Sunday, August 31, 2008
Work
Google 404 Pages Help Your Web Visitors Find the Right Page
8:00AM Kevin Purdy | Google offers a free, embeddable widget for web site owners that can help fight back against link typos, permalink problems, and other issues that send visitors to non-existent pages. The customisable JavaScript widget suggests the URLs on your site closest to the link visitors come in on, and offer a search box pre-loaded with search terms relevant to the bad link. Anyone who’s run a site for a long while knows that page URLs are a hard thing to keep linked and standing properly, and this widget is a nice step to preventing aggravation on both sides of the site. The widget requires signing up for a free Google Webmaster account and heading to the Tools menu, then the “Enhance 404 pages” link. Custom 404 pages [Google via Google Blogoscoped] More »
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Regift Without Guilt (or Getting Caught)
7:00AM Kevin Purdy | The Wise Bread blog has a few tips for anyone who’s received such a nice thought from far-away relatives or friends who aren’t quite hip to their tastes. If Craigslist, eBay, and same-store returns can’t achieve equilibrium, you can turn it around, but not without taking a few precautions against getting caught. For example: Don’t wait too long to regift. … The older the brand new item becomes, the more obvious it becomes that this is a regift. If you can no longer find the product in the stores, if the packaging has been updated or if the company that made it went out of business ages ago, you’re stuck with that item. By all means try to sell it or give it to charity, but as a regift it stinks of “here’s an old thing I found in my basement, but hey, it’s never been used!” For more regifting tips, and a few laughs about regifting horror stories, check out Regiftable.com. Photo by tornatore. Regifting: a simple how-to guide [Wise Bread] More »
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GutenMark Prettifies Project Gutenberg Ebooks
6:00AM Kevin Purdy | Windows/Mac/Linux: Free ebook converter GutenMark takes plain ebooks from the Project Gutenberg site and converts them into chapter-separated HTML files, italicizes words in foreign languages, removes all-caps instances, and much, much more. One of the main uses of GutenMark is to make ebooks much easier to read on mobile screens, removing hard line breaks and other annoyances that come with some straight-up Gutenberg text downloads. As its own home page describes it, GutenMark is a “prettifier” for Gutenberg texts, and a pretty good one, at that. GutenMark is a free download for WIndows, Linux, and (with more complications) Mac OS X. GutenMark More »
Work
Quarkbase Tells You Everything About a Web Site
5:00AM Adam Pash | Web site Quarkbase offers an organised and detailed overview of any web site, complete with summary, popularity, ownership, traffic information, and even recent blog posts and tweets about the site. In a nutshell, it’s sort of like Whois.net on steroids. Quarkbase’s accuracy and wealth of information varies based on the popularity of a site, but if you want to know more about a web site, it’s a great place to start your search. Quarkbase More »
Organise
8Tracks Creates Virtual Mix Tapes
4:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | Web-based service 8tracks remixes 30-minute MP3 playlists for personal listening or sharing with friends. 8Tracks offers all of the basic functionality of previously covered Muxtape, with the additional ability to add artwork and information about the mix itself. Users can browse others’ mixes, comment, and view mixes sorted by popularity and freshness. Here is a sample mix I enjoyed listening to while reviewing the site: More »
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