Category: Blogging

QuarkBase – Find everything about a website

Posted by Dickey on Sep 8th, 08 | Filed under Blogging, Internet, Tips, Web 2.0 | View Comments

QuarkBase is a powerful tool, which can “dig” everything about a website. For example, you can get the WHOIS information, traffic ranking, social popularity, total feed readers, and also the blogging platform (if the website that you traing to check is a blog).

To get information about a website, simply provide the domain name and press the “Search” button. I try to search for “techsnack.net” and below is the screenshot of the summary of my blog:

At the rught hand site, it will show you the domain owner, summary of the website, alexa ranking, and also the blogging platform that you are using.

There are also some tabs at the top of the page, which will bring you more details of the website information. For example, the Intro tab will show you the introduction of your blog, your blog description, about and contact page.

The Popular tab will show the social popularity while the Traffic tab will show the details of alexa ranking. The Technical tab shows you the framwork and programming language that had been used to create your website. You may also get hosting information through this tab.

QuarkBase

Mloovi – Translate RSS to your language

Posted by Dickey on Aug 14th, 08 | Filed under Blogging, Cool Stuff, Internet, Web 2.0 | View Comments

Mloovi is a RSS blog translator tool which can translate any RSS feed into 24 languages using Google Translate.

Simply provide the RSS feed URL to Mloovi, and choose the language that you want Mloovi translate to. You will then get the result in your favorite language.

Beside viewing the RSS feed in your language, Mloovi also let users to subscribe them by providing the translated RSS feed URL. Copy the new URL and subcribe through your favorite feed reader.

Mloovi

Webslug – Measure and compare the websites loading time

Posted by Dickey on Jul 14th, 08 | Filed under Blogging, Internet, Tips | View Comments

Website loading time is alway a concern for both web developers and designers. Webslug is a tool for them to quickly measure and compare different websites loading time.

We want our websites load fast, so that visitors no need to wait for a long time before can read our contents. normally, users will only wait for arround 20 seconds before the contents finish loading, unless your websites contains really interesting articles.

So, it is really important for designers to take care the loading time before publish the design. There are a lot of websites which can measure the loading time, but today i am going to introduce Webslug, which is able to compare the loading time for 2 diferent websites.

To compare the loading time, simply type the web URL to the textboxes provided and press “Compare“. The result shown that Google take2.28 seconds to load while Yahoo take 6.13 seconds. You can also measure the loading time for a single website by following the “just test one oage” link.

Webslug

WriteToMyBlog – Your alternate web based blog editor

Posted by Dickey on Jul 10th, 08 | Filed under Blogging, Internet, Web 2.0 | View Comments

WriteToMyBlog is a web based word editor which support publish blog entries to various platform.

This cool editor let users to write post without logging to their panel, and post the same blog posts to different blogging platform. The editor seems like having more features than what Wordpress provided.

It is totally free to use the service. As usual, you need to provide your blog post’s title and content. After that you can publish the post within the website.

Here, you can provide up to 3 blog accounts, which means you can publish your post to 3 accounts at the same time. They support Wordpress.com, Wordpress self host, Blogger.com, TypePad, Movable Type, and DotClear.

WriteToMyBlog also comes with spell checker, which is a must tool for every bloggers.

WriteToMyBlog

Embed others’ feed to your blog easily with Feed Source

Posted by Dickey on Jul 8th, 08 | Filed under Blogging, Cool Stuff, Internet, Web 2.0 | View Comments

If you have more that one website, wondering how to put each other feeds on them? Feed Source is a service which easily integrate others’ feed on your blog.

There are a lot of methods to put other feeds to your website. For example, you can use Google’s API to do so. But, most of the methods require some basic PHP/Javascript coding, which is not suitable for non-programmers.

But, non-programmers can use Feed Source, which is a free service to integrate feeds on your blog.

Simply provide your feed URL and then customize the color and text. Press the Update Example button to view the example output. After you done, copy the code and then paste it to your blog.

Feed Source

3 Services which deliver RSS to your mailbox

Posted by Dickey on Jun 28th, 08 | Filed under Blogging, Cool Stuff, Internet, Web 2.0 | View Comments

There are a lot of websites which contains handy tools for users to manage RSS subscribtion. Today i would like to introduce some web services which will deliver RSS straight to your mailbox.

I had cover a lot of RSS articles before, which mainly focus on how to filter RSS or create feed for websites which don’t provide RSS service. Although FeedBurner let users to subscribe through email, but there are some alternatives beside FeedBurner.

Send Me RSS

Sendmerss.com is a service which help users organize and send their favorite contents straight to the mailbox. To subscribe through email, simply provide the RSS URL and your email address. They even provide a widget for bloggers to embedded into their blogs. The widget’s design is very attractive, and it just needs a single step to subscribe through the widget.

RSS FWD

To subscribe through RSS FWD, simply provide the RSS URL and choose your delivery preferences. After that, you can preview the looks of the RSS mail before you confirm to subscribe.

RSS2Email

RSS2Email is a Russian service, and i can’t read the words. But, it is very simple to subscribe through RSS2Email. Simple provide the RSS URL at the first textbox and your email at the second textbox and hit the button.

Send Me RSS | RSS FWD | RSS2Email

Page2RSS – Create feed for any website

Posted by Dickey on May 23rd, 08 | Filed under Blogging, Cool Stuff, Internet, Web 2.0 | View Comments

Page2RSS is a cool service which can let us to create RSS feed for any website, which do not publish feeds. It will automatically monitor and check any websites for upgrades and deliver them to your RSS aggregator.

I had cover a Firefox extension that can monitor any websites upgrade, and will inform you to read the new content. Now, Page2RSS is a more powerful service which can create feeds for websites that do not publish feeds.

Just type-in the URL that you interest and hit “to RSS”, Page2RSS will then convert the content of that URL to RSS feed and you can subscribe it useing any RSS reader. There are some similar services such as dapper, and Ponyfish, but Page2RSS is the most simplest service among them.

You can click on the www.google.com link to see the Google feed created by Page2RSS. Page2RSS provide a javascript bookmarklet button for users to easily convert any web content into feed.

Note: Not all page can be converted into RSS feed. You can use the bookmarklet button to quickly know whether the page can be converted to RSS feed or not.

Page2RSS

Hellotxt – Send messages to popular micro-blogging services

Posted by Dickey on May 9th, 08 | Filed under Blogging, Internet, Web 2.0 | View Comments

Hellotxt is an aggregated messaging system which will let user compose and send message to all registered micro-blogging services at one time.

If you use more than one micro-blogging services, you may lazy to update them one by one. With the help of Hellotxt, you can update all micro-blogs at the same time, without sending one-by-one.

Currently, Hellotxt supports Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo. You need to provide your micro-blogs’ username and password when you select to update them.

HelloTxt

SocialScan – Webmaster tool for checking link popularity

Posted by Dickey on May 8th, 08 | Filed under Blogging, Internet, Web 2.0 | View Comments

SocialScan let webmaster check a link popularity among well known social sites.

It is important for every webmasters/bloggers to check their sites’ popularity among well known social sites. If your score is high, that means you will get a lot of traffic everyday.

To use SocialScan, simply enter your URL and hit enter. The system will automatically get the ranking from social sites and return results for you.

Note: If your scores is low, don’t give up. You may still get good traffic from search engine even you don;t score high ranking in social sites.

SocialScan

mooColorFinder – Find all colors used by a website

Posted by Dickey on May 6th, 08 | Filed under Blogging, Cool Stuff, Design, Internet, Web 2.0 | View Comments

mooColorFinder can search through the CSS files for any color used in that website, as long as a website specifies its CSS styles W3C conform.

Simply type in the website address and hit enter. After that you will get a screenshot of the website, including all colors used and its color code.

The above screenshot show the result of colors used in this page. mooColorFinder also provide an API for users to display the color cloud on their page.

mooColorFinder

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