Improve Photography. How Does Your Website Design Look on Mobile Phones and Tablets? Learn about free tools that will help you test your website design on different mobile phones like the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, etc. but from a desktop computer. The world has more Internet enabled mobile phones than computers but still, we often spend more time testing our site’s design on desktop browsers than mobile screens. We are more curious to know if our site looks good on the Windows version of Safari browser than say on an Android phone though more users could be accessing our site through the latter option. There are only three major desktop operating systems and four major desktop browsers.
Plus we have excellent tools like Browser Shots and Adobe’s Browser Lab that help us understand how our website design looks like across all the permutations and combinations of desktop browsers and OSs. There are however a couple of good options that will let you test your site design on the most popular mobile OSs without you having to own the device. Convert a Video into an Animated GIF Image - Tutorial.
This video tutorial describes how you can easily convert videos into animated GIF images using free tools. Animated GIF images may remind you of those cluttered and distracting homepages of the Geocities era but take a peek at this impressive tumblr blog and it might forever change the way you think of GIFs. The site features a brilliant collection of GIF animations created using frames of classic movie scenes that play in an endless loop. Here are some examples: There are free tools available that let you easily convert video clips into animated GIFs that you can later host on sites like Flickr or Tumblr – not all image hosting sites support animated GIFs but the one mentioned here do.
This is a two-step process – first convert the video into a sequence of image frames and then assemble these frames into a looping GIF animation with some custom delay. Step 1: Download FFmpeg for Windows from sourceforge.net and extract the ffmpeg.exe file to, say, the c:\ffmpeg\ folder. Online Plagiarism - Find Websites that are Copying your Content. Find sites that have either lifted your web content verbatim or have modified it slightly to make it look original. Free tools for checking online plagiarism. Copyscape is one of the more popular plagiarism detection tools that helps you identify other web sites that may have copied your content without permission.
Simply enter your web address and Copyscape will try to find other pages on the web that have either lifted your content verbatim or have modified it slightly to make it look original. The free version of Copyscape however offers only a limited set of features and you cannot perform more than a couple of scans per month (they mostly restrict queries based on your IP address). Check for Online Plagiarism with Blekko If you have been looking for some good alternatives to Copyscape, meet Blekko.
This is actually a search engine but you may use it for plagiarism detection as well. Once you are on Blekko, enter your domain name followed by /domainduptext (example). Related stories: How to Choose the Right Fonts for your Design Project - Flowchart. 18 Jul 2012 If you are looking to find the right kind of font /typeface for your design project, this font selection flowchart should come handy. couch mode print story If you are looking to find the right kind of font /typeface for designing your book, your website logo, for an handwritten invitation letter or a font for annotating an illustration, this flowchart from graphic designer Julian Hansen should come handy.
Start from the center of the flowchart, pick the type of your design project – it could be a logo, a book or something else – answer a couple of (sometimes funny) questions and you will quickly discover the most appropriate font family for your project. Also see: Find the Right Chart for your Data Julian has considered only the top 100 fonts for her typeface selection chart and you may therefore not find every single font here.
WordPress Tips - Things To Do After Installing Wordpress. You can install WordPress in 2 easy steps but it is recommended that you tweak some of the default settings to optimize the performance and also improve the security of your WordPress website. These suggestions are only applicable to self-hosted WordPress.org sites and not WordPress.com blogs. Also, I assume that you are running WordPress on Apache under Linux. The guide is now updated for WordPress 4.2. Let’s get started: 1. WordPress store all your uploaded images and files in the wp-content/uploads folder. Open your wp-config.php file and add the following lines to change the location of the wp-content folder.
Define( 'WP_CONTENT_URL', ' ); define( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR', $_SERVER['HOME'] . 2. If you look at the HTML source code of your WordPress site, you will find a couple of meta tags in the header that aren’t really required. 3. Options All -Indexes 4. Add_filter( 'pre_comment_content', 'esc_html' ); 5. Define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false); 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Provide a Better Reading Experience in WordPress with Couch Mode. Learn how to provide a clutter-free and better reading experience for your WordPress blog in few easy steps. This is like integrating Readability into WordPress.
The success of web based services like Readability, Pocket (or Read It Later) and Instapaper have proved that people prefer reading web pages in a clutter-free environment – one that is devoid of advertisements, widgets, social buttons and everything else that distracts the eye. Even the latest version of Apple Safari browser has Readability like features built-in – see the demo above – to help people enjoy web pages in a more beautiful layout. It will obviously be difficult for web publishers to switch to an ad-free layout, we all have families to feed, but what most of us can do is offer an alternate “comfortable” view should anyone wish to read our stories in a clutter-free layout. How to Create a Couch Mode for your Blog Step 1: Open your WordPress dashboard and create a new Page under Pages – > Add New. <a href="/read/<? How to Auto-Publish your RSS Feed to Twitter - Alternatives to FeedBurner Socialize. 16 Jul 2012 If you have been using FeedBurner to auto-publish your RSS Feed to Twitter, here are some good alternatives to switch to. couch mode print story Back in December 2009, Google added a new Socialize option in FeedBurner to help web publishers automatically publish their RSS feeds to Twitter.
You simply had to connect your Twitter account to FeedBurner and a tweet would be sent out as soon as any new article became available in your feed. Two years later, it looks like Google has silently dropped Twitter integration from FeedBurner as the Socialize option is no longer available in your FeedBurner dashboard. While the Social option is no longer available in FeedBurner, you can still get it back though a URL based hack. Log into your your Feedburner dashboard at feedburner.google.com and open any of your feeds. This should enable the Socialize option in your FeedBurner dashboard again.
Publish RSS Feeds to Twitter – Alternatives What do I use? How to Remove Location and Camera Data (EXIF) from Photographs. Before sharing your digital photographs over email or on a public website, learn how to remove the camera EXIF data, GPS location and other metadata from these images. This iconic Situation Room photograph, captured at the White House, has now been viewed more the 2.5 million times on the web. There’s little information available about the photograph but if you download the full-size version, you can get details about the camera model, the camera settings and even the software that were used to edit this picture before it was published online. This information is stored in every digital image, in the form of EXIF tags, and you can extract it using Windows Explorer or with the help of even the most basic image editing software.
In the case of mobile phones, your pictures may even include location information thus giving others an idea of the exact geographic coordinates where that shot was taken. See related guide: Tools for Reading & Editing EXIF Data. How to Create Good and Effective Web Content. 03 Jul 2012 How to create good and effective web content that your online audience is more likely to read and share on social sites. couch mode print story Writing for the web is no different than writing for print except for the fact that your online readers are constantly distracted and most won’t read your content word by word.
Here are some tips to help you create more web-friendly content that your online audience is more likely to read and share on the social web. These notes were initially part of a presentation that I delivered at the India Social summit. The web is like a battleground where you are continuously fighting against so many factors to grab the attention of the reader. Recommended reading: WordPress Security Tips - The Best Plugins to Protect WordPress. WordPress powered websites are often target for hackers. Here are the some of the best security plugins and tips to better protect your WordPress blog. About a month ago, this WordPress blog was hacked.
And since my other websites like ctrlq.org and hundredzeros.com are hosted on the same web server, the hacker successfully managed to wipe off all these sites from the Internet as well. The web hosting company says that it could have happened because one of the sites was running an older version of WordPress. The passwords weren’t compromised though as all the login activity happened from known IP addresses.
It was a tough period but fortunately, the deleted sites have been restored and the traffic is also back to normal. Here’s a list of changes I have done to improve the security of my WordPress blogs though the perpetual worry that such a thing can happen again will remain. #1. When you install a WordPress blog, the first user is called “admin” by default. . #2. . #3. Find. . #4. . #5. . #6. . #7.