Blogging OT » tools

Capture and Upload Screenshots Easily with Puush

Panah — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:26:14 +0000

Taking screenshots on Windows and Mac computers is not that hard. There are plenty of software applications that let you create sophisticated screenshots for you to share with the world (not that you need a third-party software to take screenshots). Taking multiple screenshots and uploading them online manually can be quite a hassle. Puush is a cool little tool that captures screenshots on your computer and uploads them online quickly.

Puush supports 4 commands. You can capture screenshots of your active applications, full desktop, ot your specified area. Uploading existing screenshots online is easily possible too. Changing the default keyboard combinations is very easy (use Puush settings window). Users can use sound notifications to get alerted upon successful uploads.

Puush is not an earth-shattering piece of software. But it can make handling screenshots on your computer a whole lot easier. It uploads your files and gives you their links to share with the world. It is a pretty neat little app.

Create Random Names with Random Word Machine

Panah — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:07:01 +0000

So you want to start a business but have no idea what name to choose for it? Today, we have startups with all kinds of names. Some of them meaningful but many of them meaningless. While you don’t want to pick a lousy name for your business, it never hurts to try something different. Random Word Machine is a simple tool you can use to generate cool, catchy names for your new products.

Random Word Machine is actually a very simple tool. All you have to do is choose the language you want to create your word in and click on the “generate” button. I have to warn you that not all the words coming from this tool are worth a consideration. Play with it long enough, and you may come up with a totally random and cool name for your product.

This tool uses an algorithm based on neurolinguistic theories to find you easy to pronounce words most of the time. It can be quite useful for brainstorming or you could get lucky and hit the jackpot with it. It does have an iPhone application so the fun never has to end. Random Word Machine does support Twitter sharing, which is nice.

5 Ways To Keep up with Your Favorite Topics

Panah — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:29:38 +0000

All bloggers need to spend a considerable amount of time keeping up with what’s going on in their industries each week. Many of us rely on RSS feeds from our favorite blogs to do just that. These days, there are plenty of other services that can make your research process a whole lot easier. Here are 5 services that stand out:

Google+ Sparks: this is one of the fastest ways to find out about the latest stories on the topics you are interested in. Just add all the topics you are interested in tracking to your Google profile and let Sparks do the rest for you.

LinkedIn Today: provides you with stories that are trending on LinkedIn. You can search through stories by topic and spend hours discovering new information on industries you are interested about.

Tweetmeme: a trend tracker for Twitter that shows you which stories are currently popular on Twitter. Users can search through the updates by category or file type.

Alltop: one of my favorite places to search for fresh content online. Alltop is a news aggregator that covers a ton of blogs across various topics. It can save you time keeping up with top blogs and portals covering only the topics you are interested in following.

Google Reader: Google Reader is still the main tool I rely on to keep up with the changes in the industries I am involved in. It is quite flexible and can handle all your favorite RSS feeds. Google Reader makes sharing your stories on other social networks easy too.

Which tools are you relying on the most to keep up with the changes in your market?

Keep Up with Your RSS Feeds with NewsRack for Mac

Panah — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 15:07:00 +0000

Those of you who have been following me on Twitter for a while know too well about my rants on Windows and everything Microsoft. I truly believe that no company is capable of producing products as buggy as Microsoft. That is not to say that Apple products are perfect. But they do seem to work when you need them whereas Microsoft products tend to fail too often. The Mac App Store is another good reason to switch to Mac computers these days. There are thousands of applications available in the store, most of them very affordable. No longer do you have to worry about not having enough apps to play on your Mac (seems to be what keeps people from switching to Mac from Windows).

You don’t necessarily need an RSS feed reader for Mac to keep up with your favorite blogs. Google Reader is more than decent in handling your RSS feeds. But if you are looking for a Mac client to do the job, do not look past NewsRack for Mac. It is an attractive RSS reader that lets you keep up with your favorite blogs and keep your feed list synched with your Google account.

NewsRack for Mac has a quite sleek look and feel to it. Its tabbed interface makes it much easier to keep up with multiple stories. Changing your feeds does not take more than a drag and drop. This application is keyboard friendly as well (perfect for you Mac warriors). NewsRack does show thumbnail previews for posts so you can find interesting stories quickly.

So what happens to your Google Reader account if you use NewsRack? You can always sync your reader with your Google Reader account. Use the tabbed interface to explore sites without leaving your RSS reader application.

NewsRack for Mac is quite sleek and has a lot of potential. If you are tired of Google Reader’s interface and want a new tool to explore your favorite RSS feeds with, NewsRack could be the answer to your prayers.

Trunk.ly: Manage Your Social Media Links

Panah — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 16:32:33 +0000

I don’t know about you but I spend hours everyday sharing content and learning from what others have to say on Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites. Keeping up with all those links can become quite a task, especially if you have thousands of posts already. That’s where Trunk.ly comes into play. It is a cool tool that lets you import your links from Twitter, Delicious, and Facebook and bring them all together.

In order to get started with Trunk.ly, you are going to have to provide this service with your social information. Connect it to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and the rest is taken care of by this service. Delicious and Pinboard are supported too.

Trunk.ly not only brings everything together, it allows you to search through your content and find what you are looking for more easily. Users can also connect with other users and follow their activities at all times. Trunk.ly does have sharing buttons bloggers can take advantage of to keep track of their most popular posts.

All in all, Trunk.ly is an easy to use service that can save you time managing all the links you share across the social media. No longer do you have to spend minutes or hours trying to find a link you saved in the past online.

How To Monitor Your Blog’s Uptime

Panah — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 16:32:11 +0000

In the past few months, we have been experiencing a few issues with our web host, mainly due to our network’s growth rate. For a while, we had trouble keeping our sites up during nights. That’s when I decided to look for new tools that could keep track of our websites and inform our team when they were having issues. While many of these tools offer premium services, you can usually get simple things done with them without incurring any costs. Here are just 5 website monitoring tools that can let you know when your site goes down:

Pingdom: my favorite website monitoring service. It not only has a free service, it allows you to keep track of your website on your iPhone (using its free iPhone app).

Site Uptime: a service with multiple tiers. It can keep an eye out on your website when you are not around to do so. You can run your tests every 2, 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes and get informed by e-mail or SMS.

Host Tracker: a free tracking service for your website. Just bookmark your result page and refer to it anytime you need more information about your tests.

Uptime Robot: can be used to track up to 50 websites. It provides you with e-mail, Twitter, SMS, and RSS updates. Pings are done every 5 minutes.

Watch Mouse: a professional quality website monitoring service used by well known businesses. E-mail, SMS, Twitter, and MSN alerts are included. It can help you diagnose your site’s problem too.

As a blogger, you can not afford to have too many web site outages. The above services can help you identify potential problems before they become major disasters for your business.

Manage All Your Images with iClippy

Panah — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 15:47:21 +0000

I don’t know about you, but I store many clips and screen-shots on my personal computer. As a blogger, I have to take screen-shots of certain things to post them to my blog, Tumblr, or Posterous sites. There are certain issues with this approach. For starters, sharing images and screen-shots from a personal computer is not a 1 step process. Besides, sometimes you end up having to deal with multiple versions of an image on multiple computers. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way for you to manage all your clips from one place without having to rely on multiple local copies? That’s what iClippy offers. It lets you capture your screen-shots, edit them, and have them stored online. That not only makes it easier for you to share your files with others online, it makes your life easier as a blogger.

iClippy captures images, scans, and screenshots to an online clipboard without you having to save your visuals to your computer. What you capture will be available for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, and even chat services. iClippy is more than just an online clipboard application. It has a desktop edition that you can take advantage of to reach your files at all times.

Credit: iClippy

You can copy/paste your iClippy content easily. The service does provide you with a gallery link that you can share with your colleagues and the world. In active mode, iClippy can intercept Windows’ copy & paste operations. You can always put it to sleep if you want more control on what gets copied to your account. The service offers a decent search and Optical Character Recognition to save you time searching through your images.

iClippy has free and premium plans. I personally have a free plan but the paid plans are not that expensive and can offer you more flexibility with the number of images and the quality of images you store online. If you have tried services such as Evernote in the past, you are going to enjoy what iClippy has to offer.

5 Killer Blog Search Tools You Should Use

Panah — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 15:32:43 +0000

Coming up with new ideas for your blog and keeping up with the latest developments in your industry should not be that difficult these days. Not when there are a lot of tools available to help you out. Google is a powerful search engine and can help you find a ton of useful information about any topic. But if you want to go beyond Google and try those blog-specific search engines, you should give these 5 blog search tools a look:

PostRank: one of the best blog search engines out there. It can help you figure out which blogs are dominating which niches. It is very handy if you are looking for quality blogs to follow as well.

Topsy: a powerful Twitter search engine that can find you the latest articles and blog posts on any topic. It even shows you which influential Twitter users have retweeted those articles.

CommentLuv Search Engine: a handy search engine that can find you those CommentLuv blogs. You can use those sites to get links for your blog and link your posts to related articles on other blogs.

Questions.com: an interesting search engine that digs up questions and answers on any topic. Great way to come up with new ideas for your website.

Addictomatic: a complete search engine that searches blogs, video, and news sites and finds you the content you are looking for. A great tool to use to see what is going on in your niche.

Have you got any suggestion? Which of the above sites have you used in the past?

5 Cool Social Event Tools for Bloggers

Panah — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 16:06:42 +0000

As a blogger, your goal should be to connect with as many of your colleagues and peers as possible. Throwing your own events would be helpful too. If that’s too complicated for you, you can always use event tools available to find tweetups and other types of meetings in your area. There are plenty of these tools around — those that let you create, share, and discover events in your area. Here are 5 such event services that can help you out:

tweetvite: one of the best tools to create tweetups and find the ones going on in your area. Makes it very easy to organize and promote a meeting with your Twitter friends and followers.

dingbee: looking to network with even more people? Maybe you are just bored and want to attend a local event. Whatever the case, dingbee has you covered. It’s a very easy to use tool that can be used to discover and share local events.

Socialseek: Socialseek is a handy tool that shows you what’s going on all around you. It’s a powerful social media tracking tool that can help you discover top players and upcoming events in your area.

Aloqa: a powerful mobile platform that keeps you informed on interesting events and activities in your local area. It works on all popular mobile platforms.

tatweet: if you are hooked on Twitter, you can use this service to share your upcoming events with your tweeps. It lets you integrate your events into your website too.

What’s your favorite social event tool?

5 Tools You Can Pick Up To Improve Your Blog Today

Panah — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 14:49:07 +0000

Many bloggers assume that blogging is just about writing. Just write more articles and everything else falls into place, right? I won’t lie to you. Some have gotten breaks by writing the right article at the right time. But that won’t happen for anyone. Fortunately, there are more than one ways to become successful in this field. If you want to improve your blog and take it to the next level, you need to track things (how people interact with your blog, their level of engagement, the amount of time they spend on a page, …). I spend hours each week to find new tools that can help me improve my blog. Not all tools are actually worth trying, but I have had a lot of success with these 5 tools:

Clicky: Google Analytics is still my first analytics tool. But Clicky is very impressive. It makes tracking my traffic and planning future posts much easier.

Crazy Egg: heatmaps are very underrated. They let you visualize your visitors’ actions and optimize your landing pages for better conversion rates. Crazy Egg is an affordable and easy-to-use tool that lets you do just that.

Hittail: Hittail is a wonderful tool that shows you your search traffic in real-time. It gives you actionable information on what keywords people are searching for and how they are getting to your website (and when).

Tynt: Tynt is a very cool tool that can encourage your visitors to link back to you more often. Besides, it helps you track how your visitors are engaging with your blog.

Apture: Apture is a toolbar that makes your blog more social media friendly. It can enhance your readers’ search experience on your website. It’s useful for branding purposes too.

What tools/services have you taken advantage of to improve your blog?