Tag: Online Tools

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Reviews

10 Online Tools for Cross Browser Testing

Web designers and developers need to test their products before launch. Testing is the main phase before launching. So, testing their web products only on single browser or Single operating system leads to downfall, because once after launching people will be using the product from different parts of the world. So, testing it on different conditions will make the product success.

Before launching a website or while designing a website, web designers need to test their project on different operating system with different browsers. So, this is called testing browser compatibility or cross browser testing. Here are some useful online tools which will of great use to web designers and developers.

10 Online Tools for Cross Browser Testing

Spoon –

This tool allows you to check your website in different browsers such as IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Google Chrome and Opera directly from the web.

Crossbrowsertesting –

This tool helps us both in cross platform and cross browser testing. Just pick an OS, Select a browser and test your website.

Browsrcamp –

This tool allows you to test with MacOS X browsers and all you need to do is, enter the URL and get full length screen shots at different screen widths.

Adobe Browserlab –

Adobe Browserlab makes browser compatibility testing easier for you and it is the best and fastest tool for testing webpages across different environments like windows OS, Mac OSX, Linux and browsers like Firefox, IE, Safari etc.

Litmus –

Litmus shows you exactly how your designs look on every platform, across every popular web browser. Litmus is lightning-fast, reliable and affordable.

IE NetRenderer –

IE NetRenderer allows you to check how a website is rendered by Internet Explorer 7, 6 or 5.5. Just type in a URL in the field above and try it out – it’s free!

Browsershots –

Browsershots is a free open-source online service which creates screenshots of your web design in different browsers.

Browsercam –

Browsercam is a cross browser testing tool which has more than 90+ browsers, Linux, Win, Mac and even the presentation in different versions of browsers on mobile devices (BlackBerry, Win Mobile) can be tested.

Browser Photo –

Check Your Pages With Browser Photo! View actual photos of your Web pages on major browsers and computers.

IETester –

IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.

If you find any similar tools for checking browser compatibility, do share it with us 🙂

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Tips

How to Use Ultrasurf Proxy Software to Unblock Blocked Websites

Last time I had written post on Download ultra surf: Free desktop proxy software to unblock any website. Till now I’m using it effectively and it is helping me a lot to remove internet censorship.  This tutorial is for all those who are not aware of how they can use Ultra surf proxy software.

Download ultra surf and once download is completed. Simply start the software. Once you will run this software, it will try to connect to its server and if it’s successfully connected. You can start browsing directly from Internet explorer.

ultra-surf

How to Connect if I’m behind a Proxy firewall?

In some colleges and office, you need proxy settings to access internet. In this case open Ultra surf, click on options and configure your proxy settings to connect to internet. Now it will connect to its server using your provided proxy settings.

proxy_settings

How to configure different browsers to use Ultra surf settings ?

When you open Ultra surf, it will automatically configure your Internet explorer settings to use Ultra surf proxy settings. But if you want to use it on other browser like Mozilla firefox or anything else, you need to change the proxy settings of browser to use :

  • IP : 127.0.0.1
  • Port : 9666

I hope this tutorial will help you a lot to access useful sites which are accidentally blocked due to your firewall software or hardware in your organization.

Do let us know which other software do you use apart from Ultra surf ?

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Tips

How influential is your Twitter profile?

We all have heard of Google’s Page Rank and how it is used in the algorithm for giving you relevant search results. One way Google does is to determine how influential your website it. But how does one determine the influence of one website compared to the other. It is simple, it is by way of references or in case of search engine language we can call it back-links. Twitter Grader is a website which ranks your Twitter ID and gives you an indication of how influential it is.

Here I tried to find my level of influence on Twitter grader and I was ranked 1,574,610 out of over 6 million. I got a grade of 74 out of 100 which is like a rating. I looked up how they came up with this ranking and rating  and it seems they have a algorithm which they do not want to share. This is obviously because they do not want people to game the system.

But here are some of the things Twitter Grader takes into account to give you a ranking.

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  • The number of followers you have is very important. Even Twitter Grader accepts it is a easy way to create more followers by following people continuously and randomly. But what Twitter Grader also takes into account is what sort of influence your followers have.
  • Updates are also given weight in the rating. A decent amount of updates means you are taking care to revise your profile but too many updates can make you lose a few points as it would be more like spamming.
  • Follower vs Following ratio is important but it goes downwards once you start engageing regularly with a lot of updates. Another factor is how many of your tweets are re-tweeted.

I liked this web service as it gives me a good idea of how well I am doing with Twitter as I use it primarily to interact with people and share things online. For professional blogger it is important to have a Twitter ID which has significant influence. For someone in Internet marketing I guess it is absolutely important to have a Twitter account which is highly influential.

What do you think about it? Do check out Twitter Grader and drop in your comments.

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Reviews

Put YouTube videos in a loop

You Tube is a great way to look up videos especially if you have a decently fast internet connection. I often watch video from tech reviews, to documentaries and sometimes I love catching a song. You Tube is a great repository of music just as it is of videos. So playing a great song on You Tube is something many of us do a lot. The problem with You Tube is that unlike a media player on the computer we cannot get the song to play repeatedly. Well that problem is solved now.

youtube_loop

YouTube Repeater is a website which puts the video you are playing on You Tube in a continuous loop. You can search for videos in You Tube with the website itself.

These is another method which is when you are watching a Video on Youtube then you just need to change “youtube.com” to “youtuberepeater.com”. Changing the name of the domain puts the video in a loop. 😉

youtuberepeater

I still prefer using Chrome extension CoolIris for viewing and browsing for Videos online in You Tube but a continous loop is not present in that extension. I must say I like this idea of putting a video in a loop.

Do check out Youtube Repeater to try out this feature and let me know what you think of it through your comments.

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Reviews

Web tool to get rid of addiction to certain websites

Many of us who work in the business of internet we often have to work had at ignoring Facebook, Twitter and so many other distractions which sometimes are necessary to network but can also be a huge sap on the time you actually should be spending working.
Some companies block certain websites while some allow a more open environment and expect their employees to practice self control on not wasting too much time on social networks or on unproductive internet surfing. As far as self regulation is concerned here is a novel website which can allow you to regulate the amount of time you spend on a particular website.

visit_or_not

  • Enter the URL of the  website you want to restrict your visit. Do not use ‘http://’ with the URL.
  • Check the time you want as minimum between new visits to the website. It is 90 minutes by default.
  • When you click on “Create URL” you get a new url which is created by the website. Replace that url with your Bookmark to your favorite page.
  • Once you visit the page and close the Tab you cannot visit the page for the minimum time you have set.
  • The one draw back is this work only if you use it through Bookmarks on the browser. Same URl can easily be opened if you enter it in the address bar.

I liked this website as it also has a timer which can actually display a time you are spending on a particular website. I think more than controlling the time between visits a display of the actual time in minutes and seconds spent on a website can be a big wake up call. Do try out To visit or Not and drop in your comments.

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Reviews

Convert any URL to PDF

Sometimes you just like a pdf file of something you read on the internet. This is really needed when you read a tutorial or a online manual. One thing you want, would be a PDF document to read or even store. I reviewed Flexamail recently which allows you to from your email create a pdf document of a web page and fetch it as a PDF document. That service can only be used for a PDF document of 15MB as it has to be email friendly.

pdfmyurl

One of the main features of this is it allows any page to be converted into PDF. I checked with creating PDF of large size and it does work quite well so I guess size of the PDF to be generated will not be a issue.

I think the most exciting part of this service is that you can add this into your website or blog with a simple code being inserted in the web-page. I tried to see if there is a widget which can put up this code to create the PDF of the page automatically; but I did not come across any. I guess at the moment if you want visitors to download your webpage you have to manually enter this HTML code.

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<a href="http://pdfmyurl.com?url=www.opentracker.net">downlaod this page as pdf</a>

You can even directly link an customized image to

http://pdfmyurl.com?url=www.opentracker.net

This will allow a visitor to click on the image or link on your page and the page is converted to PDF. 😉

For people addicted to PDF there is also a bookmarket which is offered by the website and all you need to do is drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks in the browser and when you are at a page you want to convert to PDF just click on the bookmarklet.

Do check out PDF my URL and try it out. Do drop in your comments on what you think about this service.

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News

Watch television shows online

There are many sources to look up old movies but when it comes to Television shows it is not as simple as pulling up the Google page and typing in the name of the TV show. Last week I was reading a interesting post by Rishabh Agrawal on how you can watch full length movies on You Tube, I was intrigued to see if YouTube had something similar for television shows.

Well I was not disappointed and YouTube does have a channel where I came across many old and some new full length TV Shows.

tv_shows_youtube

About You Tube Shows Channel

  • Majority of the TV shows that come up are not really the latest episodes. Most of them are for you to catch up on old ones. I personally liked the Documentaries section which have a lot of shows which are quite recent.
  • Another great section is Comedy and it has some of the best TV shows of the past avaialble for free. For instance if you were growing up in India during the 80s you might enjoy looking up Fawlty Towers or even 21 Jumps Street.
  • No Indian TV shows as yet and that is a little unfortunate as there were some very good televisions in the past during the late 80s and early 90s.

Well next time you feel like watching something that you might have seen on TV, searching on You Tube Shows Channel might be worth it.

Categories
Reviews

Use a dictionary in Chorme browser to improve vocabulary [Video]

If you love to blog or write you might like to sit with a dictionary even though it is quite impractical. Not just so that you avoid spelling mistakes but also get the exact context of a word you come across. Many of us might not have English as our first language of choice and this can be a bit of a problem when articulating exactly what you want.

The dictionary can be added through an extension in the Chrome browser and I am quite enjoying it. While writing this post I have already used it in twice and hence decided to record the video on how I can use different words or improve my choice of words using this extension.

use_dictionary_browser

An example is the word ‘articulating’ that I used before. It was not my first choice of word and I was planning to write ‘explaining’. But while reviewing part of the post I tested the extension. (See video at the end of the post)

About DictionaryTip

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  • A simple double click gets the dictionary started.
  • It has options to look up related information from dictionary.com, Wikipedia and much more.
  • Ironically when I added Google Dictionary it seemed not compatible with the extension.
  • It is quite easy to use with a popup appearing of your the dictionary after double clicking on any word of the text your are reading.

Video

What do you think? Will it help you improve your writing or even vocabulary? Or will you find it interesting just for a quick reference of a word you came across but were not sure about it’s meaning. Let me know through your comments.

Download: Dictionary Tip

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Reviews

Backup your online accounts in a jiffy

Imagine, you have all you important messages on Gmail (or any other free services for that matter)  and suddenly, a meteor strikes Google servers deleting all your data! or some Hacker intrudes your account and swipes it clean! What are you going to do? There no guarantee that you’ll get it back.

backupify

To prevent this horrifying situation, you can backup your data using a service called Backupify (powered by Amazon). This service can backup

  • Gmail
  • Twitter
  • Google Docs
  • Flickr
  • Facebook
  • Basecamp
  • WordPress
  • Delicious
  • Photobucket
  • Blogger
  • FriendFeed
  • More coming soon… (Tumblr, Youtube, RSSfeed)
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If you have a self hosted WordPress blog, you can also use the backupify plugin to backup all your blog post.

If you register your account now (before January 31, 2010), you’ll have an account free for life! So, what are you waiting for kiddies? Go get it! Otherwise, you’ll have to pay about $4/month.

Link: ZdNet Blogs

[Editor’s Note: This post is submitted by our guest blogger Suhas Sharma. He is a 16 year old tech geek who writes about technology at Suhastech.

If you, too would like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programs are here.]

Categories
Tips

Check if your content is repetitive with online tool

Getting excited about something new is very good but sometimes that excitement translates into enthusiasm and at other times it leads to recklessness. This is especially very true for a blogger, as sometimes when I get excited about something new to share I get lost in the excitement and end up writing a post. After a few days I realize I could have added a few more points, maybe covered more things.Sometimes I am unhappy that because of my excitement I have written some words in a repetitive way.

The repetitive words are fillers and often can take away from the quality of your post. I came across an website which counts the repetitive words I might have used. Did you notice how many times I have used ‘repetitive’ in this post until now? 🙂

repeated_word

About Word Counter

  • So you can see that I repeated the word ‘repetitive’ 4 times. Ideally I should have not repeated this word more than 2 or a maximum of 3 times.
  • What I did was copy-paste the top part of this post into this website called Word Counter. It checked the repeated words and gave me a list.
  • The website allows you to omit words like ‘if’, ‘to’ which obviously will be repeated often

Hope you find this website useful, I certainly will be using it for a quick check on every post I write on DW. 😉 Improvement is a continuous process anyways. Let me know what you think about this online tool and if you think it will help you write better articles, posts or even reports.