A “Made in Russia” tag on a product should indeed guarantee the class of a product. There are a lot of online image editors available on the net. Some does cropping, some does resizing, some even does a small amount of image quality adjustments. But if you are looking for an Online substitute for your famous desktop image editor tool, then you are into major disappointment. There are certain online tools which do more than one of the above mentioned jobs, but their quality and handiness will make you go back to its desktop cousin. Recently while surfing I came across a tool from Russia - Smilart Fan Studio Online Photo Editor. I have to spend a lot of time in internet cafes and have been in search of a good online image editor tool for ages.
My first impression about Smilart Fan Studio was not quiet great. I thought it was one of those tools available on net which claims big, but delivers so small. On a second impression, it turned out to be more powerful than they claim. Actually it can add a lot of unbelievable effects which usually an advanced editor like Photoshop or Gimp only could do. As a regular online tool –it can perform the usual cropping, resizing of an image. Its major features are
Camera Option – This is where you can correct red-eye effects, correct noise, clearing the skin, remove distortions etc of your digital image.
Orientation Option – Here you can rotate the image as you like, what makes this memorable is they have an tilt option to add that professional touch to your images.
Light and Color Options – here we have the lighting adjustments, adjust shadows, colour etc.
Clarity Options – here you can make your image sharp, blur, change contrast. Have to admit their sharpness option works better than Photoshop.
Special Effect Options – here you can add special effects to your images like B/W photo, Vintage Photo effect, Tint effect, Borders, funny effects etc. You can add any colour tint to your image.
All in all it has to be declared the King of Online Image editor tool. You cans save your image on web also. They also have a Compare with original option to assist you better. My only concerns – all the earnings are displayed in Russian, and I had no idea of it.
Below is two images the first one is original and the second one edited.Check the sharpness of the second one.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
The Best Online Image Editor – The King
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
FaveBot – Your Search Solution
I have been running an F C Barcelona blog for some time – All About F C Barcelona. It’s always difficult to find the latest news and events related to the club. I regularly visit some well known websites and blogs to get up to date news about the club. Rest of the time is been used in searching for Barcelona related terms in search engine. Most of the cases, I would be searching everyday for the same search terms. Now that is quite boring and monotonous way of doing thing. Now there is a solution for this – FaveBot. Using FaveBot you can keep track of your favourite keywords. FaveBot returns you a set of recently updated sites, blogs etc which contain materials with the mentioned keywords.
FaveBot provides you the option to refine the search result depending on the type of source. You can chose from which all category the articles should be selected. The categories allowed are Blogs, Books, DVDs, Events, Music, News, Pics, Pods and Videos. FaveBot also offers the feature of serving the search results as an RSS feed to your feed reader. So from next time you can stop searching the latest news about your favourite club or celebrity, instead you can read it every morning. FaveBot may not be accurate but do throw up all the major websites related to the searching terms. Some of my favourite websites was missing – that may be because of the Spam filtering. FaveBot’s spam filtering discards all the sites which are hosted on free hosting service like Blogger. Even though I have purchased my domain allaboutfcbarcelona.com, it never showed up in the result because I am using the Blogger’s custom domain option. That is kind of a problem – because then this blog also will not feature in any of the searches. They should find a way to selectively exclude certain sites (which are good) that otherwise may come in the spam filtering category.
Track Your Website Status using Monitor.us
There are many server status notification tools available in the net nowadays. The latest which I encountered is Monitor.us. Monitor.us is a handy website which helps you track the status of the servers. After signup you can add test for your servers. It supports 11 protocols for testing namely http, ping, https, ftp, pop, smtp, dns, tcp, udp, imap, and sip. You can have the server performance data displayed in any of the three formats – Table, Bar and Line. You can opt in to receive notification about your site problem via email, Instant Messenger (ICQ, Yahoo, MSN or Google) or SMS (this at this moment is a paid service). You can also create an alert feed to be read in your RSS reader about your server status.
The USP for Monitor.us is that even though it is primarily a server status tracking tool, it can be used effectively to track information about visitors to your site. You can add your website for visitor tracking, after that you have to insert a small JavaScript code into your site. You can track your traffic on the basis of countries, IPs, cities, OS, Browsers, and Keywords. The interface for the visitor tracking is beautiful, especially the Map, you can zoom in and out the map to track countries and cities. Another wonderful feature which is available is the Widget option – You can create embeddable widget to track your server performance. Another feature – Snapshot, help you in tracking all your server status quickly. Even with all these wonderful features, their service has enough annoyance for a person. I am constantly irritated with their display interface – if you opt for adding a display let’s say a visitor tracking display, it only keeps showing Loading… You will be able to see it only after refreshing the page. The worst is while trying to add visitor tracking, when I added the URL for tracking it kept on showing verifying URL and never gave me the Code snippet. No need to panic here, you just have to refresh the page and add the visitor tracking from My VT Sites. You can find the code snippet in the Traffic Report box add it to your site, bingo it starts working. For all these annoyance Monitor.us is a wonderful tool, it brings all the right application and service together to make it handy for the webmaster. I would like them to provide a comprehensive Help document (as I believe the current one is adequate) to enhance user experience. The help document should include the difference between different protocols and all the technical terms included with their services. At this moment this tool is a bit complex for a person who is a beginner as far net technicalities are concerned.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Have you QuantCast?
In the sea of online web traffic tools available on the net, what makes QuantCast different is the fact that they are basically intended to serve the Advertisers. A usual web traffic tool intention is to give the webmaster a complete picture of the traffic into his site. Their developers claim it to be the “World’s Only Open Internet rating Service”. They also claim it to be “A new media measurement service that enables advertisers to view audience reports for millions of sites and services to build their brands with confidence.” One of the plus points with QuantCast is that they tend to have some data about your site even though you have not submitted to them. But those data is absolutely inaccurate for example doshdosh.com has a traffic rank of 217000, which is absolutely absurd. So the most important factor is to use the JavaScript code provided by QuantCast.
Now what makes QuantCast different from others in the business? Firstly, they provide data from an Advertiser perspective. In other words they give the publisher an opportunity to market to the right advertisers. Secondly most of the advertisers are very much biased towards North America centered traffic – QuantCast also is heavily biased towards usage in North America. Most of the breakdown and analysis is focused in this region, even though they don’t complete neglect the world wide audience. It would have been better if they could provide another Europe based breakdown also, as many advertisers are now concentrating over there. QuantCast search facility can be used to return basic information any site. The results are categorized based on Monthly unique, Sex, Age, Demographic and Geographic information. These give a quick overview of the type of audience the particular website serve. Thirdly the statics are presented in a very pleasant manner via pie diagram, bar diagram and graph. If you have more than one website, you can group them together and benchmark each other.
QuantCast also offer a video and widget tracking service. This service could be used to measure the usage of your videos, widgets and games, whether served from your site or elsewhere on the web. The information will be categorized based on metric like plays, reach, amount consumed and category. QuantCast themselves reminds you that their data may not be 100% accurate, but when compared to tools like Alexa their data tend to be more accurate.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Alexa Changed their Ranking
I was casually searching for my entertainment niche site Actress Snaps' ranking in alexa and was was quiet surprised to see my site jumping close to 100,000 position compared to yesterday. so I decided to take a peep into what's behind the sudden surge. It looks like Alexa has refined its ranking system. Alexa ranking system has been under heavy criticsm from all part especially from the best in the blogging business. The main criticsm was that Alexa ranking was based on the number of users who have installed their toolbar.Now they claim that they have refined their rankings by adding more factors. they haven't revealed what all those factors are. But anyway now it looks like more close to being accurate. atleast Google is having a 2nd ranking in their newsystem, but still can't digest the fact that yahoo is more popular than google.They alos claim that they are still collecting data for the new ranking system, so can expect a few more jump very soon.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Making Mobile Friendly Sites
Have you ever tried to open your blog in a mobile browser? You better not, first of all it looks as ugly as it gets, secondly it takes too much of time to load completely. There are so many applications available in the net to solve this scenario. Some allows you to make from scratch a new mobile site and the others allow you to create a mobile friendly version of your existing site. If you are interested in creating a fresh mobile site, TagTag will be one of the good options available. But if you are interested in creating a browser friendly version of your blog – the two best available options are Mofuse and WireNode. Both these services create mobile friendly version of your site from their RSS feeds.
A brief review of both these services is given below:
Mofuse has been launched in its beta version in September 2007 and since then has been the pioneer in creating mobile friendly version of your site. They offer so many advanced feature like custom domain, header image, Designing Logo, Comment Widget etc. It also gives you the opportunity to monetize from your mobile site by adding your Adsense or AdMob code. The revenue split for free users is of the 50/50 ratio, but if you can upgrade to Pro version you can keep the entire revenue. They do provide automatic redirect code through which you can redirect your user to your mobile site if they are visiting via a mobile browser. They also have a comment widget and option to add/create another independent page other than your RSS page. They have been very pro active with the options they offer to their users by adding new feature – the latest are iPhone settings and Click to Call features. Their only drawback as far as I am concerned is that they tend to put most of these features in the Pro version. They will allow you to use these feature and the next time you will find them included only in the pro version. But anyway, this is by far the best application available to make a browser friendly version of your blog.
WireNode has been founded by the Tomas Zeman and Tomas Randus and has their head office located in Prague, Czech Republic. Like Mofuse with WireNode it takes only two minutes to setup your mobile site. You can have a Title Image and put your own Image in WireNode. Like Mofuse you can create individual pages, it also provides three widget – a clock widget, Message/Comment widget and Message of the Day widget. Out of this the Message of the Widget is very innovative as it gives an essential platform to announce of recent developments. Another innovative feature included in WireNode is the option to add images from Google Image search. It also provides a set of seven themes to choose from. They lack the monetization options of Mofuse but should be able to provide an alternative for it soon.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Track Your Flight Status
FligtStats is a website where you can track the status of your flight. If you do a search for flight status website in Google, there will be hundreds of websites that is going to be populated. But most of them cater to a US based audience whereas FlighStats have necessary information about the flights originating from all the major cities in the world. FlightStats provide three basic search options – Search by Airport, Search by Route and Search by Flight.
Search By Airport – This option gives the information of all the flights from/to a particular airport. FlightStats have a very good auto fill assistant which helps you in selecting your desired airports. Actually this auto fill feature is one of the factor which help this site leap ahead of it competitors.
Search By Route – This helps in finding the information of flights available between two particular airports.
Search By Flight – This is the option most suited when you have to go to pick some of your dearest ones from airports.The three above mentioned options makes it easy from the users to know the flight details with minimum information before hand.
What make FlightStats more desirable is a huge list of additional services and tools they offer. They have linked with Kayak to provide their customer with the best air travel deal possible. Through Kayak FlightStats make it possible to book cruise, hotels and taxis for their customers. Thus FlightStats act as a central resource manager for all your travel needs. They also provide a frequent flyer deal with tie up with MileMaven, this helps you to find and avail any promotion or discounts available at the particular time.
FlightStats also provide all the details you need to know about a particular airport. These details include weather condition, airport delays (US and Canada), security wait time (US airports) etc. It also provides a mechanism for registered users to rate these airports and also have a forum where you can put your views about the same. So the next time you travel to a new destination, you can prepare well for all the trouble before hand. FlightStats also let you set up alerts about information regarding a particular flight. The alerts include notification if flight is delayed for more than 30 minutes or cancelled, arrival notification etc.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Ploomy - A Must Visit for Every Guys
Etiquette is a very dreadful term; at least this was true in my case. If you search for the term “Etiquette” in Wikipedia, you will be surprised by the sheer volume of its definition. Wikipedia defines it as “Etiquette, one aspect of decorum, is a code that governs the expectations of social behavior, according to the contemporary conventional norm within a society, social class, or group.” I never used to bother about any etiquette. But recently I had to face some situations where I looked as a total misfit. A lack of awareness of common etiquette will harm both your personal and professional lives. Personally it might doom disaster – for example if you don’t know how to behave at a dining table; you might become a huge embarrassment for both your partner and boss. So I decided to educate myself with the most common etiquette needed for men to be successful. In this digital world you will find all the solution for your problem in the Net. So I hooked onto my favourite search engine and did an extensive research. There were too many sites on etiquettes but none could command the respect.
Then I saw a site which had a definitive Royal looks – Ploomy. Their catch line is “Ploomy - What Men Need To Know”. The word Ploomy is short for the French word “nom de plume” which means pen name. Ok that’s a definition given in the site. One of the most attractive features of this site is that they always update you with a list of etiquette which is very much needed in day to day life. My personal favourite is the Give Me 5 Minutes and I’ll Tell You What You Need to Know about Wine. It gives a list of useful tip to know your wines and especially impress others with your wine knowledge. Another one is Table Manner Tips Every Guy Should Know – This is a must read for every guys. This will make you realize that most of the things you were practicing till now were absolutely absurd. They have a list of other tips which will be very useful in your personal and professional lives. Ploomy is a must bookmark for every Guy.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Piky Basket - Indeed a Handy Basket
Piky Basket is a tool which I have recently installed (actually it is a shell extension) and has been using extensively in recent times. Actually this tool has reduced my workload considerably. Piky Basket is a simple file managing tool which manages the copy/Move operation of files. Once installed it integrates itself into the right click menu. Where Piky Basket comes handy is when you have to move a lot of files from different folders into a single folder. Earlier we have to move into each folder and copy the necessary files in that folder and then paste it in the destination folder. Then move into the other folder and repeat the same. With Piky Basket this task is very much simplified, simply start dropping the necessary files in to the Piky Basket (to do that select the files that needed to be copied and then right click, you will find a Piky basket option as shown in the image.
Now once you have completed dropping all the necessary files into Piky basket, then move into the target folder and just simply Copy/Move the files (depending on your use). This has been very much handy for me when copying music files into my walkman or pen drive. Along with this Piky Basket provides two more handy options where in which you can copy the file path into clipboard. This is really handy for programmers and the second one is the most I love - Command Prompt Here option. This option opens the command prompt and moves the current directory to that folder. So you can pretty soon forget the cd command.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
2 Must Have Tools for your Computer
Browser hijacking has been one of the menaces which have been prevailing in the online world for some time. For those who are not familiar with the term “Browser Hijacking” or who were very lucky not to experience it till now – Wikipedia defines it as “
Browser hijacking is the modification of a web browser's settings by Malware.” Simply put when a browser hijacker get installed in your system, it most probably changes your Homepage and in most cases it will also disable the option of changing the Homepage. The situation becomes rather embracing because in most cases the Homepage will be changed into some erotic site. I was really shocked when it happened in my office with me and after that I started looking for ways to restore the settings. It’s not that surprising to find that Internet Explorer with its low security features is the target of majority of Hijacking attempt, whereas Firefox has a pretty healthy record against the same. May be this is another reason to prefer Firefox rather than Internet Explorer. One of the most powerful anti Browser Hijacking tool is:HijackThis
HijackThis was originally created by Merijn Bellekom, and later sold to Trend Micro. It still remains as a freeware. HijackThis basically detect Malware by tracking the common methods used by Hijackers. It does not compare the list with a database of Malware list as in the case of other spy ware removers. Hence false warnings are imminent. HijackThis is pretty easy to use but is a very dangerous tool in the hands of a user who is not an expert in Spy Wares. The official Trend Micro site issues the following warning “HijackThis does not determine what is good or bad. Do not make any changes to your computer settings unless you are an expert computer user.”
But there is no need to be sad about it, there is huge number of forums where you can paste your HijackThis log and get Help from. One of them and one I use frequently is Cyber Tech Help. Or if you want to do it yourself without any help, you can then search in internet where the List populated by HijackThis is indeed a Malware. But I don’t take any responsibility about the side effects of such a step.
Another set of spy wares affect your USB drives. In most of the cases you get infected by a Flash Malware when you use them in a public computer mostly at cyber cafes etc. In most of the cases the only option left will be formatting the pen drive. But this will result in data loss. Flash Disinfector by sUBs is a tool for removing most of these Flash Malwares. It can be used to remove these Malwares from both computer and Flash drives. It’s pretty simple to use. Save the file then run the software. The software will ask you to insert the affected Flash Drive. Your desktop will disappear for a moment and then reappear. That’s it….
