If you’re a blogger and often have to draw good looking html tables, it may be a daunting task. Our favorite blogging tool, Windows Live Writer, though provides a native table creation utility but it lacks good formatting options.

Here is a better and quick way. First go to MS Excel and create the best looking table in the world. With various options in Excel 2007 ad Excel 2010 it is literally a matter of minutes. Once done simply select and copy the complete table.

Go to Windows Live Writer. Right click where you would want to insert the table and choose Paste Special instead of Paste.

Select Keep Formatting, press Ok button and you have your HTML table generated.  (Check how the above table rendered on one our earlier articles)

Recommended: 43 Hand Picked Tools for Bloggers

Post from: Review Of Web

Bloggers: Create a beautiful looking HTML table in minutes

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I recently attended an excellent webinar conducted by Lon and Michelle from LearnCamtasia . One of the points Lon mentioned was regarding “Quality” settings of the production. He suggested to use 100% quality and don’t really bother about the default Camtasia settings.

The techie in me came into action and I then produced a 5 mins project (flv) in various settings just to see the impact quality settings would have on size of the published output

Here are the results (with some surprise) :

Graphs scales well for 60% -90% quality range with only a minor increase in size but as soon as the quality grows to 100%, size of the rendered video becomes ~4x the 90% quality settings! . Something beyond me. Any explanations for this behavior?

PS: Lon has came up with a new course on Camtasia and if you’re new or want to hone your skills in Camtasia, I would highly recommend this course. Check it here.

Post from: Review Of Web

Camtasia: See How File Size Increases with Quality

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As the name suggests, WordPress Review Plugins enables you to quickly and effortlessly put good looking reviews on your wordpress enabled websites. In this review we are going to compare two of the best wordpress review plugins providers out there wpReviewSite and wpReviewEngine. (ReviewOfWeb tried contacting MyReviewPlugin folks but the queries went unanswered, hence it is not included in the review]

As always, we will try to bring an unbiased opinion for the two products so that readers can take an informed decision before choosing to purchase a wordpress review plugin.

For the purpose of this review we have purchased two brand new domains Email AutoResponders Reviews and WordPress Membership Site Reviews. After a quick wordpress install, we installed wpReviewEngine on Email AutoResponders Reviews and wpReviewSite on WordPress Membership Site Reviews. Here is a detailed comparison and review for both these plugins

ReviewOfWeb’s View

Both plugins are just fine if you are looking for a basic review system in your wordpress enabled website.
However, we see wpReviewEngine folks have done a great job of including many helpful features to make reviewers life easy. Also, wpReviewEngine plugin has many more customization options available when compared to wpReviewSite. Given the good set of features, ease of customizations and nearly the same cost our vote goes to wpReviewEngine plugin

Over to readers, have you tried any of the plugins listed above? How would you rate them?

PS: Thanks Bob and Dan for agreeing to face the challenge.

Post from: Review Of Web

WordPress Review Plugins: wpReviewSite vs wpReviewEngine + Discount Codes

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Amazon Web Services has come up with a start-up challenge aimed for start-ups in 22 countries including US and India. This challenge is opened for those start-ups that use the AWS cloud computing platform.

Some important points to be noted:

• The contest is open for start-ups located in the 22 countries that are currently using or are in the process of using Amazon Web Services.
• Only those entrepreneurs or privately held businesses are invited to apply that have not generated more than $5 million USD in gross annual revenues or outside funding.
• The winner would be rich by $50,000 among other benefits. Complete list of prizes is available here.
• All eligible entrants completing the application form will receive $25 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits
• You can sign up here to get notified as soon as the challenge opens.

Post from: Review Of Web

Are you taking up the AWS Start Up Challenge 2010?

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The first version of our Recent Comments widget was a big success. Now, thanks to extensive customizations by Clemens Vargas Ramos we have come up with a new and much improved version of that widget.

Here is how the new improved widget works and how is it different from the rest:

1. This widget is completely customizable and now supports internationalization.
2. This widget does a quick search on all posts of the blog and save the blog-titles. The reason is, by default blogger comments do not contain the real post-title but kind of a pseudo title, i.e. the filename of the html file of the post.
3. This widget searches for all available posts of the blog – even with hundreds and thousand of posts. Apparently blogger has an upper limit of posts within a single feed at 500. Therefore the script makes repeatedly calls to feeds on blogs with more than 500 posts.  This search happens only once at load time of the script. I tested it with a blog with over 1300 posts and it behaves well and quick.
   Next the script calls the comment feed and displays the comments together with some other information. This script will find every single comment of a blog – even with thousands and tens of thousand of comments. This is the big difference when compared to similar blogger widgets available on the net.
4. Look and feel of the new widget is quite slick and Web2.0 ish.

Demo of this script is available here

• English (look at section “Recent Comments”)
• German (look at section “Letzte Kommentare”)

Download

• Right Click and download
• Unzip rcc.zip to get rcc.html
• Open the file rcc.html in a text editor like windows notepad. [Don't use text formating applications like Word or OpenOffice, these applications can damage the code]

Installation

1. Look for YOURBLOGNAME and replace YOURBLOGNAME with your blog name. Look for section “// user defined variables”.
2. The script is multilingual – adjust to your language: German, English (default) or even user defined by you! Look for section “// user defined variables”.
3. Adjust text, background colors and fonts with CSS if needed.
4. Copy the code into an HTML/Javascript-Widget of your sidebar.
5. You’re done. Enjoy the new widget! For further configuration look for section “Configuration:” within this script.

Please let us know your thoughts on this new widget in the comments section below.

If you like the above widget. Consider donating and encourage us to come up with more such widgets.

Post from: Review Of Web

Blogspot: New Recent Comments Widget 2.0

With our lives becoming increasingly dependent upon the internet and lifestyle that demands long hours in-front of the machine, we need a desktop based solution that can help us with managing day-to-day tasks and keep track of them.

One such task management software Swift To-Do List 7 Professional is our subject of review today. Swift To-Do List (henceforth referred as STDL) is the flagship product of Dextronet and they have recently released the new version 7.

Installation

Dextronet allows you to get a fully functional STDL 7 professional 30 days license for trial before making a decision to purchase it. The trial can be downloaded here. The installable is a 5.7 MB exe file. After downloading, it took about 30 sec to install the software on my machine powered by Windows XP Pro. I was greeted by a 7 step Quick Start Guide.

Features

The software come with a big list of features. I won’t be listing all here but the ones that appeal to me.
When you open STDL for the first time it uses the default database by the name MyTasks.stdl. You can choose to create a new database from the file menu.

• Back-Up and relocate database operations can be done at a click of a button. I like the fact that company has given importance to small things, like the “Database Info”  option available under Advanced node – can be quite handy when you make use of back-up softwares.

• There are a host of customization options available under File > options menu. Things like setting up the default database, look and feel of your GUI, setting up reminder etc can be done from this place. If you find yourself sharing your machine with others you may want to password protect your database. The option is available under File > Options > Encryption.
• Task can be organized using folders and folder can in turn have child folders. Folders are organized in the form of a tree view. This is how a typical set-up could like.

• If you don’t like the boring folder icons, you can choose from a list of 140 icons that are available on double clicking a particular folder. Numbers in the brackets show the number of tasks available in a given folder.
  Once a folder gets highlighted on the left, the corresponding tasks can be seen on the right hand side.

• Notes related to a particular task can be penned at the bottom. The whole flow is quite logical. Other than the default columns, you also have the facility to choose from various columns available under “Manage Columns”. Overall, the main window of Swift To-Do list would looks like this (Click to enlarge)

• Double click on a particular task and you will get various options to edit the task. For example, Setting the priority, due date, reminder, notes, adding attachments etc.
• Another important feature that is available only in the pro edition is task emailing. Especially important if you’re working in a team set-up.
• STDL can be run from the USB drive.
• STDL auto saves any entry that you make in the application. Apparently small but a MUST have feature in such softwares.
• You can get the complete list of features here
• Trivia- Keep this link handy when you plan to move your STDL 7 software from one machine to another.

Licensing and Cost

This software comes in three editions lite, standard and professional. Lite is free and quite limited in features. Standard will cost you $44.95 while Professional edition costs $88.95. You can get the detailed comparison for various editions on this page. STDL comes with an unconditional 90 days money back guarantee.

Minor Issues I noted

The only problem I found – nothing related to software per-se -  is the sales home page (landing page) which may not entice me enough to keep reading the copy further. I think they have focused more on telling benefits rather than the features. Geeks like me are normally sold on things like comparison charts (with the competition)

My views

A nice software at a reasonable price. Given a choice, I always prefer to have desktop based solutions rather than their online counterparts. It becomes easy for me to check and use the software even when I am in my car or sitting in a limited internet connectivity area. This software has my full recommendation in that area.

Other than the above, I can see that this kind of to-do list can be of utmost use to people like internet marketers who have to do mundane tasks each time they buy a domain. STDL, in such cases, can double up as a project management software. Lets say you have to buy 50 domains. On all those domains, things like setting up mail server, hosting, installing theme, installing plugins etc is required. With this software you can create a list of such tasks once. Create various domains names as folders on the left hand side tree view and then simply copy the tasks in each of the folders.
Going forward, I would love to see a feature whereby you can create a “task template” and import those tasks at a click of a button.

Discount Code

Dextronet has offered a 25% discount code to all readers of ReviewOfWeb. With this discount code, pro-edition would only cost $66.7 while standard would cost $33.7. Here is how you can avail the discount code:

1. Go to this page to buy professional edition or to this page to buy standard edition of STDL 7.
2. Enter billing details and the code REVIEWOFWEB in the Discount Code box. [This discount code is valid for 3 months and expires on 8th/Nov/2010.]
3. Review your order on the next page and you’re done.

Thanks Jiri for the nice offer.

Post from: Review Of Web

To-Do List Software Review – Swift To-Do List 7 + 25% Discount Code

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Recently while creating an opt-in form I had to incorporate this functionality in my squeeze page. Results that Google threw up, were either too complex or too simple which won’t suffice my need.

So, here, I have written a piece of code which will help me in future and hopefully you too!

This code uses two event handlers onfocus and onblur. The first one comes into the picture when focus is set on a particular object while second one comes into the picture when focus is just removed from an object.

<input onfocus="this.value = (this.value=='First Name')?'' : this.value;"
onblur="this.value = (this.value=='')? 'First Name' : this.value;"
type="text" name="MERGE1" value="First Name" size="0">;

Explanation:

• onfocus checks for the value First Name, if it is present, it clears the field.
• onblur check for the blank value. So say you bring your cursor to a particular field and then moves away from it without entering any value. This is where onblur event would insert the default value again.

Post from: Review Of Web

Code: Click on an edit box and make the text disappear

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Sometime back while working on excel 2010, it seems by mistake I disabled the option to use “cell drag and drop”. This feature allows you to drag the mouse and copy cells. If this option is disabled, your mouse pointer will never change to move pointer on selecting a particular cell.

Ok, here is what I mean. In the illustration shown below, mouse pointer is getting changed to move pointer as soon as I bring it to the edge of a cell.

There is some info available on the net for Excel 2003 and the earlier versions ie  by going to Tools > Options > Edit and checking "Allow cell drag and drop", you can enable this option but there is no information regarding the same for Excel 2007 and Excel 2010. So how can you enable this option in 2010?

1. Go to File > Options > Advanced > Enable file handle and cell drag-and-drop
2. Check this box.
3. Click OK and you’re done

I wish there was some “mapping file” available from Microsoft for mapping excel 2003 and earlier versions navigation to excel 2007/2010. It could save us a lot of time.

Post from: Review Of Web

Where to find Allow Cell Drag and Drop option in Excel 2010?

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