Geeky Ninja

DomainLogr: Evaluate Your Domains for Free

Sharninder — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:07:00 +0000

If you own and run a blog or a website of any kind, I’m sure there’d have been times when you wanted to find out the value of your website, if only to massage your ego a bit, or you were actually considering selling the site and wanted an accurate valuation for all the hard work that you’ve put into to.

The next time you have the urge to know the value of your masterpiece website, give DomainLogr a try.

DomainLogr is a simple website that looks at a number of parameters, such as Alexa ranking, Google Pagerank, number of backlinks etc and comes up with a value for your website.

Features:

No need to signup
Simple and Easy to use tool that puts a dollar value to your website
Takes into account multiple parameters to provide a fair value
The results are stored online so you can visit them later for comparisons

Check out DomainLogr at http://domainlogr.com

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How To view iPad version of websites on your Computer

Sharninder — Sun, 30 May 2010 18:23:26 +0000

The iPad has been a roaring success. There are no two ways about it. It is an awesome device and the built-in web browser is the best in it’s class.

Even though most websites work perfectly fine on an iPad, a lot of web publishers have optimized versions of their websites available for just the iPad. Often, the iPad optimized versions are designed with a touch interface in mind but sometimes the desingers get a little more creative and take the single tasking focussed of the iPad and design an interface that is not only a delight to use on the iPad, but would also serve as a better interface for the desktop version.

Take, for example, the iPad version of Gmail. The regular desktop browser based Gmail is fun to use and, IMHO, has one of the best interfaces for email on the web. But, the iPad optimized version of Gmail takes GTD to a whole new level.

If you want to use the iPad version of Gmail on your desktop computer, all you’ve got to do is fool Gmail into thinking that you’re actually visiting the site from your iPad instead of your desktop browser.

Launch Firefox and Install the User Agent Switcher extension from the add-ons directory.

Now, go to the Tools menu and edit the user agent settings from the Tools->Default User Agents->Edit User agents menu. You can add a new user agent for the iPad by clicking the New button and entering the following values in the window that pops up.

The most important value that you need to add is the “User Agent” one. Set it to the following:

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

Just copy the rest of the settings from the image above and you’re all set. Set firefox to use the new iPad setting as the default user agent and browse over the Gmail and you’ll be presented with the iPad optimized version of Gmail. You can also try it with any other site that has an iPad optimized version.

In theory, this trick will work with any browser but since I’ve used a Firefox extension to switch the user agent, I’m tied to the Firefox browser. If you can change the user agent in your favorite browser, you can use this trick on that browser too.

How To Create Your Own PDF Encyclopedia From Wikipedia Articles

Sharninder — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:50:38 +0000

As a child, my parents used to present me with an encyclopedia every year on my birthday. It started around the time I was in the second grade or so and continued till I was around 14. I still remember the joy I used to get reading up those thick books crammed with information about this wonderful world of ours (Yes, I was and still am a geek).

As I grew up and the Internet came into my life, all my reading has more or less shifted online. I still like reading encyclopedias and learning about new stuff but instead of reading real books, I now go to Wikipedia for that same pleasure that Encyclopedias used to give me till a couple of years back.

The only problem with wikipedia is that, I can’t really read it on the go. Sure, I they do have a mobile optimized interface and GPRS/Edge/3G is almost everywhere but it still isn’t as convenient as having a real book at your bedside all the time … Unless, there is a way to print a collection of articles from Wikipedia and read those … Just like a real book.

Well, it turns out there is. Wikipedia has developed a Custom Book Creator tool that you can use for this very purpose.

Making a PDF book out of Wikipedia Articles

Start the Book Creator tool using the link given above. You will now see a rectangular box on the top of all Wikipedia pages that you surf to.

Now, you can just browse through wikipedia as you normally would. When you come across an article that you’d want to have a copy of in your PDF book, Add the page to your book, using the link in the Book Creator box on the top of the page.

Repeat the same process to add any number of pages that you want in your book. When you’re done, click the Show Book link.

You can now give your book a title and also drag and drop the pages to change their ordering. When you’re done with that, just hit the Download button to download a PDF copy of your book. You also have the option of downloading the book in the Opendocument text format.

If you’re feeling generous, though, I’d suggest that you buy the printed book and support the wikipedia foundation.

If you’re logged in to Wikipedia (I didn’t try this), Wikipedia will store your books in your user directory and the advanced users can even edit the template and change the layout of the PDF file that is created.

Trim your MP3 files online for Free

Sharninder — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:56:08 +0000

Before I got the iPhone, I used to own a Nokia E50 that I was (at the time) absolutely in love with. It was the first phone I owned that could play real MP3 files without the need to convert them to some esoteric light weight format.

The E50 could also use MP3 files as ringtones and that was arguably my favorite feature. Taking an MP3 and trimming it precisely to get just the coolest part of the song was something I used to spend a lot of time at – Not because the process took time, but because for this process I had to use an Audio processing software and, I’ll be the first to confess, I’m not good at those. I chose Audacity for the purpose which seemed to be the easiest to use, but even that had a problem. I had to be on my desktop to use it.

Now, after all these years, the cloud has finally come to my rescue. Today, I came across a cool little web application called Cut Mp3 that lets the user upload an audio file and cut portions of it using an interface that is so simple that even your grandma can understand !

To trim an MP3 of your choice, you must first upload the MP3 by clicking on the Open MP3 button. Select the file that you want to trim and depending on your internet speed, you’ll be presented with a screen similar to the one below.

You can listen to the audio by clicking the Play button and find the exact spot that you want to trim file from.

Once you’ve found the part from where you want the trim to start, bring the Start Slider to that position and then play on to find the part where you want the music to end. Bring the Stop Slider to that position.

You’ll see the size of the split’ted file and the exact positions in the box below the sliders. Press Cut to let Cut MP3 do it’s magic. Save the resulting file on your desktop and you’re good to go.

Cut MP3 is free to use and doesn’t even require you to register.

Cut MP3 is an easy to use website that provides a pretty useful service. Give the site a try and let me know what you think.

Watch hundreds of TV channels for Free using TV Chrome

Sharninder — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:01:42 +0000

In the past couple of years, the Internet has taken over and changed a lot of our media consumption habits. From newspapers to magazines and even movies, everything is available online. With more and more publishers taking the online route, it would be safe to say that in a couple of years the Internet will take over as the sole medium of distribution for media producers such as newspaper publishers and movie studios.

There is still one medium, though, that hasn’t really taken to the Internet in a big way and that is Television.

Sure, there are websites such as Hulu that let you watch TV shows at your own leisure, but well, Hulu doesn’t work outside the US and that for me is a big deal breaker, considering I and a majority of the readers of this blog stay outside the US.

If Live TV is all you crave and nothing else works for you, download and install TV Chrome right now.

TV Chrome is a plugin for Google’s Chrome web browser that lets you access hundreds of TV channels from around the world for free. Installation, like all Chrome plugins, is swift and easy. Just click the “Get TV Chrome” link and click Continue to let Chrome download and install the extension.

TV Chrome installs a tiny little icon next to the address bar of your browser. To start watching TV, just click the TV Chrome icon.

When you click the icon, you’ll be presented with a list of channels from around the world, sorted according to countries as well as genres.

Select the channel that you want to watch from one of the two categories and the channel will start playing, almost immediately, in another pop-up window.

One thing that you might face a problem with is that most of these channels require the browser to include the windows media player plugin. Chrome doesn’t come with this plugin by default and if you don’t see a link to download the plugin in the TV window itself, then download it from this page.

I know the page says that the plugin is for firefox, but trust me, it works.

After you’ve installed the plugin, you might have to restart Chrome for the plugin to be enabled. Restart the browser and try watching TV now.

Congratulations ! Have fun watching all the awesome channels available for your viewing pleasure now.

Random Posts

Live PDF: Search PDF Files using Google or Bing

Sharninder — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 08:02:38 +0000

Almost all search engines support searching inside PDF files and almost all of them have special keywords that the user can pass if you want them to return only PDF related results, but by default the results that you see for any query are mixed with regular web links as well PDF files.

If you’d like to see results from only PDF files from Google and don’t remember the special keywords for it, try Live PDF.

Live PDF is a free web service that lets you search PDF files from around the internet using either Google or Bing. The search engine to be chosen can be selected by the user.

The links that you get in the search results point directly to the PDF file so downloading the linked file is as easy as right-clicking and selecting the Save Link As option.

[Mac] How To use Automator to Test your Website’s iPhone version

Sharninder — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:36:32 +0000

Before the iPhone came, only the largest websites had a separate version exclusively for mobile visitors which was usually based on WAP. And since there weren’t too many mobile visitors anyway, a lot of site owners just didn’t bother with creating a lighter version of their websites. The mobile web was a mess and those of us (un)fortunate enough to have meddled with it back then were a bruised lot !

The iPhone definitely changed the mobile web landscape for the better. The iPhone’s browser was probably the first mobile browser that could actually display regular websites almost as well as desktop based browsers.

But, the consumers wanted even more. They weren’t happy with pinching, zooming and double tapping their way around to navigate a website and wanted all websites to have a version for the iPhone.

So, let’s say you have made the decision to build an iPhone version of your website, coded it all up and now want a way to test your new iPhone optimized site. What are your options ?

If you’re using OS X and are not afraid of installing the iPhone SDK, you can use the bundled emulator to browse through to your site and see how it looks. If you’re not using OS X, then you can use one of the many sites online that let you do the same. The problem with these websites is that they’re not very accurate and the results depend on the desktop browser that you’re using to access those sites.

The third option is the one that we’re going to talk about today. We’ll be using Automator to create a workflow that’ll let you see how your site would look like on an iPhone.

First of all, you need to download and install the Website Popup action.

Once, the action is installed, Launch Automator and select the Workflow template.

Select the action titled “Get Specified URLs” from the library. Remove the apple.com URL from the list and add your website’s URL.

The next step is to search for the “Website Popup” action that you just installed and drag it over to the workflow area.

By default, the Website Popup action displays the website that you pass to it in a large window as would be displayed by a regular desktop browser. To make it display an iPhone sized window, select both the Site size and User agent as iPhone.

That’s it. Save the workflow as an Application and quit Automator. Execute the workflow Application to look at your site in all it’s iPhone enabled glory.

Automator is an awesome tool that I’ve been exploring a lot lately. Let me know if you guys would want to see more automator related posts. Are there any specific tasks that you’d like me to help you automate ? Let me know in the comments.

How to add Facebook chat to iChat on Mac OS X

Sharninder — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:47:38 +0000

Facebook is the social media giant that is showing no signs of stopping. Apart from being a regular social media website for people to interact with their friends (and strangers, in some cases), Facebook has also been trying to get into the instant messaging game which has till now been dominated by Google’s GTalk and Yahoo’s Messenger.

Even though GTalk is relatively new compared to Yahoo messenger, it has quickly become the favorite instant messaging client of a lot of people because of two main reasons, in my opinion. The first reason is that the GTalk client itself is extremely light and efficient and the second reason, and I think this is the major one, is that the GTalk protocol is based on open standards, which allows users to log in to google’s instant messaging network using many of the excellent free and open source clients available such as Pidgin, Adium and the like, and not depend only on Google’s official client which as of this writing is only available for Windows.

Facebook has also now taken a similar approach in their quest for IM domination. They have recently launched an XMPP compatible gateway for their chat protocol, which basically means that you can now connect to and chat with your facebook buddies via any IM client that supports XMPP including the friendly iChat.

To add Facebook chat to iChat, go to the Preferences menu and click the ‘+’ button to add a new account to iChat.

Select Jabber as the account type, type your Facebook username (which you can get from your Facebook Account Settings page) in the form username@chat.facebook.com, enter your Facebook password and under Server Options enter ‘chat.facebook.com‘ as the Server address and 5222 as the port. Keep the ‘Use ssl’ tick box unchecked.

That’s it. You can now login to facebook chat and chat with all your facebook buddies right from iChat without having to login to the Facebook site.

How To Get Music Off your iPhone

Sharninder — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:03:58 +0000

A couple of months back I wrote a post about how the iPod stores music internally and how you could use that knowledge to retrieve music stored on your iPod without using any external tools. This is made possible because of the fact that the iPod identifies itself as a USB connected external disk and let’s a user browse the contents of it’s filesystem using almost any operating system.

An iPhone on the other hand is an even more closed system than the iPod. While Apple atleast has opened the filesystem of an iPod, the iPhone doesn’t even let a user browse it’s filesystem contents. The only way then to manage the music on your iPhone is using a compatible version of iTunes. Right ?

Well, yes and no. While it is true that the only official method to manage music on the iPhone is using iTunes, a lot of enterprising hackers have been able to decrypt the protocol that iTunes uses to communicate with the iPhone and have created standalone utilities that let a user do stuff that Apple never wanted iTunes to do, like copy music off an iPhone.

One such utility is expod.

expod is a Mac OS X application that lets you copy all the music off your iPhone without using iTunes. expod works not only with iPhones but can be used to recover music from iPods and iPod touch’es too. It recognizes playlists that you might have created on the phone and also recognizes the metadata, i.e., the Artist and Album information, if any, embedded in the music files.

To get started, just download the expod DMG file, open it and copy the expod binary to your Mac’s Applications folder.

Connect your iPhone/iPod to your computer and launch expod.

If you see the above screen when you first launch expod with your iPod plugged in, don’t worry ! Expod will take a couple of seconds to scan your device and will present you a list of all the songs on your device.

expod displays a list of the playlists on your player on the left sidebar and a list of all the songs on the right hand side of the window. Select a playlist from the sidebar and the songs in that list will be displayed on the right.

To copy a song to your computer, just select it and press the Extract button. If you want to copy multiple songs in one go, hold down the Apple key while selecting the songs using the mouse. Or you can just shift-select to select consecutive songs. Once, you’ve selected the songs that you want to copy, Press the Extract button.

That’s it. Specify the location that you want to copy the music to, and expod will extract all the music from your iPhone/iPod and copy it to your computer.

Monitor your websites for free using WasitUp?

Sharninder — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:06:33 +0000

Even though datacenter technologies have come a long way, downtimes are still a reality that most of us bloggers have to face at one point or another. Your web host may offer a 99.999 % uptime guarantee but the fact that no host gives a 100% uptime guarantee proves the point that as there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is also no perfect webhost.

So, what do you do when your website inevitably goes down ? Inform your webhost about it ? Open a support ticket sit in one corner of your house sulking ?

While it is true that you can’t do much to bring your website up once it’s down, you can definitely reduce the downtime by informing your webhost about it as soon as you come to know about it.

Wasitup makes the process of monitoring your website as easy as letting them know the URL of your website and the email address to contact when the website goes down.

You can monitor upto 10 websites for free and WasitUp checks each of those websites every 5 minutes to see if they’re responding or not.

If you’ve filled up your quota of 10 websites, you can go to the Manage Monitorings link and remove some URLs from the list to make room for some more.

While website monitoring services are dime-a-dozen and some of them offer a lot many features, WasitUp distinguishes itself from the crowd by being the simplest service possible for the task. And it gets my vote for exactly the same reason.

Do you guys use any service to monitor your website for uptime ? Which are your favorites services for the purpose ?

Geeky Ninja

DomainLogr: Evaluate Your Domains for Free

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How To view iPad version of websites on your Computer

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How To Create Your Own PDF Encyclopedia From Wikipedia Articles

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Trim your MP3 files online for Free

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Watch hundreds of TV channels for Free using TV Chrome

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Live PDF: Search PDF Files using Google or Bing

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[Mac] How To use Automator to Test your Website’s iPhone version

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How to add Facebook chat to iChat on Mac OS X

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How To Get Music Off your iPhone

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Monitor your websites for free using WasitUp?

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