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QuoteURL

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:45:49 +0000

Still using Twitter? To be honest, I discovered a few interesting people using it so far, and more than enough spammers – or simply people I have nothing in common with. Should I start taking it seriously? Nope, no way, but as long as it may help some of you, I’ll get back to it from time to time, and today’s the right moment to talk about QuoteURL, an interesting replacement to the original script allowing interactive tweet embedding, but this time a Web-based solution (no coding required, so it surely works for me!).

If you missed the script from Twitter I just mentioned, you could take a look here, while a detailed article about using it can be found on Mashable, but if you’re really in a hurry, I think you should jump straight to QuoteURL and get busy!

The official mumbo-jumbo goes like this: “QuoteURL helps you group different Twitter updates from different people into a single page that has a permanent URL. So you can put it on your blog or send interesting conversations to friends.” Demo is available here, and… I guess that’s all, folks!

Compatibility: all major browsers, obviously

Blockster

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:26:04 +0000

Sometimes, I really want to kill the people behind sites with multimedia content. Fortunately, it’s about those sites with loud background music starting automatically, and no obvious Mute button. When it comes to slideshows and animated banners, I usually have nothing against them. Hey, I even enjoy such things, as long as I get to see some useful content around, too!

Blockster can help those working on a website to easily create featured content sliders that offer a wide range of transition effects. This is a free and really small piece of code, having only 2.6kb and requiring Javascript. To be honest, I have no idea about the license type, since there’s no such info available on the official page, but since code is available… I am sure you can email the author for details, in case you want to mess with it in some way!

Blockster is highly customizable, thanks to HTML/CSS code, just as you were probably expecting. The ZIP package includes the code available for the examples on the official page and… that’s all, I guess! Have fun with it and… in case you want to add some sound to your site (I know there’s no real connection with today’s subject), please don’t make it start automatically, all right? Thank you very much!

GTmetrix

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 11 May 2010 07:49:55 +0000

Remember Load Impact? It doesn’t really matter if you don’t, but if you do, you can forget about it! The reason is today’s topic, another free Web-based speed analyzer for your site. As you probably know, it’s official – Google is taking speed into account when awarding search rankings, so… you must know where’s your site spinning, right?

GTMetrix uses two analyzing engines from the big ones in the industry, namely Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow, providing enough information to know how’s your site moving when compared to the average values. All you have to do is enter the name of your site and press the “Go” button, but…

… only after you’ll get a free account you’ll gain access to all the goodies, including scheduling of daily/weekly/monthly automated checks, reporting capabilities, tests history and more. These being said… I have nothing more to add but the usual compatibility check part.

Comparability: all major browsers, including Chrome, Opera, IE8 and Firefox (please drop a comment below if you face any kind of problems with any Web browser, no matter how exotic it may be)

Chubby Twitters

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 09:38:50 +0000

When something becomes really popular on the Web, there’s always something good about it, no matter how bad could be the popular thing by itself (think about “two girls one cup” and the videos showing people’s reactions to it, for example). While I can’t say I am in love with Twitter, I have a Twitter account that I use from time to time (that meaning “almost monthly”) and checking out backgrounds and icons for this microblogging service was always something to enjoy.

Considering the above, Chubby Twitters is one those “nice accessories for the beast,” since Twitter doesn’t get more useful thanks to them, but this icons set surely will make your day a bit brighter. As you can see in the image above, we’re talking about 6 Twitter bird icons, and the unseen technical parts go like this: PNG format, available in three resolutions – 64 x 64, 96 x 96, and 128 x 128 pixels.

Designed exclusively for Onetraxpixel by Wong Lexin, this icons set can be downloader from here. I don’t know about you, but I really love them – they are blue, they are fun and, to make everything even more interesting, freely available! What else could you want? Yes, indeed, I would like to see Twitter becoming really useful… but that’s something six funny icons can’t help me with, unfortunately…

StripGenerator

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:00:27 +0000

It seems too much time has passed since we talked about online pattern, texture, or even button generators, and today I will try to add one more item to this large category of online design elements generators. Sure, some may say there’s nothing special about such tools, and they may even be right, but they should also admit that, at least sometimes, it’s better to play with some already-made elements, instead of looking on Google Images for the right thing… and then figure out the size is completely wrong, or that they bumped into a licensed image!

Since we had quite a few texture/pattern generators here in the past, today I’ll point you to a tool that you don’t get to bump into every day, because StripGenerator can help you create… your own comic strips! Yeah, that’s right, and you can even get started without creating an account, just open the website, press that big red button saying “Create a new strip,” and then mess with the tools at your disposal – how cool can this be? Pretty cool, I tell you!

More than creating your own cartoons, you can browse the ones created by other people, and I must admit some of them are really good, especially considering the tools at your disposal, which have their limitations, in my opinion. Anyway, I am not a graphics designer, I only messed with this field for a while, so I don’t think I’ll have any decent work done with StripGenerator anytime soon, but I’m sure some of you will be able to do that, so go ahead and give it a try, will you? Just remember to get back here and link back to your work, so we could enjoy it, too!

Load Impact

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:55:05 +0000

As far as I can remember, we never talked about Load Impact and, to be honest, I can’t recall ever seeing this excellent resource… until now. Since I happened to bump into such a useful tool, I thought you also have to know a few things about it, because every site owner or Web developer working on a site dream about huge amounts of traffic, but I am also sure they have nightmares about too much of it!

More than just a website testing tool, Load Impact is a whole package of tools, with a pretty solid set of them freely available. The main test, available right from the home page of the site, allows you to test how well the server hosting your site can handle large amounts of traffic. After all, it’s better to find this way that 10k visitors in 15 minutes can kill your server, instead of doing it the hard way… Just think about the frustration of finally making it to Digg’s front page and seeing your server “go down in flames” 3 minutes later!

My final hint for you is this – check the Page Analyzer section, there are plenty of goodies to be had for free there, including emulation of most popular browsers for page loading tests, without leaving Chrome 1/2/3/4 or Safari 3/4 and other smaller players aside. Sweet!

Oh, yeah – you can only simulate the activity of up to 50 concurrent users on your site for free, but if you pay… you can break all the limits! It only remains to be seen if your server can do that, too…

Services Editor

Adrian — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:59:51 +0000

Windows Operating System is the most used operating system today. Unfortunately people forget you can get alot more speed from the system by editing what Services are running. Let`s say you don`t have a printer. This way you don`t need the print service running. Stopping services requires knowledge about each one to prevent stopping an important service.

To do this in a safe way you can install an application like Ashampoo Winoptimizer or Tuneup Utilities or you can do it online using Services Editor website. ServicesEditor.com allows users to quickly run down a list, choose what action they want for the service and then download a quick and easy registry file which updates their PC’s running services!

Service manager website is one of the easiest way to quickly edit the services that run on your computer. Service manager is made with the slogan “safety first”. You can’t disable services which may result in the loss of data. Although you should read up about each service before you edit it’s default action you can use the online service manager for an easy way to mass edit your Windows services. Unlike the Windows default service editor you can edit what services you run all at once and then get a registry file to quickly download and run.

Compatibility: Service Editor is compatible with Windows Xp, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Browsershots

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:03:45 +0000

Creating a site isn’t that hard, but making it work properly on a few dozen different browsers, and most of them, with different behaviors depending on the operating system… now, that’s art! Since installing a few operating systems and running all those browsers to test your pages would really be a productivity killer, please let me show you something that’s going to make your life a lot easier…

… and that “something” has a very suggestive name: Browsershots. The idea behind it? Just go to the site using any browser you want, enter the address of a site you want to test, select the browsers and platforms you want to see screenshots for, and then wait. Be sure that it’s going to take a lot of time to see your screenshots if you select all available options, so choose only what you really need!

In the end, you should get to see how your site looks in Opera 10, IE 5-6-7-8, Firefox 3.5, but also in less popular browsers, like Minefield, K-Meleon or Shiretoko. Even more, I think this site could prove to be useful to those looking to get some inspiration… so step forward and get some browser shots, will ya?

Compatibility: any major browser, of course (you’ll encounter the minor ones inside Browsershots, anyway…)

slideViewer

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 06:41:49 +0000

One of my morning “rituals” includes jumping around the house, having some fruits, and then checking email/news, as well as spending a few peaceful moments enjoying some images, usually professional pictures of fruits/vegetables/remote places. No need to get into detail more than that, but I am sure you’ll agree with me that a site for those who have similar habits would be nice, as long as you have enough images that you can freely use and the right script to display them…

… but if you don’t have any script in mind yet, don’t worry, because that’s the topic I had in mind all along: slideViewer, a lightweight jQuery plugin that got its last update in mid-January 2009. Current version is 1.1, and its purpose is to help you create a
nice image gallery without giving you a headache.

While it doesn’t have more advanced features like automatic image resizing (all images you’ll add must have the same size!) or fancy looking slideshows, slideViewer gets the job done pretty well, allowing you to customize various aspects of the animation and tooltips displayed.

Since there are plenty of code examples and a demo (don’t forget that you need jQuery 1.2.1 and jQuery easing.1.2 to run slideViewer without running into problems) on the official page and my morning “ritual” is already over, I think I’ll stop here, leaving my image gallery watching for another day and move on…

Compatibility: any major browser, as long as JavaScript works properly

myFontbook

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:10:12 +0000

When talking about font collections, I have plenty of them. The only problem is that I have to check my CDs and DVDs catalogue to find the locations of those archived font collections. To make things even more interesting, I have at least a dozen archives on different disks, so… Web-based services like myFontbook are clearly better than my old-fashioned approach!

To go straight to the demo mode, just click here. Pretty cool, don’t you think? Even more, you can register for a free account, and you will also get some extra features, especially the ability to tag & categorize your fonts and find them easier in the future!

Additional features allow you to display a custom text in the preview area, and you also get a gylphs view pane for quickly scanning characters and symbols. At last, there’s also the font metrics view, which shows guides for the text baseline, default kerning, and median height. Sure, you can even print your fonts with a single click, but let’s not reveal it all, shall we?

Compatibility: any major browser, but beware – script blockers may cause various problems!