Google’s Webmaster Tools unleashed a pretty cool tool today to help you improve your websites load time. The tool is called Site Performance, located under the labs portion in the Webmaster Tools.
Looking at my own graph, it appears they have been tracking average load times since the end of July. For this site, the average load time is 2.4 seconds. Something I’m pretty happy about, but wouldn’t mind finding a way to bring it even lower. Continue reading »
So you may be asking what the heck is a VLC player. Is it a (enter your own idea here) player. Yep, you are right, it plays those. It actually plays a lot more than what you most likely guessed. It plays CD’s and DVD, and most video formats found currently available today. It’s dubbed the number one video lan client player, Vlc.
The Vlc player is a little more than a simple media player. It was designed by some students in Paris, and what they were initially going for was a client side player, and a video streamer. The concept is similar to what WinAmp did with audio. After it went public though, developers got their hands on it, and converted it to something even greater. Using the player you can now play broken videos, flip and distort, take snapshots, and even make ASCII art out of the videos. I know most of you will just want this for the DVD player function alone, but know it can do a lot more.
The player is free to download (open source code), has several skins available, and is just a litle over 13mb. Currently there has been a little over 3,000 downloads, still a baby.
Download Page: Vlc Player
If any of you are using it, or have tried it after reading this post, let us know what you think! Post a comment below.
Here is a very cool tool when it comes time to start cleaning out that hard drive, the Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder. Right off the bat, I like it. What does it do? It scans your images to find duplicates. It does this not just by name or size, but by actually analyzing the image. I tried it in a temp folder that I use on a regular basis, and found four duplicates. Not bad considering the folder only had about twenty files, and a couple of folders. Best part was, they were indeed duplicates that I could delete.
Before and after the scan you get a few choices besides just looking for duplicates. You can scan for images by dimensions, files size, both dimension and files size, and by date. Within those choices you can set the method of scanning for either visual or identical CRC32 Checksum. After the scanning is completed, you can then select to delete the duplicates or move the duplicates.
The software is a small package so download and install are quick. Using it is very intuitive. To make my first scan from landing on the download page took about two minutes. Not bad for never seeing this software before. Oh, and did I mention free download?
Details for Downloading
With exception to naming a web browser as my favorite tool, WinSCP, I think, wears the crown. WinSCP is a SFTP, FTP and SCP client for Windows. It’s also free. I found it last year when my primary hosting company stopped supporting basic FTP. I needed SFTP software, and my old FTP software couldn’t do it.
After entering information for one of my accounts I tried it out to see what it could do. I liked it immediately. It logged in quick, refreshed changes automatically, and gave me the option to save my place locally. Saving my spot locally when logging in was a feature I loved on my last ftp software package, and I was afraid I was going to miss out on that feature.
It has side by side view of course, the option to show the directory tree above (something I use), and a synchronization button to make sure web and local have the latest versions.
This software is easy to use, intuitive, and really better than I expected. Any time I found myself confused, I later found it was only because of their forward thinking in making things easier than you planned. There are little things I loved as well. One example is when I edit my site. I expect to find files displaying line numbers when editing, but what I didn’t expect was to find the “Go to line” button which I love. Instead of scrolling down to line 183, I just type 183. Bamm I’m there.
It has cool things like being able to right click on a file, and getting a little more than rename or copy. How about execute, tar, touch, grep, print, set permissions, to name a few. The editor has many options as well, and of course includes replace all for those coding repair jobs we have to do time to time.
I could blab on about how much I love, but here are some features listed by the creators of the software to make sure I am not missing something important to you.
Features:
Without a doubt WinSCP is something I use everyday, and if you have a website, or just need a FTP application this is the software for you. It’s close to 24 million downloads so it is safe to say there are a few others that like this application as well. Check it out, here are the urls you will need.
Download Page: http://winscp.net/eng/download.php
Site Home Page: WinSCP
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Vikinghammer Tweet, A Bloggers Dream
If you use WordPress for you blog, and are looking for a way to really make your Twitter feed alive then you need the add-on Vikinghammer Tweet. I just installed this, and am completely jazzed on what it can do. I was also happy to find it because if I didn’t, I was going to have to build it myself. What does it do? It tweets your blog posts (already been done I know), and it tweets comments made on your blog (this is the good stuff). Continue reading »