only does hiding the cables have a cleaner look, it greatly reduces the chances of accidentally kicking one loose while working.

Part of the clutter in most home offices and desks is a stack of paperwork and bills that tend to build up.  Reduce and eliminate this stack with a Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner.  This compact document scanner duplex scans and outputs directly into PDFs, allowing you to transform your former paper cluttered home office into a paperless, searchable workflow fast and efficiently.  Combine this with the network hard drive for backing data up and you can fast and easily keep two copies of important data, easily found using the search function on your computer (Windows or Mac).

From the time I was a kid until about 10 years ago, I remember my Mom always having a calculator, sticky notes and other assorted office supplied cluttering up her desk.  There are electronic ways to simplify your desk and home network that can replace many of these items.  In both Windows Vista and Mac osX, sticky notes and calculators come standard in either the Side Bar on Windows and the Dashboard on Macs, use them!  They are put there to replace clutter on the desktop.  I’ve found it far more useful to use the calculator on my computer than open up my desk drawer and fish for one, or have yet another power cable on my desktop.  Additionally, Google has done such a great job with their Documents that I keep notes for myself online, easily accessible from any computer that has an Internet connection for me.

Most home networks never start out being cluttered and messy; they are a result of poor planning or constant add-ons to expand needs.  This has always been the nature of computers, home offices too.  Taking a step back, evaluating your current situation and making some smart investments will not only clean up the cluttered mess you stare at daily, it will also help you be more productive.

Random Posts

8 Ways to Simplify Your Home Network originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

We’ve all been there, doing an un-boxing of shiny new tech gadgets, so excited to get them plugged in and hooked up that the cables just get thrown everywhere, only to add more stuff to the pile as the weeks go on, never making time to organize and put into order the slew of cables connecting everything.

The unsightly ball of cables under your computer desk or draping between your TV and components not only looks bad; it makes tracking down problems or doing upgrades very difficult.  IOGEAR has a great line of products to help reduce and eliminate these cluttered cables and are giving them away to your un-organized, messy self!

The contest is easy. Take a photo of your current setup and describe how these IOGEAR products would help improve your quality of life.

First place is the Wireless USB to VGA Kit (valued at $209.95) that allows you to connect your laptop to your monitor (or TV) with no cables.  Hello streaming Internet media made easy!

Second place is a USB Laptop KVM Switch (valued at $99.95) that will allow you to connect your laptop or netbook with your desktop computer and transfer files seamlessly.  Great for netbook users who want to use a larger screen or need to move files off their smaller hard drives.

Third place is IOGEAR’s Wireless Desktop Keyboard and Mouse (valued at $59.95) – a no brainer for eliminating cables from any desktop.  The sleek keyboard features hotkeys for launching specific applications and the mouse comes with a charging cradle.

Get the full details and submit your photos on the IOGEAR blog here. Hurry, the deadline is April 30, 2009.

Random Posts

Get Clean and Win Prizes? originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

After 10 minutes of searching the web and three more failed map plugins, it dawned on me that this was really stupid, I should be able to use whatever HTML code I want in WordPress, including the iframe tag.  This is how I found the EmbedIt Plugin.  According to their site, EmbedIt is a,

simple plugin that allows you to embed any html code in a post, deciding precisely where to embed it, allowing you freedom of coding your html without being annoyed by the wysiwyg editor.

• embed Youtube videos into wordpress
• embed ustream into wordpress
• embed a custom Google Map into wordpress
• embed whatever html code into wordpress
• embed specific Adsense code into wordpress posts deciding WHERE it should go inside an article

The appeal to this plugin is that it will allow anyone to use any code they want without a funky plugin or breaking the framework in their WordPress theme.  EmbedIt utilizes the custom field in WordPress and is fully documented with screenshots on the official page.

My only complaint about this plugin is that you must submit a valid email address which grants the publisher of this plugin to send you an email now and again about new WP plugins he is working on.  I got the email instantly which has the link to download, but I still don’t like it.  I fully understand people take time to create these free plugins and never really get a lot of credit, but I think he’d be better off allowing free downloads and putting a Paypal donate button on his page instead of collecting email addresses.

Random Posts

EmbedIt WordPress Plugin Review originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

Going one step further, there has been an online petition started asking Google to roll back changes, or at the very least, an option to roll back changes.  Seems that when software or application vendors make changes without full market research, users will stand on their soap boxes and let everyone know how much they dislike them.

Random Posts

iGoogle users revolt, want old design back originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

That’s how my iGoogle page looks currently.  Sadly, the tabbed names are now cut-off, the last one should read Photography / Art, it doesn’t.  Furthermore, this new sidebar eats up 128 pixels of space.  Reading article titles when the + is expanded is a joke and it’s now wasted space.  I’m angry, real angry.  This sucks.  Google, give me my horizontal tab navigation back!

The only attractive thing to the new update is the rounded edges, which is so 2006 already.

Update: It seems the real purpose for this update is to integrate Google Reader with iGoogle and, possibly, become your bookmarks portion instead of storing them in your browser.  Seems if you click the blog name from the left side, the content from the RSS feed loads, as seen here:

Here’s the other really crappy part, Google has added in content to my tabs that I didn’t have there before!  I never had movies or The New York Times in my iGoogle, now I have to go through and edit their crap out, Google, I hope you are listening because I’m loosing my trust.

From a user perspective, it’s not terrible I suppose, but I still would much rather read an article on the original website than a stand alone reader which is why I never used Google Reader.  From a blogger’s perspective, this is horrible.  If you choose to publish your whole RSS feed, you have now have potentially lost unique visitors to your site, they can read it all right here in iGoogle.  Additionally, .htaccess pages used to help prevent people from hotlinking graphics means that your article that has photos in it won’t display properly, as is the case now with my blog.

As a blogger, I need to seriously consider if I want to continue to publish full articles via my RSS feed or just snippets and have the reader come to my site to read it all.  What’s more fair?  What serves the reader the best?  As a reader, what’s better for you?

Random Posts

iGoogle gets facelift, for the worse originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

There is some validity to using MySpace as a way to generate traffic to your site, but as I explained in the comments of Daniel’s site, it’s very short lived, but a nice spike when it happens.  The drawback however is time, it simply takes a lot of time to make blog posts on MySpace linking back to your own blog’s article, same goes for bulletins.  Being the wonderful thing that is the Internet, I set out to find a way to have WordPress automate this for me, and that is what this review is about.

A very short and quick search on Google led me to the MySpace Crossposter v2.0a plugin for WordPress.  It is almost totally what I was looking for.  As described on their site,

The WordPress to MySpace Auto Crossposter is a WordPress plugin that publishes all of your WordPress blog entries to your MySpace blog at the time of publication. This allows you to publish as usual on your WordPress blog, but to also capture and retain your MySpace audience without any extra effort.

Each time that a new WordPress post goes live it will automatically be sent to MySpace for publication.

Users of the plugin have the option of publishing a notification or a whole story to MySpace.

Perfect!  The download is just like any other plugin, in a zip file.  Extract it and FTP it into the \plugins directory of your web server.  Login to the admin panel of WordPress, activate the plugin and then go to Settings > MySpace Crossposter to configure it.  I will warn that this plugin is not nearly as simple or clean to install as most all other plugins are.  Once you land on the configuration page you need to enter the Database settings from when you originally setup WordPress.  The settings are located in your root directory on your web server in the config.php file, which I had to download because I honestly didn’t remember them.

Once that is taken care of, enter both the URL to your blog and your blog name, along with your MySpace login email and password.  Lastly is the option to post Notification style, which is a link to your blog, the title of the article posted and a direct link to it, or Whole Blog Entry, where the entire blog post will be republished on your MySpace blog.  Default setting is to Notification sytle, which is what I’d suggest leaving it as, it will help drive more traffic to your site and you won’t have to worry about formatting issues.

Click Submit and the settings are saved, you don’t have to do anything else besides write new content.  I tested this out and it worked flawlessly, posting a new blog post on my MySpace page mearly seconds after it was published on my site.

The benefits of doing this are many, most importantly it exposes your articles to more people right away and it also helps create back links into your site.  While I don’t foresee this as being a huge source of traffic, it is none the less a source.  For those people who are active on MySpace and have a lot of friends, it couldn’t hurt at all and it takes no time to do, since it’s fully automated.

Hopefully they can automate the need during intial setup to have the database information already inserted as I think a few bloggers might be turned off by the thought of screwing up their MySQL table information.  The whole process took only a few minutes to install and configure though, so I can’t complain.

Now if only I could find a WordPress plugin that would do the same with bulletin postings on MySpace, I’d be fully automated and could spend more time writing.  This is a plugin I’d recommend to anyone who is looking for an easy way to cross post articles to the largest social networking site on the internet right now.

Random Posts

MySpace Crossposter plugin review for WordPress originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

Here’s a summery of what is new and changed:

• Smaller tabs that were on top of the timeline to the right sidebar, where they can occupy more space, making them larger clicking targets. They also moved the following/followers/updates stats to the top of the page and made them larger, so now I can really see how deflated my follower numbers are.
• The most important change, in terms of functionality is the addition of AJAX to the “Home” and “@Replies” pages. Their new implementation allows you to refresh the items in your timeline without having to reload the whole page.
• New design customizer with this release, which allows you to change the colors on your Twitter profile with the help of a color wheel.

Great, new ways to make it look pretty, but still barely works properly.  I’ve been using Twitter on and off for a year now (follow me at twitter.com/mikepanic) and while I did manage to crack 12,000 text messages by subscribing to some major news outlets and having them sent SMS to my cell phone, most of what I’ve found is that it’s just noise, even from people I know in real life.  For more than 3 months now I haven’t had tweets coming into my cell, I’m very happy about this and do not miss it one bit.  I also rarely go to the official Twitter site, rather I use Twitterific on my Mac to read and update tweets.

What is most frustrating, outside of the noise and constant “read my new blog post” tweets that I myself am guilty of sending is the lack of stability.  The service seems to be going down, still, several times a month.  How can I stand behind and love an app just because it’s pretty looking when it isn’t stable?

Random Posts

Twitter redesigns interface, still somewhat unstable originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

fixes bugs with areas including Microsoft’s Silverlight software, tab behavior, video playback with YouTube and other Flash players, and scalable vector graphics, and it suppresses full-text indexing of sites accessed with encrypted Web connections

Cnet News has all the information on how to do the update, to me the killer is you can’t even update from the software itself, you need to go to another website.  Then you have to choose which updates you want to receive, Beta or Dev, and then watch as it updates.  I have no problem with software being released and not being finished, it happens all the time, but with Google’s track record of keeping apps in beta for years and years, why put so many users through the growing pains of both Dev and Beta versions?  Me thinks Chrome should have been a private invite only release like Gmail was originally to get most of the issues flushed out in the first place.

Chrome is nice, it has a lot of cool features and has everyone who uses the internet interested, but as reported earlier, no one is really using it and no one on a Mac can even start to use it.  It pains me when major companies rely on the free labor of their own users to finish building and fixing software that shouldn’t be released yet, much less make them jump through hoops to get the update.

Anyone here a die-hard Chrome user yet?

Random Posts

Google Chrome gets first update and more confusing originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

I was a daily reader of his site up until he switched to version 2.0 maybe a year ago.  At that point, it was clear that the focus was on ad placement and started to make reading the content that much harder.  John’s primary readers are bloggers and creative writers who are looking for ways to turn a profit on their own sites, they want information, not blatant advertising.  The overall layout was clean though with good graphics, but I stopped reading daily.

Today, Version 3 launched and John has moved the index of the site to be similar to one of the other super popular bloggers, Darren Rowse of Problogger.net with respects to being more of a magazine style with snippets of current articles, more ads and some static information.  Inside the site is supposed need less scrolling to read the articles and be cleaned up even more; I can agree to disagree with that.  He did finally do away with having exotic cars in his header, but that only appears to be because others ripped the idea and so he could fit more advertiser space in.  On my 1280×1034 screen I count 13 ads plus the top half of two more ads and one more ad promoting his e-book.  It’s a bit much.  The footer takes on the trends of other larger Web 2.0 sites with what must be close to 500 pixels high worth of information, sadly there is no button to take you back to the top of the page

With more than 30,000 RSS subscribers, 2,000 more following on Twitter people listen to what he says, but I think more is being emphasized on how it looks instead of better content.  John is still posting up photos of food and other random things and shares his insight on how to run a blog for money, but getting to the content for me isn’t worth the trouble anymore.

Random Posts

John Chow dot com 3 launches, I yawn originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

What’s so great about it?  Well it’s new and shiny, has a minimalist look and feel to it and consumes about 75% less memory than Firefox does, at least for me on my Windows XP box.  Google really seems to have done their homework with regards to chewing up your CPU cycles and there appears to never be a memory leak.  Additionally, you just need to type something in what used to be known as the address bar, as it now functions as a search bar and many other things.  It’s also fast, but how fast?  My seat dyno says slightly faster than Firefox, but to a normal user, it might only feel faster because it’s new.

What’s not so great about it?  Well first and foremost, Windows only.  As a Mac user, I once again feel like someone put me out in the cold.  Lack of any add-ons that I’ve come to love with Firefox is also missing, but if you were coming from Internet Explorer you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about anyway.  Dedicated search box is something I miss.  Why you ask, since Google answers all questions on it’s own?  Because it simply doesn’t.  I’ve been using a Firefox add-on called OpenSearchFox for more than a year now; it allows you to add a drop down in Firefox to search any site that has search enabled on it.  That means, rather than going to say Netflix and then searching, I can select Netflix from my drop down menu in the search bar and type in my query there.  My other gripe is the lack of a status bar.  I understand how important screen real estate is, but I like it, I’ve been using the status bar for more than 10 years in browsers, I’m used to it.  Lastly, Chrome doesn’t work with all websites yet.  One site that I order digital photos from requires a Java plugin, to upload the photos.  I have the plugin installed in Windows but the browser doesn’t pick it up.  I’m sure small kinks like this will iron themselves out but it’s still an inconvenience.

One of the most interesting Easter eggs is kind of a joke in Chrome.  In the address bar type about:internets – then sit back and chuckle, at least someone around the Google camp has a sense of humor.  Chrome is interesting, but it’s not a killer app for me yet, nor do I plan on switching.  For now, I will use it to beta test website design and other various things on the Internet but Firefox will continue to be my primary browser.

Random Posts

Google Chrome browser 1 week later originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

Download was very small; it then opens an applet and downloads the rest of the software.  Installation requires Firefox to be shut down so Chrome can import all your bookmarks, favorites, history and passwords; this goes quickly and rather painlessly.  Next you get a TOS about reporting options for crashes, I denied their request and the install was complete.

Upon launching Chrome for the first time an unusual question is asked, “Do you wish to keep Google as your default search engine?”   It’s unusual in that, it’s a Google product and the first thing about this new killer app is to strip out Search, the one thing Google does very, very well.  I selected to keep it.

All my bookmarks and history imported, what didn’t was my homepage.  I’m a long time iGoogle user and rely on the RSS feeds to get me caught up quickly at a glance to what is going on with the sites I follow.  Not there.  Instead six white boxes stare at me.  A little note tells you that these are your most visited sites.  Nice idea, but not for me.  I easily look at 50+ sites in six different tabs of iGoogle.  There is no apparent way to set a traditional “homepage” only what Google wants you to see.

The other thing lacking is an option to show the status bar.  I rely on the status bar while at work and home to see where any link will take my, by hovering over it.  There are also several add-ons for Firefox that sit in my status bar that I’ve come to love, from what I can tell in Chrome, there is no status bar option.

On the plus side, it is fast.  How fast?  I don’t have scientific numbers or pretty pie charts, but it really feels fast.  One site that I know uses a fairly common Java plugin to run an app wouldn’t work and there was no option to install it but everything else on the dozen or so sites I quickly browsed seem to work.

Is Chrome the next killer app?  Hard to say now, Firefox has such a loyal, loving fan base to it, but I think this could compliment it very well.

Random Posts

First 5-minute Impressions With Google Chrome originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

I set off to search for a plugin that would allow me to accomplish the goal of restricting access to the entire blog, forcing a registration.  After a few minutes I ended up on Viper007Bond’s site.  I’ve used his plugins before, so I knew they’d be top quality.  He wrote a custom plugin called Registered Users Only which, will redirect all users who aren’t logged in to the login form where they are shown a user-friendly message.

Perfect!  Upload the .php to the /plugin directory on your server, activate it and tick one box in the Options screen, you are done.  As admin to the blog, you create user accounts for those people you wish to give access to.  Since it uses the standard WordPress login screen and user database, you can simply add them as a Subscriber and once logged in, can see the entire site.

Total installation time is less than two minutes!

While the idea of putting a blog online is usually done so that someone will read it, this certain situation started to make a lot more sense to me.  WordPress offers so much more than just a blog, it’s turning into a CMS, and a tool to allow, in this case, his business to expand and grow internally.  The more I thought about it the more I realized that a private blog has many other uses to it.

Parents who want to setup a blog for their children, either from day 1 in their life or as they enter the tween stage probably won’t to protect who sees photos of their kids and what activities they do.

This plugin restricts ALL pages of the site, that is the only option.   This fits the goals of my friend and I think many other people.  Be aware, this does not protect your RSS feeds.  I would suggest deleting all RSS feeds from your WordPress install to fully protect your blog, if that is your goal.

Download from WordPress.org

Random Posts

Registered Users Only – WordPress Plugin originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

Switch is a multi-platform dead simple program to use.  Simply tell it where the directory of files lives that you want to convert, point it to the directory where you want them to end up (or the same one), along with what format you want them converted into and click a button.  I seriously wish more software was this easy to use.

On my core 2 duo Macbook with 2GB of RAM it took about 4 hours to convert 12 .wma files into 192 kb/s .mp3’s.  This isn’t a five-minute job to do, and I fully expected it to take some time, so plan ahead.

Sound quality, to my untrained ears was identical.

Ease of use for this multi-platform software, being able to handle dozens of file formats and being free means this small app will stay installed for some time.

Random Posts

Switch Audio File Conversion Software originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

Google is the killer app of this decade, no one is doubting that. It is so popular it has become a verb, people just say, “Can you Google this for me?” which is almost impossible to do with anything anymore. So what if a new search engine comes along and tries to flatten the playing field?

That is exactly what Cuil (pronounced Cool) is trying to do. They claim to index three times the number of sites Google does and display them in a three-across pattern. That alone is kind of unique for searches, as they have always gone vertically. They have also implemented tab searches, a kind of, well maybe if you were looking for camera you might also want to look for digital camera. The search engine works, that really isn’t a question, but why should I use it?

Google does so many things now, like simple and complex math problems, fast weather look-up, package tracking from UPS and other services, all the way to stock quotes and word definitions. For me, it has eliminated the need to go to specialized sites if I can just put a special query in the Google search bar in Firefox. Cuil is also missing an image search function, something even Microsoft and Yahoo have worked into their site.

Cuil has some cool features, like roll overs, drill-down menu’s and the tabbed feature mentioned earlier. They are taking on the proverbial 800 pound gorilla by going after Google too. My two cents say that Cuil will have a small cult following for a while but ultimately, this will only make Google stronger.

Random Posts

Cuil – The Google Killer? originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

This tiny Mac only piece of software will show you distance and angles shown your screen, perfect for web developers needing to know how wide something is to fit a proper graphic in. Prior to using this tool, I used to screen grab a site, open in Photoshop and then crop down to determine the distance. Now all of this is gone!

Anyone who does web or graphic design work should give PixelStick a try, and it’s totally for free. The only requirement is Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Random Posts

PixelStick Determines Distances on your Screen for Graphic Design originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

From what I can recall, the Google start page was launched into beta more than two years ago and it had no official name. I instantly started to use it as that is about the time I really started to fall in love with RSS feeds and wanted / needed a better way to keep track of them. Since launching, many of the bugs have been worked out and a slew of new improvements for the service, which is, at the heart, an RSS reader, yet deliver so much more.

The official name for the web service is iGoogle, although no one really seems to know why and to access it you must point your browser to google.com/ig. Using this service for more than two years, I feel I can give it a fair review because I use it every single day.

Layout: By default, iGoogle is three columns wide and seems to hold an unlimited number of feeds vertically. There are now more than a hundred different themes for the page to skin them however you’d like, some will change dynamically based on your zip code, for sunrise / sunset as well as rain / snow / sun. Across the top are tabs; these are separate screens to help keep you organized. For example, I use one for Home tab; these are feeds and gadgets I use most. I also keep separate feeds based on interests, having one specific to Art & Photography, another for Celebrity Gossip, and so on. These tabs, help me keep everything separated yet still really easy to find and use.

Appearance: As stated above, there are themes available to skin the homepage to fit your liking. I use different skins for each of my tabs; this helps me quickly identify which tab I’m on just by visual. Recently, they’ve added a whole slew of artist’s themes by some very famous people and opened up the API to allow others to create and submit themes.

Use: You need a Google account to use iGoogle, not a big deal if you use Gmail already. Once logged in, you can add any site’s RSS feed by clicking the RSS logo on that page or, if using Firefox, the RSS icon in the address bar. You’ll be prompted as to how you want to use the feed, choose iGoogle Home Page and it will be added. To arrange the feeds in the order you want, simply drag them around. To move them into a new tab, simply drag that feed to the new tab. This is, by far, one of the simplest layouts I’ve used. There are also options to expand and collapse feeds and designate how many posts from any given feed you want displayed, default is three. The one feature I really don’t use is the ability to expand any particular feed and read it on the homepage. I don’t do this because the columns are a bit too narrow if there are photos in the blog post, they often get cut of. My preference has always been to read a blog post on that particular blog anyway.

More: There is an Add Stuff button on the iGoogle page that will show you the most used RSS feeds and Gadgets. Gadgets are simply things like dynamic weather integrated in, Quote of the Day, stock tickers, Gmail integration, etc. Personally, the only gadget I’ve found useful is the weather, but I have several friends that use Netflix and eBay widgets religiously.

I’ve tried a few dedicated RSS readers and a few other start pages but I keep coming back to iGoogle for the ease of use, clean design and easy customization. My current start page has 5 tabs and more than 100 total fees. Within minutes I can scan all of them and checkout articles that I might be interested in reading.

Try: www.google.com/ig

Random Posts

iGoogle start page reviewed originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

• Internet fame
• Potential to make money from ads
• Obsessed with statistics
• Conceited
• Enjoying knowing someone is reading what you wrote
• Etc.

Most of us enjoy knowing that someone is reading what we as writers spent time and energy to write, the side effects of money and fame can be nice as well, but how to achieve? One simple way that I’ve found is to ask people to view your site. But how? Where? Relying on Google search results can take time and not everyone reads your MySpace bulletins or the tweets you obsessively send via Twitter, digg.com isn’t working that well and neither is Stumble Upon, and it may not be in your budget to buy ad space on a more popular site right now, so what can you do?

Email blog owners who have written similar articles and let them know about the one you wrote. Yes, it’s that simple. Don’t do this with every article you write, pick your very best and send the links to the biggest and best blogs out there. Don’t ask them to review your site or link to it, simply let them know you have written similar material that they or their readers might want to use and you like their site. Be honest and don’t make it sound cheesy.

How do you find people with similar articles? Try Google Blog Search and look for articles written in the last week or month. Does this really work? Absolutely. I used this technique last week, here’s what I did and the results from it.

They filmed part of the Transformers II movie in my town last week and some co-workers got behind the scenes photographs of the set and a video. They gave me permission to blog about it, which I promptly did. Next, I did a Google Blog Search for similar sites and found the Transformers Live Action Movie Blog, the owners email is displayed on the left sidebar. This is the email I sent him:

I saw you recently published an article & photos regarding Transformers 2… wanted to share with you one my recent articles with more photos and a video (with more videos being edited now for publication).

Thought your readers might enjoy these: http://www.randomn3ss.com/2008/06/05/exclusive-filming-of-transformers-2-photos-and-videos/

That’s it. Within a few hours, they published this article that contains a link to my site’s homepage and the direct link to the article. More than 1,000 unique visits came to that specific article over the following 12 hours from the Transformers Live Action Movie Blog. I’d call that a success.

I’ve used this technique sparingly as not to become a burden on anyone, seem pushy or ungrateful for what others have done for me. Using this method though, I have successfully had articles linking to my sites on Lifehacker.com, GetRichSlowly.org, and several other very well known high traffic blogs.

I’d love to hear about some success stories from people who give this a try. Not every email you send will have great results, but it does work. Keep an open mind too when a fellow blogger approaches you with an idea or to share content.

Random Posts

Get more traffic to your blog with 5 minutes of work originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

Random Posts

Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) bloggers are killing twitter originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

Lately, I’ve actually been really into twitter and have been following people left and right; in return I’m getting followed.  The trouble, in my eyes, is that twitter’s search tool for finding relevant people is far from good.

Welcome to Summize.  It allows you to search, in real time, people’s tweets.  This is really cool if you are looking to meet people who tweet on topics that you are into.  I actually found out about Summize from someone who started to follow me, based on thinks I tweet about.

It’s a fast, simple site that allows you to meet and follow all kinds of new and creative people on twitter.  I’d also like to throw out an invite for everyone to follow me at, http://twitter.com/mikepanic.

Random Posts

Search Twitter in real time with Summize originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

The problem is comment spam.  These are comments that are left on articles that usually point to some website that tells you how she’d like you to be thicker and longer lasting, or how to find a great deal on your next new car.  Nothing of value, in face, these types of comments detract from the credibility of your content and worse, possibly lead to your readers leaving from clicking on a bogus link.  There is help.

Shortly after one particular article got bombarded with tons of traffic from several social bookmarking and networking sites at once, the comment spam started to roll in.  Using WordPress, my preferred platform for blogging, I set out to find some sort of Captcha system to add to blog posts to help cut down on the spam.  Generally speaking, I don’t like anything that interferes with a users experience, but this plug-in is a must have.

Did you pass math? adds a small math question to the bottom of your comment box, above the submit button.  It prompts the commentator to do a very simple math equation, like 7+3= [fill in the answer].   The plug-in can be found here: http://www.herod.net/dypm/ – and while it hasn’t been updated in two years, I don’t see that as a problem, it simply works.  To install it, simply download to your computer from their site, unzip the files and upload [via FTP] two PHP files (English is default, but support is there for dozens more).  Login to the admin section of WordPress, activate the plugin and you are done.

Since installing the Did you pass math plug-in, my comment spam has been near completely eliminated.  As an added bonus, there was zero negative feedback and no backlash from the my readers after installing.  Some even thanked me for not using a true Captcha system, since they can often be very hard to read.  My suggestion would be to install this when first setting up a blog, so you aren’t in a situation like me, trying to fix a broken problem while it is being broken even harder.

Random Posts

Did You Pass Math? A Simple WordPress Comment Anti-spam Plugin originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook