Online Observations

A great place online for all your tools and utilities needs

If you are a person who has to provide IT support to your friends and family, then I have found just the thing for you, but before that, answer this question – how many times have you asked a family member to go download AVG and have them come back to you asking where to download it from? Yes, I though so. Well the person who has put together this site (hang on, I will reveal the name in a second) has had an even worse experience. His family member accidentally downloaded spyware when he asked her to AVG from FileHippo.

So, he decided that he had had enough, and he put together a site where he will start storing all utilities that you would ever need, so that he can provide safe links to his family and friends for downloading software. And he made it public so that others can benefit from this store as well. Allow me to introduce MSunderground – an add free repository of useful tools and utilities (and here’s the link to the incident with his family member).

This is the “promise” of the site: We want to provide the easiest means possible for people to get the software they need. Without ads, flashy banners, and built in adware.

And he intends to be free forever for this service. But if it becomes popular, all these files have to be stored somewhere, and all the bandwidth has to be paid for, and so he has a link where if you like, you can donate to the cause. I hope many people donate to him so that he can meet the cost of hosting and bandwidth for this great site.

And I wish that this site becomes larger than all those stupid money-grubbing download sites.

Zemanta is coming of age

Actually, Zemanta is pretty mature now, IMO. I have covered Zemanta before here and here. When I gave it a try, I stopped using them because they were not relevant, and they didn’t have a Windows Live Writer plugin. They are better at both these things now. I am writing this post from Windows LiveWriter and I have the plugin for Zemanta installed on it that allows me to enrich my blog post using their suggestions. For instance, I definitely wanted to insert a logo of Zemanta at the beginning of their post, and it has rightly presented me with a number images, out of which one of the options is the Zemanta logo which you see displayed right there in the beginning of the post.

There are several nifty things that Zemanta allows you to do. If you create a login on their service, it allows you to save preferences in it. One of the preferences is that you can specify “My Sources” which causes Zemanta to make suggestions from only your sources – these can be your blogs, your flickr accounts, and more. This is fairly useful, IMO.

One more thing that is nice is that if you are a Zemanta user, then content that you create finds its way into the Zemanda related posts recommendation engine, which means that it will be suggested to other bloggers who use the tool, causing them to link to you which is great for generating traffic, which is nice. There are other nice things such as you can get statistics on their website about how much your content has been linked by others and more (I will write more on this when I get a chance to use this feature).

Here are some related posts that Zemanta has suggested to me:

Zemanta Gets an Update

Blog better and quicker with Zemanta

Off Topic: Zemanta – a Tool for Bloggers

All is not pretty though when you use Zemanta. For instance, the images that it inserts into the blog post are hot-linked to the source. So the image is actually being pulled from the server where it is originally hosted – even if it has the right licensing for it to be used in a post, a lot of people don’t like any hot-linking. Not sure what Zemanta can do to avoid this, but as a blogger you may want to get some manual work going.

Another issue is in the Windows LiveWriter plugin – in here, if I use the Zemanta bar to insert a link or something, I can’t Undo is. By that I mean, Ctrl+Z doesn’t undo the insertion. I have to manually remove it. Very annoying.

Still, I think its a great tool and a great service for bloggers.

YouTube for Audio

I was recently looking for a service like YouTube where one can host audio files for free. While YouTube is great for hosting video files, it just doesn’t have any support for audio. So, where could I go? I didn’t want just any file hosting service. I wanted some place where I could upload the audio file, and then get a code to embed this file in various web pages if I wanted. I wanted to track how many times the file has been listened to.

After much searching and rejecting tons of file hosting sites, I came about the perfect candidate: HoundBite. HoundBite is a site which lets you host audio clips by either uploading onto the site, or even simply recording directly. The size of the uploaded clips cannot be more than 8 MB, and the length of recording cannot be more than 15 minutes. That fell right within my requirements of what I needed.

So, if you are looking for a YouTube like site but for audio, then give HoundBite a try.

Blog to WordPress from your iPhone

Do you have a blog on WordPress.com? Or do you host your own blog using the WordPress blogging system? On top of this, do you own an iPhone? Well, if it’s yes for the above, then it would be cool to be able to blog from your iPhone using a native iPhone app. And that is exactly what this post is about. WordPress does have a native iPhone App.

You can download this application from the App Store of course. To gather more information about this application, you should visit the WordPress iPhone site. I am about to install it on my iPhone as well as on my iPod Touch. Mobile blogging in its finest form, I say.

Convert Html to PDF

I am a great fan of free tools on the Internet. Tools that do only one thing, and do it well. I don’t care if they are ad supported. That’s what keeps them free after all. And one such tool is hosted on a website called http://html-pdf-converter.com/. As it is obvious by the name, it converts any html page to PDF.

It works simply enough, when you navigate to its home page (http://html-pdf-converter.com/), it asks you to specify the URL of the html page that you want to convert (yes, that is the only caveat, that it has to be hosted on the Internet); then you click a button, and after some gears turn in the background, you get a prompt to download the PDF file which represents the HTML page you just converted.

As I said, it does ONE THING, and DOES IT WELL. Perfect for downloading articles into PDF format from blogs, and then being able to read them offline (or if you have a Kindle, then you are all set).

Make beautiful charts online for free

What is the best way to describe a really cool online service when you come across it? By making a simple to follow chart for everyone so that they can get started on using it immediately.

Please follow the chart to the left, and I promise you that you won’t be disappointed. Of course, that is in case you are looking for an online utility to quickly put together some diagrams.

LovelyCharts is a service which is different from so many of its competitors online. The difference? Charts made in this service are actually very lovely. It has some very beautiful symbol graphics that cane be utilized in your diagrams. It is fairly easy to use and work with.

I made the chart above in less than 5 minutes. That is how simple it is. The best thing about this service is that it is completely free. No advertisements, no core features missing, and complete privacy of your documents. This alone takes it above most of the competitors.

Of course, there is a premium account, but the features that it makes available are more nice to have – collaboration features, history management, etc.

The toolset for LovelyCharts includes flowcharts, sitemaps, network diagrams, people diagrams, basic symbols, and wire frames. This and other bare minimum features make the tool very simple to use indeed.

Well, you now know what process to follow when you need to quickly put together some diagram.

Move over Meebo, welcome IMO.IM

Meebo as many of you know used to be the final destination for web-based multi-client instant messaging. it had support for a variety of messaging platforms such as yahoo, aim, etc. Well, recently I discovered IMO.IM, and I have to say I got blown away by its simple ease of use and accessibility.

IMO supports MSN, Yahoo, AIM/ICQ, Google Talk, MySpace, and Skype (yes, you read it right). That is a great list and in my opinion covers most of the chatting platforms out there (maybe they are missing Facebook and Orkut, but they may come soon). On top of providing Instant Messaging facilities on the above mentioned service, IMO provides Voice and Video as well on all these services (and all this through a browser, of course).

But, its not just the fact that there are so many features available on IMO which makes it a very good service to use. There is also the fact that it is insanely simple to use. I can go in there and get set in literally less than half a minute. I don’t need to create any logins, etc. I think that makes it a very good option for quickly hopping over to when you want to quickly have a chat with some of your Yahoo contacts, but you don’t have access to your machine, and the computer you are on, doesn’t have YIM installed (or any number of similar scenarios).

Oh, by the way, I didn’t even go through a fraction of the total feature set. That’s because I haven’t had the need to use it all. But do check it out. Go IMO.IM.