By Jason
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August 9, 2007
Man, I love adding cool images to my blog posts, but sometimes it can be a pain to find an image, download it, upload it, get the path, and blah blah blah. So, imgred.com makes it easy to embed images in your site, but instead of hotlinking to the original source, imgred downloads it, places it on their own server, and allows you to hotlink from there.
But how does it work? Well, I tried it with this image from Lifehacker, who wrote up this very same topic.
So, if you see an image above, then it must be working.
As you can see from the image, all you have to do is add “http://imgred.com/” to the beginning of the absolute path to the image online. Pretty easy. Now, I’m about to hit submit and see if it works…
Technorati Tags: hotlinking prevention
I finally got around to setting up Parallels and installling XP so I can more easily test sites in IE6 and IE7. However, the one feature I was most excited about was coherence. Now, setting up Parallels and getting a virtual machine set up couldn’t have been more easy, but out of the box, coherence wouldn’t work. The button was there, but nothing happened when I clicked it.
So, I googled it, and came across this page. It had just what I needed. It turns out, you have to manually install Parallels Tools (you actually begin this process on your mac, then make it happen within your virtual machine.)
Once I did this, I was running in coherence mode immediately, and it was all better. (by the way, coherence mode allows you to not have to run your virtual machine confined to a window. It places the Windows Start bar at the bottom of your browser, and you just launch apps just as if they were made to run in Mac OS X, it’s amazing, and I love it.)
I spend most of my day with my hands on the keyboard and a web browser open. So, one feature I’ve come to absolutely love is Firefox’s inline autocomplete. Basically what this means is that when you’re typing into the address bar a URL, and you’ve visited a similarly named site before (for instance, I type in “goo” and google.com is in my history), it autocompletes inside the address bar. So instead of having to move to the arrow keys and scroll down to it, the best match is automatically filled out. I love this feature so much, but whenever I use a new machine, re-install my settings, or something, I have to look it up on Google again. So, I’m posting it here, for you and for me.
To enable autocomplete in the Firefox:
1. Go to about:config in the URL field and press enter.
2. Right-click somewhere on the page and choose New > Boolean value
3. Enter browser.urlbar.autoFill as the preference name (note, this is case-sensitive: ‘F’, not ‘f’). I just copy and paste it, makes it easier.
4. The value should default to true, but double check.
You’re done. So nice, so easy. Here’s a screen shot of it in action.
Special thanks to Geek Ramblings for this tip. I always went to his site to remember, but I just want to have it on my own site for ease of finding…
I’ll be the first to admit that this free script solution isn’t the most full-featured form builder I’ve ever seen, but it is very simple and handy for it’s intended purpose. Sometimes however, you need a little more muscle. Wufoo is just such a muscle. It’s a great, hosted service that lets you manage and control forms without any programming knowledge or time commitment. After you create an account, you can then create and manage as many unique forms as you want; contact forms, questionnaires, event sign-ups, etc). All of it is done via wysiwyg editors and simple wizards. It then gives you the code to put into your site and viola, instant database driven forms. You can then log back into Wufoo and view, sort, export the results of your form at any time. It has a very simple free plan, but for bigger needs, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan, but the price you pay is much cheaper than paying a programmer to build it by hand, especially if you need to administrate the results of the form. In the end though, the prices are very reasonable.
Features
Available on All Plans
* Built in Validation and Error Checking
* Ability to Style the Look of your Forms
* Subscribe to Entries via email or RSS
* Custom Confirmation Messages
* Easy integration into Your Web Site or Blog
Available on Paid Plans
* Access to Customer Support
* Upload Files with your Form
* No Advertisements on Confirmation Page
* Redirect to a Custom Confirmation URL
* Password Protection on Forms and Reports
Aaron Wall recommended this site in a recent TechCrunch comments thread, and I absolutely fell in love. I’m not much of a programmer, so I’m always bugging my partner to make me little scripts or do simple things for me when I need something, but this is the kind of thing that will help me be much more efficient and self-sustained.
Contact Form Generator
This site has a quick little wizard that will write and preview everything you need for a customized contact form. You enter where you want the form to send it’s contents (an email address), the subject of the email, and then you design the form with whatever fields you want. It writes up some php and gives you some code to embed in your site, as well as a php file to place on your server. It’s all very simple, and very fast. I love it.
I whipped up a little one and embedded it below to test it out.
Read More »
By Jason
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April 17, 2007
One of the major downers when using Gmail as your primary email account is that you can only download emails to one computer using POP. You can set it to not mark items as read or move them to archive, but if you go from one computer to another, each trying to download emails to the hard drive, you’ll only get each email once.
However, there is now a found workaround.
When entering your email address into your mail client, add “recent:” to the beginning of the account name, (recent:name@gmail.com). Now, Gmail will allow this client to get all email in the past 30 days that it hasn’t already downloaded, regardless of if it has already been downloaded by another client or not.
It’s been tested, and found that it does not download multiple instances of a single email on one machine, and does in fact seem to be the Golden Ticket for getting all your email on more than one machine.
Final note: Using “recent:” will only grab the past 30 days worth of email, so this won’t help you with a two-year-old account getting archived emails downloaded, but it’ll help you going forward.
Here’s a link to the Google Group discussion forum where this was discussed.
By Jason
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April 10, 2007
So, my friend Matt taught me a nifty trick this afternoon. I had recently uploaded a new site to a server, then switched the DNS settings over to it. It was going to take a while before the DNS propogated itself, and I didn’t want to wait (actually, I wanted to double check it was working before my client saw it). So, if you have a Mac, here’s how you force your computer to check an IP before it looks to its DNS settings.
1. Open terminal and type sudo mate /etc/hosts. (this will open the file in textmate)
2. When the file opens, go to the bottom of the file and start a new line. Enter the IP address of your new server, hit TAB, then add in the exact URL you want to point to that new address. I added mine WITH a www., so I can still look up the non-www URL and see how the DNS settings are propogating.
I’m sure people out there no a ton more about this than I do, but this is enough info that it worked for me, and I thought I’d share (as well as document it so I don’t forget.)
By Jason
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February 22, 2007
I’m definitely a amateur when it comes to PPC campaigns, but I still have a lot of fun with them. However, my wife likes to make sure I’m staying in the black and not venturing into the deep red of negative margins. When I heard about the new InstaCalc website, where you can build your own calculators, I headed over and made a little quick one to track profits on campaigns.
I’m sure there are easier ways to do this, and when you’re covering hundreds of campaigns, this would be ridiculous, but it’s still fun and somewhat useful, so here it is:
By Jason
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February 15, 2007
I’ve found several people lately talking about using robots.txt files to help their ranking in Google and get pages out of the supplemental index. Especially if you use Wordpress, you can quickly start having way too many pages that just list out your content, using up link juice, while your posts themselves are sitting there without enough PR to get indexed. The Archives pages, any Tags pages, Categories pages, Feed pages… They add up quickly, all showing pretty much similar content.
Read more about this at Earners Blog, and at Shoemoney. Both of these guys got a huge increase in traffic after they instituted a simple exclusion rules. Each have a different list that worked for them, so check out each post and make sure you read the comments, that’s where the real gold is at Shoemoney’s site.
By Jason
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February 12, 2007
A client of mine is a publicly traded company, and while looking at their company information in Google Finance, I noticed that the “Company Summary” had some inconsistent information. I wasn’t immediately sure what to do to correct it, but soon found the correct place. If you would like to change any information about a company in Google finance, they list the sources of their data here:
http://www.google.com/googlefinance/faq.html#remove
It’s a list of email contacts for the source or partner of their information.
Specifically, here is the useful info.
I’m concerned about content I’ve located in Google Finance. Would you please change or remove it?
If you see something wrong, Google and our partners want to know about it. Here’s the appropriate contact info for various Google Finance features and the corresponding content partner.
- News — http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/about_google_news.html
- Blog results — http://www.google.com/help/about_blogsearch.html
- Public Company data — Reuters webmaster.reuters@custhelp.com
- Private Company data — Hoovers update@hoovers.com
- Mutual Funds — Morningstar dataquestions@morningstar.com
- Anything else, including crawled data and photos