Archive for: Web Apps
Connecting our websites with social networks is one of the easiest ways to increase our popularity. ShareSideBar can help us in a great way, completely free and in one step we can create a sidebar for our site with all the common social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Delicio.us, Digg, Buzz, Reddit and Stumbleupon.
The most common use of providing visitors an easy way to share our website is adding links in our home page to all of the networks; certainly a more effective is using a sidebar in our website with a permanent and visible links. ShareSideBar creates for us the necessary code ready to be added in our website.
We can choose if we want the sidebar on the right or left side of the page, and the social networks we would like to use in the sidebar. This web app is completely free and does not require any registration.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software is not all that common and applications rarely include this service included, FreeOCR is a free web app which will allow us to easily extract text from images and even PDF files.
Not only free, FreeOCR is really simple to use: Access the site, click browse for selecting the image you would like to extract the text and just wait for a few seconds. No registration required.
FreeOCR has some limitations about the service: We can upload files up to 2MB, only 10 images per hour, and for PDF files, the text extracted will be only for the first page.
As you all know, PDF files are very static documents, and there’s no easy way to edit them, even more if the owner created some restrictions like printing. PDFUnlock! it’s a simple web app which allows us to remove these restrictions for free.
PDFUnlock! can remove normal restrictions from PDF files but does not removes user passwords, so if you have a password protected PDF, you will need it for using this app.
You can upload files up to 10MB. You just need to access the web site, click “Browse” to select the PDF you will like to use, and within a few seconds you’ll have it available for download.
Choosing the right name for your domain can be really tricky, most likely because the names you want are not available or because you want a cool name but not sure how to spell it. But how do you feel if I show you a web app that can do all the thinking and name validations for you? Meet Wordoid.
Yes, Wordoid simply taking a word you would like to use starts digging around domains available and finds the right name for you. The interesting thing about it is that we can select if we want the domain name to “sound natural” in the language we decide (English, Spanish, French, Italian and German available); if we want the keyword to be used in the end of the name or not and even the wordoid length.
Take a look to this example using the keyword “geek” in English. Here are some of the domains that are available: regugeeks.com, damageeks.com, figeeky.com, youngeeks.com, etc.
I wonder how long the domain refugeeks.com will be available…
WobZip is a very useful web app which we can use to simply upload a compressed file, considering all common formats (including ISO), and the web app will do all the work: Uncompress and scan for virus.
Did you ever receive a compressed file in a computer which didn’t have, for example, WinRAR? If that was a .rar file you know that you did not have any other option but download the tool to access those files. WobZip avoids using any software, just access the site, upload and download the uncompressed files.
Here are some of the features:
- Completely free.
- Antivirus scan included. BitDefender engine.
- 100MB file size supported.
- Formats: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZHCHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS
- You can uncompress a file from your computer or directly from a URL.
Even though this is an amazing and free tool, still is a little buggy.
Massive social networks like Twitter demands, for normal users and companies, not only using it but also maintain several accounts, publishing a lot of information and also brand monitoring. For that, SplitTweet is the tool.
SplitTweet is a simple and free web app which will provide you a single place to handle several Twitter accounts with all the necessary information of each: Replies, direct messages, favorites and the most important one brand mentions features, which experts in social media can use it to monitor the behavior and popularity of their brands.
SplitTweet also provides a simple dashboard where you can monitor all the important activity around your accounts. Another important feature of this web app is the possibility to automatically tweet the same in several accounts.
It also have a Desktop App for Mac.
Fileminx is a completely simple and free web app which you can use to convert files directly, without the need of registering, filling any form or downloading any software or add-in.
Fileminx takes most common type of files document, video, music and image. Besides being completely free, the steps involved are really simple:
1. Access Fileminx website and select your file (up to 50MB).
2. Select the format you would like to change the file. The selection, of course, varies depending on the file you just uploaded.
In my case, a Word file can be converted to PDF, TXT, RTF, OpenOffice format, etc.
3. Processing…
4. Done! Just download the new and converted file.
Simple as that, this web app represents a perfect fit for most cases, when you need a fast option for conversion.
Page.ly created a very interesting infographic about WordPress numbers. We may find some obvious numbers in this graphic, but I’m pretty sure you will find some cool facts about the most famous blog engine available.
Here are some of the facts:
- WordPress holds up to 8.5% of the entire CMS population.
- Akismet spam service caught over 17 billion of spam messages (with 18 million averages per month).
- Over 1200 free themes available in WordPress.com
- “All in one SEO pack” is the most popular plugin with nearly 6 million downloads.
- New York Times, Pepsi, TechCrunch, BlackBerry, National Geographic are some of the top sites which are using WordPress.
- WordPress 3 has nearly 14 million downloads and still counting.
Take a look to the infographic here (full size image):
Do you actually remember who your first follower was? And your first tweet? Well you don’t need to test your memory; MyFirstTweet and FirstFollower will do the job for you.
Any of these two simple web apps does not require connecting with your Twitter account to retrieve this information, just use your Twitter name and the result will be available in just a few seconds.
MyFirstTweet web app currently is showing a disclaimer about the use of it: “This is working intermittently at the moment. I think the site hasn’t quite cleared Twitter’s whitelist yet. If you put in your twitter username I’ll save it and run it when things are running again. Sorry about that.”
In my case I didn’t have any problem running it.
Oh and in case you are interested, there’s also a section with the “earliest tweets”.
Envolve created and offers for all web admins and companies who are trying to push up their web sites the way of integrating Facebook-like chat functionalities.
Facebook is making a large impact in the world, no news there; social networks and sociability is changing, also the market and possibilities around there. Windows Live Messenger had a big impact a while ago because the popularity of Facebook: People prefer the Facebook chat instead of using Microsoft’s application.
Envolve offers the service to use in your site similar chat functionalities used in Facebook for your visitors. Even more, Envolve service delivers also some extra functionality we don’t find specifically in Facebook’s chat:
Real-time translation. For chatting with people in a different language.- Shareable chats. Each chat has a custom short URL. Friends and followers can use it to join in or view the chat later.
- Statistics. View real-time statistics and read old chats that have occured on your website.
- Private and public chats.
- Drag-n-drop. To invite another user to a chat — public or private — simply drag-and-drop their name or picture into the desired chat window.
As we said, this is a service provided for Envolve and no, it is not free. The pricing depends on how many visitors currently have: Starts with a “basic” plan at U$S7 per month (up to 5K visitor per month); and the “platinum” plan at U$S89 per month (handling over 100K visitors).
More info about pricing here.
