jking.net: Resources

Showing posts with label Resources. Show all posts

The Wyzo experience...

lifted from the Wyzo website

Wyzo is an awesome new browser that focuses on optimizing your online media experience. Wyzo gives you easy access to all your favourite media sites, downloading media content and inform your friends about your discoveries.
BitTorrent™ Made Easy

We've integrated your torrent downloads inside our download manager, so downloading torrents has never been so easy! Now you can manage your web and torrent downloads from the same window. Start downloads with just one click.
Secure Web Browsing

Wyzo allows you to browse the web securely using the latest protection and safety technologies. Built from the ground up on the Firefox core, Wyzo will make sure your experience is smart, safe, and hassle-free.

I downloaded it and it seems ok, not all that it could be. I will play around with the torrent client more to see if that's really worth it. I also am trying out the FireFox plugin with higher hopes. Check it out for yourself at: http://www.wyzo.com/.

Plethora of web links

Another good find: http://www.alvit.de/handbook/

This is a page with links to all sorts of web content and developer tools and widgets. Enjoy

Online Office Replacements

As I move to the online line mashup model, I have been looking at replacements for other applications that I use. What can I do using just a web browser? These links are for tools and sites that I have found useful for this purpose. This was originally posted on my main site blog, but here I will dig a little more into the guts I hope.

For now, check out the links below.

Google Docs: This site from Google has a decent word processor and spreadsheet as well as some other gadgets but it is not tops in functionality.
Zoho: This suite has the best setup I have found so far. I like the way the software works and the suite is robust.

Firefox Extensions for Web Developers (and blog hackers)

The days of looking at an area on a web page and guessing the pixel dimensions or color are over! Well, at least if you have a few tools and use Firefox. I like IE, but Firefox has largely replaced it for my day to day usage primarily due to the customization and tools available for Firefox.

Here are a few add-ins that I find to be very helpful for web development and hacking my blogs or other web properties I use.

The eye dropper utility.
- This is a great little widget that gives you an eye dropper in the bottom of your status bar. If you click the eye dropper, you can identify the color of any area on your page in RGB or Hex.
- Get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/271

The measure it utility.
- This add-in gives you a little ruler in the status bar that you can click to get a measurement overlay giving you precise pixel dimensions of any screen area. Great for measuring that new page element location or footer area and so on.
- Get it at https://https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/539/

Web Developer
- As described by CW: "Web Developer is another virtual Swiss Army Knife for coding. There's some overlap with Firebug, but where Firebug concerns itself almost exclusively with the content of a Web page, Web Developer offers tools to tweak how you're interacting with the page." I like this integration with the tool bar and the ability to work with CSS in particular.
- Get it at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/

Random Quotes / Messages

Random quotes are a nice addition to a site to add a little fun content so I am including directions here to put them on your own blog.

Select a list of quotes to put on your blog.

Go to the templates tab on your blog customization and select add a new page element.

Select the HTML / JavaScript element

Paste the following code into the block

<i><center><script language="JavaScript">
//store the quotations in arrays
//change this number to reflect the number of quotes
quotes = new Array(2);
//just follow this pattern to add more quotes
quotes[0] = "Shave your head, get a wet sponge, and flip the switch, 'cause you're about to get a Truthocution!<br/>Stephen Colbert";
quotes[1] = "I believe all God's creatures have a soul... except bears, bears are Godless killing machines!<br/>Stephen Colbert";
//calculate a random index
index = Math.floor(Math.random() * quotes.length);
//display the quotation
document.write("\n");
document.write(quotes[index]);
</script></center></i>
</pre></li>

You can give the element a title if you want, but it is not needed

Save the element and drop in in your page where you want it.

Viola, you have random quotes...

Ok.... thanks for the applause, no really, thank you... Ok. So there are variations of this script all over the net. You can find a version you like better or hack this one up. Follow the links to check out sites with great little scripts and widgets for your blog, or watch here for more.

File Synchronization

A while ago, I was looking for a way to keep my multiple drives and systems in synch, and also to back up my files. As it turns out, so was my dad. I spent some time rummaging around the web and I came up with allwaysync. This application is easily the BEST at what is does, especially for the money. (free for personal use)

From the vendor: "Allway Sync uses innovative synchronization algorithms to synchronize your data between desktop PCs, laptops, USB drives and more. Allway Sync combines bulletproof reliability with an extremely easy-to-use interface."

We both use it at this point and it has been working most efficaciously. Pull the application down from http://allwaysync.com/ to give it a try.

Useful online resources

While browsing through a recent issus of PC World, I came across some great links for online resources. This caused me to look a little more on my own. Here are the ones that are listed. More reviews coming later.

Online Office Challengers
These offer replacements for word processing and other desktop apps

Large File Delivery services - think UPS for e-packages

Online Calendaring