Online Observations

Url Shortening Service with a twist

You have probably heard of TinyUrl.com – a service that allows you to take very long Urls and create tiny Urls. There are other such services such as SnipUrl.com which offer a similar service. They all convert a long Url to a short Url.

The problem with such services is that when you are trying to convert a long Url that points to a website which is Not Safe For Work (NSFW). It’s impossible for the person who is clicking on the Url to determine where he/she is going.

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WordPress 2.5 is out

WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms ever just released their latest version: 2.5. The release promises a host of new features and improvements.

Largely the improvements are on the Administration side, where the complete UI has been changed to look much fresher. There has been a complete reorganization of the navigation and grouping of functions. Of course, like anything else, there has been a mixed response from early adopters.

Here are a few reviews from around the web: Habitually Good WordPress Review; a review from Socialized Software; and one from Astheria.

As for the bad reviews, most people are complaining of broken plugins or widgets. That is not a problem if you are just installing a new setup. We recommend that you do a test run on a separate server before installing on your main if you are upgrading.

Adobe Photoshop Express looks nice

Adobe recently launched an online version of Photoshop called Photoshop Express. It is an online Photo Sharing and Editing service. You can upload photos, create albums, share albums for others to view.

Editing Capabilities

You can perform a variety of edits on your images as can be seen in the screen shot here.

From basic manipulations such as cropping and rotating, to some neat effects such as Pop Color. What is very interesting with all the edits is that after you save your changes, Photoshop Express doesn’t actually change the original image, rather it applies the effects every time the photo is rendered.

This way, you can go back to your original whenever you want (even if that is a few weeks later).

The overall UI is pretty responsive. As expected, it is built in Flash, and takes only a little while to load initially. Once it is loaded, you really can’t help but smile at how smoothly the whole User Interface works. Whenever you select an effect to apply to your image from the ones available, you get about 6 presets of the effect, which you can view in your actual image by hovering your mouse over each of the presets (see below).

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Zemanta – a blogger’s aide? Maybe…

Here’s a service which can help those of us who are not the most creative of bloggers. We don’t come up with relevant images for the blog post that we are writing. Nor can we find the best links or resources on the Internet which are relevant to what we are writing and thus can add value for our readers.

The service is called Zemanta. The service integrates with popular blogging platforms and monitors what you are writing. It then fetches images, links, articles, tag suggestions, etc. from the Internet for inclusion in your posts.

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Geeking to Live

"Geek to Live" is the motto at LifeHacker. I visit this site about 3-5 times a day. The team at LH is dedicated to making our life easier. You can almost always find something new there which can help you perform something in your life in a more effective way. The tips you find there are a mix of technical/computer-geek type and tips that simplify your life in general (such as this Grocery List for Smart Eating at Work).

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Google observing the Earth hour by turning out the lights

Google Israel is observing the Earth Hour and urging all Israeli’s to do so. They have changed their home page to an all black theme to remind everyone to turn out their lights as well for an hour. This is not an attempt to reduce emissions by Google (by changing to a black theme); in fact, it is not clear that a black UI actually reduces electricity consumption (as many people believe). All I wonder is why Google Israel only? Why not others or why not Google.com?

Anyway, I think that the gesture is great nevertheless. As one of the most eyeballed pages on the Internet, Google can have a huge impact on the awareness of initiatives such as the Earth Hour. Way to go, Google!

In case the page is back to normal and you wish to see it in its black glory, I froze the page here.

Freeze a website in time

What do you do when you want to show your friend a website? you probably send them the Url of the website. What if you know that the content of the website will change before your friend gets to view it, what do you do then? Well, you freeze it.

Freezepage.com is a site which allows you to take instant snapshots of any site (or so I thought).

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