Web Tech Daily

bit.ly is another web service like the popular tinyURL. You paste the long URL in the text box at bit.ly, optionally set a custom keyword and click on Shorten button to get the shortened URL.

For example, let’s say that I am researching on water purifiers and came across a page whose URL is http://www.eurekaforbes.com/products/healthylife/wpurifier.php. Now I want to be able to go to this link in the future without having to bookmark and by just typing out an URL. I can go to bit.ly, specify ‘aquaguard’ as the keyword and it will generate this URL which points to the same page: http://bit.ly/aquaguard.

bit.ly doesn’t yet have all the useful tools like a Firefox add-on or integration in Twitter clients like twhirl. A browser bookmarklet is available though. But with a good API to shorten, expand and extract URL info, I am sure bit.ly is going to replace tinyURL from its #1 spot.

Visit bit.ly.

FormatFactory is a free windows software to convert video, audio, picture from one format to another. Also offers DVD ripping.

Features:

• Video: All to MP4/3GP/MPG/AVI/WMV/FLV/SWF
• Audio: All to MP3/OGG/WMA/M4A/WAV
• Picture: All to JPG/BMP/PNG/TIF/ICO/….
• Rip DVD to video file
• MP4 files support iPod/iPhone/PSP format
• Repairs damaged video and audio file

[Read the rest of this entry...]

TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop application using which you can categorize Twitter messages into groups.

TweetDeck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets. To do this All Tweets are saved to a local database.

In the first run, all tweets (including yours) are shown in the first column and all the replies that you have received in the second.

Clicking on the first button TWEET brings up the standard box in which we can post to Twitter. It would be nice to have a URL shortening feature like in Twhirl.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Sendible is a web service using which you can set Email and SMS Reminders so never miss birthdays and important occasions of your family members and business contacts. Want to send an email to your friend after 2 days at 5pm? No problem, just enter the To address, date and time and Sendible will deliver your email at that time, in the future.

With Sendible (after signing up), you can:

• Send a once-off or recurring (daily/weekly/monthly/annually) Emails
• Send a one time or recurring unlimited number of free SMS messages to any number in the world. The character limit of each message is 125. The received message will have a line ‘Sent by Sendible.com’ or an ad at the bottom. So you might want to add your name in your message so the recipient knows who sent it to him/her. To send a SMS to a phone in India, prefix the number with 91. 

  Sendible is also working on making replies to your SMS appear in your account. That will make it a nice two-way web-to-mobile and mobile-to-web communication medium.

• Send a once-off or recurring messages to your contacts in these social networks: Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Hi5 and Orkut.
• Sendible also supports posting to Twitter, but at the moment they are not offering recurring auto posting.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Ryan of CyberNet enhanced Searchery Firefox add-on so that one can instantly see the results of Google web searches using the keyword system. 

The way it works is: Say you want to search in Google for “free data recovery software”, you type the keyword associated with Google search followed by your search term and then wait for a second or so and the results will show up. You can go to your desired result either in the same tab or in a new tab (by navigating to and pressing Alt+Enter).

The add-on supports all these: Google search, Google Local search, Google Video Search, Google Image search (as pointed out in the extension’s page, this is not so useful since it doesn’t show the images or their thumbs), Google Blog search, Google Book search, Google Patent search and Wikipedia search.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Identi.ca is the latest microblogging service to the join the likes of Jaiku, Pownce and Plurk. It is identical (couldn’t help ;)) to Twitter in that you can let the world know what you are up to by typing short messages.

Identi.ca has support for OpenID and so you don’t need to create a new user account if you already have OpenID. After creating a nickname, you can immediately start typing in the text box. The character limit is set to 140 like in other similar services.

One extra feature that Identi.ca has that Twitter currently doesn’t is Instant Messenger support. Not only can you be notified via your GTalk or Yahoo! Messenger or a Jabber client, but also post your updates from within IM clients. For that you have to first add update@identi.ca to your IM client and then provide your IM address in the settings. After that, just confirm by clicking on a link in the IM message and from then on you can simply click on update@identi.ca in GTalk or whichever IM client you use to publish your short text.

Identi.ca is built using open source code that can be downloaded from Laconica site.

As more and more add-ons are being developed for Firefox, it’s interesting to see what all a browser can be turned into. The Pencil Project is a Firefox extension using which you can draw and design GUI prototypes (having elements like buttons, combo boxes, text boxes) easily by drag and drop. It uses Firefox’s underlying Mozilla Gecko engine.

These are some of the features offered by Pencil Project:

• Built-in stencils for diagramming and prototyping
• Multi-page document with background page
• On-screen text editing with rich-text supports
• PNG rasterizing
• Undo/redo supports
• Installing user-defined stencils
• Standard drawing operations: aligning, z-ordering, scaling, rotating…
• Cross-platforms
• Adding external objects

After it is installed, Tools –> Pencil Sketching will start the application. Pages are arranged in tabs.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Want to get only those stories from your favorite RSS feed that have certain words? Feed Sifter provides a form where you can paste a RSS feed, enter keywords by which you want to filter that feed and get a new feed URL.

The keywords are to be entered one in a line (multiple keywords separated by a comma will be treated with an ‘and’ condition). For example when I enter the feed URL of this blog and filter by ‘firefox’, the generated RSS feed is http://feedsifter.com/?f=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webtechdaily.com%2Ffeed%2F&firefox

If you want more powerful feed manipulation like being able to mash multiple feeds together, filter, sort, fetch and more, Yahoo Pipes is the best web service available.

noupe has a list of useful tutorials posted at several blogs on the Internet on the topics of Photoshop, Illustrator, CSS and XHTML, Ajax and JavaScript, Free Graphics. Definitely worth bookmarking. Visit by clicking on the screenshot below:

Are you like me using the free VLC player only to play .avi and other video files? If so, check out this lifehacker’s article on how to use VLC to:

1. Rip DVDs
2. Convert videos so they are playable in iPod or iPhone
3. Stream media to other computers
4. Play ripped DVDs