Down for everyone, or just me?

June 15, 2011 by

Have you ever had trouble accessing a website and wondered whether it was your computer or the site that was causing the problem? I know I have, and I’m never sure whether it’s my connection or not. When this happens to you, the site Down For Everyone Or Just Me? can help with your diagnostics.

There’s every likelihood that you’ve head of this site before – it’s not new – but it’s worth bringing to your attention despite that as it’s very useful.

Just visit the site, enter the address of the site you want to check, and hit enter… and you’ll either be told that the site is down or whether “it’s just you”.

So next time you’re tempted to ask on Twitter, “Is Mashable down?”, check Down For Everyone Or Just Me? first. You might find your answer more quickly.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: ,

Home improvement – making it easy with mobile apps

April 25, 2011 by

This is a guest post by Drew Davies

It’s that time of year again and whether you’re spring cleaning or doing a major revamp, your smart phone can help you take the pain factor out of your DIY. From mixing your own paint palette to calculating exactly how much concrete you’ll need to construct a wall (or an entire house), there is an app to help you out; planning, budgeting, room layout, interior design, technical calculations and installations, shopping lists and project management are all covered.

The scope and emphasis across these apps varies. Proprietary tools, such as B&Q’s free iPhone app, offer ‘How to’ guides for technical jobs, store finders, wish lists and special offers, while others provide forums, articles by guest contributors and space for users to display their interior designs and other handiwork.

Here are some of our favourites:

  • Wiki How (iPhone, Free) – Offering a wide range of tips from “How to Clean Your Bedroom” to “How to Have Fun with your Cat”. There’s a search function, a “How to of the day” and most interestingly, a Survival Kit with advice on Animal Attacks, First Aid and Home Emergencies.
  • DIY Chatroom Forum (iPhone, Android, Free) – An app-based forum to discuss all your Home Improvement questions – from carpentry to flooring and DIY repair. The community seems knowledgable and good-humoured (see the response to “how to get tape off the wall” for a more tongue-in-cheek reply to a question) and although it’s a little US-centric (lots of talk of broken range cookers) this is a great way to crowdsource an answer to your difficult DIY issue.
  • HomeRoutines (iPhone, £2.99) – More of a productivity app, this brightly coloured scheduler allows you to add tasks by time of day, time of week or zone (such as kitchen or bathroom) which makes it especially useful for home repairs. There’s also an Accomplishments section for you to reflect back proudly on the day’s achievements (and maybe show your significant other).
  • Big Yellow Space Kit (iPhone, Free) – Should you need to move items out of the way while a room – or even your entire home – undergoes transformation, a self storage unit could provide the answer. Help is at hand in the form of this app, which features a cunning room layout tool (which you can populate with furniture), a paint calculator and storage archiver.
  • Dream Home (iPhone, iPad, £1.19) – A look book for people trying to decide on a new colour or style for a room, this app offers full color inspiration images. You can upload photos of your own home and, while it would have been nicer if the images were retina display, it comes with a great range of styles. This is a fun app to use in bed when you’re trying to prove a point about minimalist lines accentuating a modern bathroom. There’s also a Dream Home Spring version of the app, if you’re so inclined.

OK, so we’ve shared our favourites. Now over to you. Are there any mobile apps you have found useful when thinking about home improvement? Or have you tried some of the apps above and want to share what you think? As ever, tell us your thoughts in the comments.

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Convert your documents for free with CometDocs

January 31, 2011 by

Every now and again you’ll have to perform an annoying task. Maybe you have a word document that you want to distribute, but you don’t want people to be able to edit it. The best solution is to convert it to PDF, the widely readable format created by Adobe. While more recent versions of Word can do this, there are still plenty of people rocking older versions that lack the ability. So, what do you do?

CometDocs is a suite of converters, allowing you to convert  a variety of formats to PDF and back again. You’re not limited to working with Word, but can convert Publisher, PowerPoint, Excel and CAD files too, as well as converting PDFs to HTML.

It’s fairly obvious that the free converters are there as a loss-leader to entice users to buy Able2Extract, a piece of desktop conversion software. However, on the occasions when you just need to convert a document from one format to another, these will prove invaluable. You might think I’m overstating the usefulness here, but I know how frustrating it is to want to turn, for example, a poster for which you only have the PDF file into a Word document so that you can edit the details.

CometDocs is pretty easy to use – just pick the conversion you want, upload your document, and enter your e-mail address so that you can receive the link to download the converted file. Just be careful that there’s an option to sign up for a newsletter too. If you don’t want to receive it, remember to uncheck the box. Within minutes you’ll have your new file.

I tried it with several ebooks and was impressed with how closely the resulting Word files retained the look of the originals. There are a few funnies where things don’t quite look right, but on the whole it’s very good. Of course, please use CometDocs responsibly – don’t use it to steal others’ content or work.

On the whole, CometDocs is a simple tool that you won’t even think about until the day you need it. And when you need it, you’ll be very glad you found it.

Check it out at http://www.cometdocs.com/ccn/

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Get focused with QuietWrite

January 17, 2011 by

I love simple ideas, and QuietWrite is simple… really simple. It’s a text editor with very few bells and whistles. No fancy formatting, no mail merge, no inline drawings. Just you and your text.

The idea is to provide a space for you to write your text with as few distractions as possible, allowing you to focus on what it is you’re trying to say rather than wondering whether there’s a way to turn each letter a different colour of the rainbow.

I love the simplicity of it, but if that was all there was to QuietWrite, the same effect could be achieved with a copy of notepad! So how is QuietWrite different?

Auto-Saving

Getting to the end of a long piece of writing, only to have the editor crash or power go out is a tense moment. I always ask myself the same question, “When did I last save that?” Re-opening the document to find some or all of it is missing can be soul destroying, especially if you put a lot of effort into your writing. Fortunately, QuietWrite auto-saves your work as you go, so even if your web browser crashes you’ll never be more than a few sentences behind on what you’ve written.

I can personally vouch for how much of a life-saver that features is. Before WordPress introduced auto-saving, I lost several large blog posts due to poor network connectivity. More often than not, I was so cheesed off I would rewrite a half-hearted version of the article and post it saying, “that’ll do”. Auto-saving has stopped me losing so much work, and stopped me losing my sanity. [note: as I was writing this, my network connection went down. QuietWrite told me something was up, reloaded the page, and I'd only lost half a sentence].

Publishing

Once you’ve finished writing, you may want to share it with the world. QuietWrite has a built-in publishing platform that will make your words publicly viewable.

WordPress Integration

If, however, you don’t want to publish on the QuietWrite website, and you have a WordPress blog, you can publish from one to the other using your blog’s URL and login details. You will have to tweak your post once you get it into WordPress, maybe taking the chance to add a little formatting, categorising and tagging it, but it’s nice to see the link there.

Conclusion

I started out by saying I love simple ideas. I genuinely love the simplicity and sparseness of QuietWrite. By removing the temptation to play with fonts, insert graphics, or see whether there’s a way I can make section headings look a bit fancier, QuietWrite frees me up to just think about what I want to say. Yes, there will probably be some reformatting later, but for now, in the moment, it’s great to just be thinking about one thing.

If you have something you want to get down “on paper”, give QuietWrite a go and see if it helps you focus. And why not tell us how you get on in the comments?

Thanks to John Ager for tweeting about QuietWrite and giving me the head’s up – you can read John’s post about QuietWrite too on his blog.

Filed Under: Media, Tech Tagged With: , , , ,

Yogile.com makes photo sharing easy

December 21, 2010 by

Digital photos – wonderful things. No longer are we limited to a paltry 24 frames of film before having to pause, reload, and realise we’ve missed the moment. Memory cards are now large enough to snap hundreds of photos without stopping, which means more photos and more opportunities to catch those special moments.

After a night out, family meal, or Christmas party, you’re fairly likely to want to share photos with some of the people who were there… either as a reminder of a great time or to spread a bit of embarrassment over some of the funnier incidents. There are a load of photo sharing sites out there, but I want to introduce you to Yogile.com.

Yogile.com makes it incredibly easy to share images privately and within groups. You simply log in and create an album, which is assigned its own unique URL and e-mail address and can be password protected to keep the images private. The URL/e-mail address and password can be shared with anyone you want to be able to contribute to the album, meaning that you can build up a collaborative view of any event.

Take a wedding, for example. Dozens of attendees take their own photos, all from different cameras and angles. While you might try asking everyone for their shots afterward, Yogile provides a single place they can share their images, by uploading online or just sending them to a custom email address.

Once you’ve got the photos online, there are options to share the album on Twitter or Facebook and, if the album is public, to embed it on your website. In essence, this is like a cut down and simplified version of Flickr’s groups… but it seems much quicker and simpler to contribute to. You don’t even need a Yogile.com account but can upload photos anonymously (who took that one!?).

Yogile.com is a clever take on photo sharing and collaboration. While I would still use Flickr for the majority of my sharing and archiving, I can see Yogile being a great option to quickly share photos after a get-together. Why not try it yourself and let us know how you get on in the comments?

Filed Under: Art and Design, Tech Tagged With: , , , ,

Montage – a new type of personal start page?

December 15, 2010 by

The Internet is a wonderful thing. Its vast network of computers and servers, each storing varying amounts of data, places an amazing amount of information at the fingertips of people like you and me. Sometimes, though, there’s so much information it’s overwhelming. Aggregation services can help to draw relevant material together, and Microsoft have just released a new social tool that might help.

Before we get into the nitty gritty, have a look at this completely insane video about the service.

Creating a montage is very simple – just enter some keywords and Montage will go off an draw together what it thinks is relevant information, placing it in a magazine-style framework. So entering “cats” does indeed create a montage of cat-related articles, videos and photos.

I can see this being useful as a quick taster of what’s happening online. Perhaps it would be useful to create a montage for, say, the iPhone or tech reviews so as to get a general overview, but the auto-generated montages seem just a little too random for my liking. Luckily, there’s the option to start from scratch and populate each frame of the montage with whatever you like. While that will take more time than letting Montage do it for you, it does mean you can have photos from your favourite Flickr contacts, articles from those essential sites in your RSS feed, and tweets on whatever search term you want to use. Personalised start page, anyone?

Remixing – coming soon

One feature that’s still to come online is the ability to “remix” other people’s montages – building on what they’ve shared already and allowing you to, according to the press information, “put your own unique spin on them and keep the fun and conversation going”. No word on when that will go live, yet, other than it’s been delayed. But if someone has put work into creating a custom montage, the ability to tweak and build on it could be very useful.

Why not give Montage a go and tell us how you get on in the comments? I’d be really interested to see if you find it useful or not.

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Digital SLR Photography Toolkit for Dummies [iPhone]

August 4, 2010 by

Photography is one of the passions of my life, and a while back I bought a Digital SLR camera. I can honestly say it’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made, and has allowed me to take my photography to a whole other level. If you want you can have a look at some of my images on Flickr and RedBubble.

I rely quite heavily on the camera’s automatic settings… if I’m taking pictures of motor racing, I use “sport” mode. Landscape photography? That’ll be “landscape” mode then. I know the creative modes allow more, well, creativity, but I’ve never really got to grips with them. I need some sort of simple guide to what settings are appropriate in different situations so that I can learn what they do.

Get set…

That’s where the Digital SLR Photography Toolkit for Dummies comes in. It’s an iPhone app that aims to help you take great photographs. It’s the settings finder I’m most taken with – you select what kind of subject you’re photographing (e.g. flowers/leaves/nature), what the conditions are like (overcast), and it’ll tell you the best ISO, aperture, and shutter speed to use as well as giving you a bit of advice on the best technique. I tried this with some landscape photography and found it to be pretty much spot on, although you’ll want to check the photo’s histogram afterwards just to be sure. After all, “overcast” covers a pretty wide range of light levels!

Tell me more…

As well as the settings finder, there’s some useful teaching in the DSLR Toolkit. The section on “taking great pics” splits into several topics like how to take a good portrait, getting the exposure right, and thinking about composition. There’s also a section called “Part of tens” that reads like a very in-depth blog series… Ten tips for better photos, ten benefits of using Flickr, ten great online resources, and so on. It’s almost like carrying a photographic advice magazine around in your pocket.

What have I forgotten?

So you’ve managed to convince your friend that you should be the photographer at their wedding. Have they any idea what they’ve let themselves in for? Come to think of it, have you? What kind of equipment do you need for a wedding shoot, anyway? The Digital SLR Photography Toolkit for Dummies includes a series of checklists to help you avoid forgetting that all-important item when going on a shoot. You can even check items off as you pack them. I love the checklist for going on vacation, which includes a small point-and-shoot camera that will fit in your pocket. Yeh, a Digital SLR’s great, but it’s not the most discreet of cameras for snapping family photos when you’re at a restaurant. Seriously, though, the checklists are a very handy addition and should avoid those moments when you’re out and think, “I wish I’d brought the tripod”.

And finally…

Those are some really meaty features, but add in a photoshoot diary, diagrams of different camera’s controls, a spirit level (for ensuring your tripod is level), flashlight, glossary and exposure calculator, and you’ll have noticed that this is an incredibly useful app for anyone looking to improve their Digital SLR photography.

The Digital SLR Photography Toolkit for Dummies is available from iTunes and is well worth the investment of a purchase. Please note that some features require an on-board camera, hence the reason I’ve only listed this as an iPhone app.

Filed Under: Art and Design, Tech Tagged With: , , ,

5 tools to help you blog better

April 8, 2009 by
365.14 (Blogging)Creative Commons License photo credit: kpwerker

I won’t lie, I’m taking part in Darren Rowse’s “31 days to a build better blog” challenge, and today’s task is to write a “list” post. If you’re encountering a load of lists on the net today, that might be the reason. So whilst the format of this post is perhaps a little forced, the information contained within is, I think, genuinely useful.

I got to thinking about some of the tools that help me write my blog, monitor it, and promote it… these are the ones that came instantly to mind.

  1. Akismet
    Top of the list is Akismet, a built-in WordPress plugin that checks all comments and incoming links to make sure they’re not spam. Prior to installing this I was deleting twenty or thirty spam comments a day. OK, so that’s not much, but I’m glad I installed it when I did because before long the levels had jumped to around a hundred a day. Whilst I still have to scan the spam comments list for false positives (comments marked as spam that aren’t), I’m much more confident that spam comments won’t go live on the site and the spammers won’t profit from them :) If you have a wordpress blog, stop spam and use Akismet.
  2. Google Analytics
    It doesn’t do live statistics, but Google Analytics gives you so much information I don’t think I could do without it. If you want to know your daily visits and pageviews, where your visitors came from, where they went to, and how long they spent on the site, then this is a great (and free) tool. You can even check what kind of browers they were using and what kind of connection they were on.The only part of Google Analytics I haven’t put to good use is the Goals section, where you can define metrics for “fulfilling business objectives”. Basically, it’s something like a payment page, or a download page, so you can measure how many times people hit the page you really want them to. Whilst this isn’t too much use for me, the rest of the Analytics package means this is my statistic software of choice.
  3. Feedburner
    Prior to signing up with Feedburner I sort of took it on faith that people were actually subscribing to Geek-Speak. I could see that there was traffic, but I had no idea how many people were interested enough to actually add the RSS feed to their reader. Feedburner gave me the ability to see how many people have subscribed, and how many click on an article in their feed reader. I also like the ability to sign people up for e-mail digests, and to add the option for them to share articles via Digg, StumbleUpon, or to mail articles to their friends.I’m aware that Feedburner has had a bit of bad press lately for being unreliable, but I haven’t noticed any issues myself. Because of the stats and other options, every blog I set up makes use of Feedburner feeds.
  4. Social Media
    I was going to list Twitter and Stumbleupon separately, but you can only say so much about each. Suffice to say that by building genuine relationships with people through various social media sites, including Digg and Facebook too, you earn (if that’s the right word) the ability to make recommendations for articles they may be interested in. Spamming won’t cut it, but by genuinely being interesting and interested in others you can do wonders for your blog. Of course, don’t just recommend your own articles… show that you know a bit about your niche and recommend good articles by other authors… and then when you do recommend something of your own people are far more likely to listen.Let’s not forget that you can also use social networks for research. Ask questions, telling people you’re putting together an article and want opinions, and you might be surprised at some of the material you gain by it.
  5. Pen & Paper
    Believe it or not, this is probably my most useful tool for blogging… a simple notebook and pen. I can blog on the go using my iPhone, and I can write notes on any internet-enabled computer, but for quickly jotting notes down I don’t think you can beat pen and paper. There’s a freedom to being able to draw diagrams, write, cross out, etc. that just doesn’t seem to come with electronic media. Despite being a gadget freak, and loving hi-tech solutions, I wouldn’t be without ye olde fashioned writing utensils :)

How about you? Are there any tools or tips that make your blogging better? Share ‘em in the comments!

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Twittertastic – Twitter Resources

February 9, 2009 by

The Twitter API has enables a slew of tools and gadgets to extend Twitter’s functionality. Let’s have a look at a few of them that may enhance your Twitter experience:

  1. Twitter Influence Calculator

    Twitter Influence Calculator – Taking various factors such as number of retweets, follower ratio and posting frequency into account, the Twitter Influence Calculator comes up with a value for your “influence” on Twitter (well, you wouldn’t expect it to do anything else, would you?) Whilst this is an artificial metric to one extent, it does reward generosity (by retweeting others’ tweets) and usefulness (by encouraging you to improve your signal to noise ratio). Having said that, it can be good to see your influence value increasing as you continue to tweet. Perhaps not something to be taken absolutely seriously, but interesting.
    You can see my influence rating here.

  2. TwitterCounter

    TwitterCounter – TwitterCounter tracks the number of followers you have over time. This can be interesting to see whether you are gaining or losing people, but the site also projects your future follower numbers giving you the estimated number of followers you will have tomorrow, or any number of days you choose into the future. The projections are, of course, based on past performance and will be a little inaccurate, but they are often a fairly good indication of trends. A rather nice touch is that you can also grab the code to put your follower count on your website, offering social proof of your authority… or popularity.

  3. Tweetburner

    Tweetburner – If you’ve ever wanted to know how many people clicked on the links you shared on Twitter, Tweetburner is the answer. Any URLs you share using twurl.nl will be picked up by Tweetburner and tracked, telling you how often your friends and followers actually looked at the website you were talking about. Tweetburner have currently disabled the personal stats page, but you can still see stats for individual links you posted.

There are, of course, loads more Twitter tools and sites out there. These are the three I’ve been using most lately, but what are you using? Share your tips and tell us in the comments! And while we’re thinking about Twitter, why not follow me too?

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This is cool :: Paparazzi!

May 6, 2008 by

MacOSX alert!!! Paparazzi is a fab piece of donationware that is so simple and yet so effective – basically it is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages.

Here’s a pic I took for a post on my blog…

I think it works a treat… and is going to be an important tool in my Mac toolbox. Nice!

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