Category: Internet Tools

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Free Webmaster Resources Internet Tools My Products & Services

Create Contact and Survey Forms with FormKid.com the Free Online Form Builder

I just finished creating yet another web application that may be useful to fellow webmasters, FormKid.com. It helps you create professional online web forms for your website. Check out what I created just now, a contact form for Kavoir.com. You can contact me by filling out and submitting the form from now on!

Currently you can add 8 different types of input controls to your forms, namely

  1. Single Line Text
  2. Paragraph Text
  3. Check Boxes
  4. Radio Buttons
  5. Dropdown Selection
  6. Section Break
  7. Arbitrary HTML
  8. Captcha

Captcha is for recognizing and capturing spams and uses one of the 3 available approaches at your choice. The reCaptcha service that’s recently acquired by Google is one of them. So you can be rest assured that your form will stay clear of online spamming.

I’m planning to add more features such as advanced entries management in future but not until this application proves itself to be useful and popular. Before that, a lot of work need to be done to make the whole thing smooth, safe and frustration-free. Please join in the forum and let me know of your ideas.

If all you need is a simple PHP contact form, our company Simple PHP Script has it.

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Free Webmaster Resources Internet Tools My Products & Services Web Design Tips and Insights

How to convert .png, .gif, .bmp or .jpg images to .ico icons to make favicon.ico for your website?

image conversion tool Over a year ago I created this online web application Convert Hub by the help of the splendid open source image manipulation library Netpbm. Give it a try, upload an image and convert it to another format. But not just that, it’s also capable of resizing an image, rotating or flipping it.

I love it. It’s simple yet adequately useful. The best part of it for a webmaster like me is that it can convert other image formats such as .bmp, .jpg, .gif and .png to .ico so I can use them as favicon.ico for my sites. Try these US state flags and convert them in any way you want!

It’s a great tool and gained tremendous popularity. I know this because one day DreamHost warned me of overwhelming server resource usage and took it down for good reasons. I had to move it elsewhere and Linode is where it currently resides on.

Server side computing is too expensive for a free application like this. After a few ideas and thoughts, I decided to create a client side software program to do the job instead. It’s called Batch Image Converter. And it proves to be much better. It doesn’t come with a daily limit on the number of conversions allowed per IP but you can do as many conversions as you want. The whole software consists of one single executable file, there’s even no need to go through any installation steps. It’s totally green to your system. What’s best, it can work in batches which means you are able to perform operations such as format conversion and dimension resizing on a lot of images by a single click.

All you need is to download it there. It’s free. The problem is that it only supports Windows for now. I’m planning on rolling out versions for other platforms but this may not happen soon.

Please do let me know what you think of the application in the forum.

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Computer & Internet Literacy Hosting Tips & Deals Internet Tools My Personal Reviews

Free 2GB HTML static web pages hosting

Dropbox - Sync your filesFor every free Dropbox plan, it comes with 2GB online backup storage that has a public folder in which you can publish HTML web page files that are publicly accessible around the Web. It will give you a URL that you can hand out to your friends so they can view the page on the Web anywhere anytime.

Basically, a free static HTML web hosting space (with potentially unlimited transfer).

Simply download the software and sign up with them, put the HTML file in the “Public” folder of your specified Dropbox directory. After a few seconds’ synchronization when there finally turns up a small green tick at the bottom left corner the file icon (which means the synchronization is successfully completed), right click on the file, point to “Dropbox” for the submenu and select “Copy Public Link”. Now you have the public URL address of the page.

Paste it into the address bar of your favorite browser, bravo! Now you have your own HTML web pages freely hosted on the Web! Check out what I’ve published on Dropbox!

The brilliant part is the ease of the hosting. Just create more web documents such as audio files, images and HTML pages, put them in the “Public” folder and you will have them online in no time because Dropbox automatically synchronizes everything you put in the folder. Want to modify the existing files, fine, just do it, save the changes and Dropbox would also automatically synchronize the update to the remote server.

Dropbox is not just a public host though, it’s easy to use and rocks as a photo gallery, online backup storage, file sharing and synchronizing machine.

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Internet Tools My Personal Reviews

Dropbox review – the most intuitive online backup storage, data synchronizing and files sharing software

Dropbox - file sync, sharing and backupI’ve tried quite a few online backup services to back up my valuable website data – you just can’t imagine what a nightmare it would be to lose all the files that you’ve been working on for the last half year – I even created my own backup programs that automatically syncs and stores designated files across multiple hosts, however, Dropbox has been the most intuitive application so far.

It’s revealed by Dropbox that backup shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

They’ve got a very slick clean style, both the application as well as the website are so designed that anybody can figure the whole thing out at a glance of 5 seconds. And that’s it. Everything you need to ever know is merely a folder named “My Dropbox”. Thus it goes incredibly breezy on first time users, doing the job perfectly and silently even when you have forgotten it.

Install and forget.

Working from the desktop of Windows, Linux and Mac, Dropbox is not just an online data storage provider, it’s also at its best as a data backup system, files sharing wizard, automatic synchronizer, way-back time machine and free file host.

  1. Offsite remote data storage: this goes without saying. All files and data you put into the “My Dropbox” folder is automatically and quietly transferred to and stored at the their central server securely.
  2. Backup system: intuitively, after you have hit the save button, the document has been backed up on Dropbox servers. Otherwise, just drag and drop anything you’d like backed up on the remote server so a local hard drive crash won’t make you go nuts.
  3. Files sharing wizard: all the files and media (music, videos, photos etc.) can be instantly accessible and downloaded from the central servers across all the computers and mobile devices such as iphone that have Dropbox software installed.
  4. Automatic synchronizer: editing a document, saving it in the “My Dropbox” folder of your office PC and you can continue working on it after opening it from the same folder of your home Mac. The next day, you just open the same file in your office PC and it’s exactly the same file! Basically, any changes you made to those files are instantly synced to the server, thus across all computers of the sync software installed.
  5. Way-back time machine: Dropbox keeps historical versions of your files for 30 days by default, so that you can undo any changes or deletions you regret.
  6. Free file hosting: simply put any file into the “Public” folder and you will be given a public web address (URL) to hand out to your friends and everyone else so that they can view and download it.

Try them for free for 14 days and be ready to be impressed.

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Domains Internet Tools

Bulk Domain Name Availability Checker Tool to Batch Search Available Domains

dynadot bulk domain checkerSomeone asks me via contact form how to check potentially hundreds of domains for availability at once, as it’d be a huge waste of time to check them one by one. For example, when you need to check if these 50 domain names are still register-able: californiainsurance.com, newyorkinsurance.com, virginiainsurance.com, … and so forth, you need a bulk search tool for available domains.

While an AJAX whois tool gives instant results for all major TLDs, a bulk domain name search tool queries for the availability of all the domains at once in larger volumes that’s preferably no less than 100 in a batch.

Dynadot free bulk domain search is just the tool you need in a situation like this. You can generate a list of most wanted domains, in 100, and input them batch by batch to their domain bulk checker.

Register an account at Dynadot, head to: Domain Names –> Bulk Search and you should be able to check 100 domains at a time.

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Domains Internet Tools

VeriSign Data Analyzer – The Most Authoritative Type-in Traffic Analysis Tool for Unregistered Domains / Misspelled Domains

VeriSign, the central registry for COM domains, recently released a new tool called Data Analyzer. Data Analyzer allows you to check the amount of traffic a domain name gets, even if the domain does not exist.

So just the kind of traffic analysis tool that examines the type-in traffic of unregistered domains (.COM). Well, not just type-in. Imagine a domain that has some history but recently got abandoned, wouldn’t it be great to know that? To sum up, you can use this tool to:

  1. Grab valuable unregistered .com domains with decent type-in traffic.
  2. Know mistyped versions of your current domains, those your visitors tried but failed to get to your site.
  3. Hunt for abandoned or dropped domains that have a history and traffic.
  4. …

The tool has just now been released to domain registrar Dynadot at this address. If you are not already a Dynadot customer, sign up for an account.

Where does the data come from?

Verisign, being the central registry for COM domains, also runs the root name server for COM domains. Each time you type in a domain name in your browser, Verisign’s root name server will receive a query for that domain name. Verisign stores all queries, including those for domains that do not exist, in their massive Data Analyzer database.

How do I use the Data Analyzer?

You can find the Data Analyzer by logging into your Dynadot account and clicking on the “Search” tab and then “Data Analyzer Tool” sub menu.

On this page you can submit a list of domain names that you want to check the traffic for. They will send your domains to Verisign, and the next day you can sign back into your account and check the results. Each domain name will receive a score between 0 and 10. 0 means no traffic, and 10 means lots of traffic.

How can the Data Analyzer help me?

Say for example you own the domain name “acmewidgets.com“. You want to check to see if your customers are mistyping your domain name, and thus not getting to your website. You can submit a list of domains to the Data Analyzer such as:

axmewidgets.com
acmwidgets.com
acmewigets.com

If any of these domains return a high score, then you can register the domain name, and forward the traffic to your correct domain name.

How many domains can I upload?

You can upload as many domains as you want. In fact some customers have already uploaded millions of domains to be analyzed by the Data Analyzer. However, if you upload lots of domains, it may take many days to finish analyzing your domains. Verisign limits the number of domains Dynadot can submit to them each day.

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Hosting Tips & Deals Internet Tools

Web Hosting Connection Speed Test

Update: There’s a better uptime tracking and connection / downloading speed monitor tool to test the responsiveness of your website, it’s Host Tracker. But be prepared that it may consume quite some MBs of bandwidth of your server because it sends HTTP requests from well over half a hundred places around the world.

Update: Yet another better hosting server / website responsiveness / loading speed test tool: http://www.hyperspin.com/en/quicktest.php

Internet Supervision accepts your web site URL, tests and loads it from 7 major cities around the world: Washington, DC, Los Angeles, CA, Beijing, China, Detroit, MI, Chicago, IL, Gloucester, UK and Sydney, Australia.

host speed test

It gives you an average downloading speed in kbps and the time in seconds to download the specified web page from each of the locations. A decent international host should in my opinion, score at least 150kbps in downloading speed.

What’s yours?

Update: Another good uptime / connection speed test tool to check the loading speec of your website is Alertra Spot Check.

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CSS & HTML Tips Internet Tools Web Design Tips and Insights

Validate and Check Your Site’s Accessibility against WAI (WCAG) and Section 508

online accessibility validation tool If you are determined to make your site comply with the latest provisions in the accessibility code, you may find it’s a pain in the ass to check point by point against the checklist of WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) and Section 508.

Yep, it sure is with so many check points for your web page styles and content building, until you find the right online tools to check them on your behalf automatically and free.

Content Quality is the web content accessibility validation solution by HiSoftware. Supply the URL, and the system will instantly provide a detailed analysis of how you are doing with the guidelines of either Section 508 or WCAG (Priority 1, Priority 2, Priority 3). Not only that, it also provides you the option to emulate quite a few of browsers in the process such as: IE6, IE5, Opera 3 … (God this is old)

Anyway, a great tool to validate your web pages against these accessibility guidelines.

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China Internet Internet Tools My Personal Reviews

Watch TV and Movies Free Online – The China P2P Internet Streaming Network: PPS

You know what they say, China doesn’t have digital products, instead, it’s all digital freebies because of the lack of legal accountability for intellectual property. A recently released Hollywood blockbuster movie will be pouring into the piracy market at less than $1 per DVD copy. And online? You literally have unlimited access to millions of movies via a variety of channels: you can either download them via P2P downloading network or watch them online.

pps internet tv and movies

While reasonably you may think them in understandably inferior video qualities – they are, quite a percentage of them – but as far as I’ve seen them, the quality of the majority of them is comparable to traditional DVD, if not HD.

PPS is currently the largest P2P video streaming network in China. They’ve got a few English web pages online to for potential venture capitalists, but the program itself is completely targeted at the Chinese market.

pps tv movie streaming

After installation, the program will need a brief contact to the central server to get the latest playing list of TV channels and programs – daily updated movies (English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and continued cycles of operas (love, comedy, CSI, cartoon and so forth). There’s one thing that may hinder anyone not speaking Chinese from using it, that is, the titles are all in Chinese.

I don’t know if it’s possible to connect to the network from other part of the world, but PSS should be free to use anywhere and you may download it and give it a try.

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Hosting Tips & Deals Internet Tools Linux Server Administration Tips

Dismiss unusable proxy server lists – Build your own stable socks5 proxy server and surf anonymously in minutes!

All web hosting servers with SSH access enable you to tunnel the sessions so that your local computer can act like a socks proxy. For web hosting users, browsing anonymously has never been so easy.

There’s a detailed step by step tutorial for turning your web host into a socks5 proxy server.

Basically, you use PuTTY to utilize the SSH connection to the web hosting server to be an alternative transport of all traffic between your personal computer browser (or any other web clients such as FTP programs or IM) and the destination site (such as facebook or myspace). Of course, all the transfer will be billed in your web hosting subscription.

Not bad at all, if you have some large chunks of extraly available transfer to spare from your current web hosting plan. It’s simply the most stable and usable proxy server you can get and make  for yourself, much better than the servers in all the un*available* proxy servers lists you can find online.

Enjoy!