Archive for the ‘Web Apps’ Category
VaultPress is a new web app tool (beta stage) that will shield and protect your WordPress blog, providing some interesting backup and restore features; and also maintaining the security of your site.
VaultPress offers a complete backup solution for your entire blog: articles, database, files, images and more. Giving you the chance whenever a disaster occurs, a fast and reliable restore can be executed. Also VaultPress will be in charge of monitoring the blog health against any possible security risks, applying the last updates.
Another remarkable point is that the people in charge of developing and maintaining VaultPress built it using the automatic grid from which over 10 million blogs from WordPress.com rely on.
VaultPress is only available as a private beta for now, and when the final version is released, this will be a paid service (around U$S15 or U$S20).
If you were wondering about a free possibility, we’ve already evaluated BlogBackupr.
Have you ever been curious about your hosting service? Have you ever wondered “what kind of machine is holding up my website”? Well, you are going to love this one: phpSysInfo retrieves an incredible amount of information from the hosting server.
And when I say incredible, I mean INCREDIBLE. Running this PHP it will automatically bring the following information from the server:
- Processor model, type and speed.
- RAM and the amount currently used.
- Operating system.
- Number of hard drives and present RAID configurations.
- Partitions and mounted filesystem free space.
- Number of process running and their status.
- Hardware temperature and voltage.
- Network usage.
- And even more!
This script runs on any site where PHP is enable, it only requires PHP 5.2 version or higher. And the output options are: static content, XML or update it dynamically. Plus, you can get different themes to use it.
The phpSysInfo site have ready a demonstration of their script running on their server. Check it out here.
Did I mention it’s completely free to download?
Enjoy!
Many of you have probably had a moment where you wanted to quote a favorite line from a movie, but couldn’t quite get the wording right. A site called AnyClip can help.
AnyClip provides a growing directory of movies in which the user can search for a specific movie and find a list of major scenes and the lines in them. Or you could just type in the quote, and AnyClip will bring up related dialogue. Then, if you’re looking at a scene that you really like, you can also click on a tag and see scenes that have the same tag. And if that scene spurs you to think, “Boy, I really want to watch that movie again,” AnyClip has links for buying or renting the movie from retailers like iTunes.
AnyClip now has 5,000 quotes and tags from 2,000 of the top-growing films, and it plans to add another 3,000 by the end of the next quarter.
Tumblr is a very simple blogging platform in which users can make a blog in minutes. Tumblr is the perfect tool for users who want to have a blog with photos, videos, and other content embedded, but simply hasn’t got the time or the will to struggle with a complex blogging platform.
How is this working out for them? Well, according to the neat infographic which they’ve sent us (see below), their traffic and user base is growing fast, and they’ve recently hit some major milestones.
Microsoft’s search engine Bing, that offers 41 different languages, just removed and banned from the Arabic language search any sexual related term.
A very complete report made from Open Net Initiative where they describe about the words that have been tested in Arabic and English languages from Bing. Here’s a summary:
You are probably thinking that since the religion that prevails in most of the countries in Middle East is Islamic (and some variations), it could sound normal that Microsoft was obligated to remove sexual and explicit content; but the restriction also applies for other countries like India, Turkey, Thailand, China, Malaysia and Singapore.
There’s always going to be a lot of discussion regarding to sexual content available on the internet, restricting content over the web, religions involved, etc. etc. But someone actually starts thinking if any of these measures actually solves anything? Banning these words would prevent from any kid to access some of unrated material?
“Yeah I don’t feel like scrolling down my contact list, I just want to scribble a letter and let the phone do the rest”. I guess that was the original idea when they’ve started developing the Android gesture search.
And the functionality is as simple as that, just scribble a letter in your Google phone and Android will recognize the letter as an input, and you’ll get the result. Here’s a little sample:
This feature will be available on Android 2.0 or higher. And the gesture search will work not only with contacts, but you can find applications, bookmarks, music, etc.
Also the system has some interesting features:
- If you type a letter that looks like a different letter, the search result will consider both possible letters.
- The system is prepared to learn from every time you search, and your selection will appear jump to the top of the list the next time you try the same search.
I was sceptical when I first heard about this new web app. The ability to track airplanes in real-time? Surely it would only track a handful, have plenty of bugs and not live up to expectation at all. I was wring.
Casper, which is set up as a demo on the website, shows you the movements of all airplanes coming and going from Schiphol airport in the Netherlands and flights over Dutch airspace. However, the program can be calibrated for any airport using an ADS-B receiver which can be bought from many hobby shops and online. The program will then interpret this information and display all flights relating to that airport. You could do this yourself at home.
The program is really light weight as it uses Google Maps to run and works really well. This is definitely a great app for all aviation enthusiasts and those interested in a little bit of fun.
The Internet has pretty much revolutionised fitness and healthy living. It has both busted many myths and crated some. With all the crosswinds of information available, an inevitable vortex has been created leading to a lot of confusion. Most people don’t know how many carbohydrates they should take in or why. Well SimpleFit is a new web app which aims to change all that in a simple, minimalistic way.
Firstly, you tell the app what kind of routine you’re looking for and in put some information about yourself. It will then churn out a fitness plan which is quite basic at the start and increases in its difficulty as the weeks and months progress. You can see a sample one below.
You are encouraged to log into the service to record your achievements and workouts and also to see what lies ahead for you the next day. All of your results and stats are recorded on the site and can be viewed in numerous forms such as graphically below.
For anyone trying other fitness apps which don’t seem to be working out, you should give SimpleFit a go to see if simplicity works for you.
Over the past year or so, there has been much talk about paid subscriptions coming into effect for some of the bigger websites. Undoubtedly, this will begin to work its way down the scale. Hopefully this will improve web content and keep some faith in media which democracies rely on. So, what if your website needs a subscription service to keep afloat?
Well you could spend thousands of dollars getting in developers to set one up for you or you could use Recurly. This is a service which will enable your users to subscribe to your blog, pay their fee each month and thus have access. There is no need for your to manage or oversee anything once it’s set up as Recurly will handle all new subscriptions, fees, payments, outstanding bills and customer support.
You can also either embed the service seamlessly on your site using their API or have your subscription redirect to their site.
It is free for the first fifty subscribers and after that you can either pay a flat monthly fee or give Recurly a small percentage of your revenue intake. For bigger publications, the flat fee will work out best. So if you’re looking for a way to set up a paid subscription for your blog or website in just a few minutes, check out Recurly here.
ECwid is a web app which allows you to easily create your own store which you can integrate within your website in minutes. Basically, it’s like Amazon Associates (mostly because it’s powered by Amazon) except this has much better easy-to-use tools installed and is also easier to use for novice users when it comes to integrating your ecommerce store within your website.
Once you have created an account you just select what products you would like in your store, tailor the layout and colour scheme to your tastes and then click ‘Finish’. You’ll then be given HTML coding which you can copy and paste into a page on your website to embed the store. This will then act as your very own store on your website as though your developed and integrated it yourself.
The program also allows you to track invoicing, customers, accounts and other such important data to see how your store is getting on and how it can be improved.
