Web Tech Daily

Your daily dose of Web stuff

Classic delicious extension for Firefox

FirefoxDelicious The current latest version of official delicious add-on for Firefox replaces your standard browser bookmarks with bookmarks from your delicious account, besides providing useful buttons for bookmarking a page and bringing up your delicious bookmarks.

If you are interested in just adding the buttons and not the entire functionality provided by the official add-on, you might want to get the classic version. Unfortunately the add-on that page is not compatible with Firefox 3.0+. It has been modified to work with the latest Firefox by Micah Sittig and can be downloaded from here.

I have created a mirror for it here.

How the add-on works

The above add-on adds 2 buttons in Firefox like so:

image

Clicking on theimagebutton takes you to your bookmarks page at delicious.com.

Clicking on the image button brings up a window like so:

Bookmak dialog

where you can enter description for the bookmark (up to 1000 characters) and your tags. The tags can either be selected from recommended list at the right or typed (suggests your existing ones as you type)

Bookmak dialog - Filled

Setting up keyboard shortcut to bookmark a page to delicious

 

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bit.ly – URL Shortening Service

image 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.

image

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 – Free All In One Media Converter

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

FormatFactory

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TweetDeck – Organize Twitter messages into groups

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.

TweetDeck after installation

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.

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Set Free Email Reminders and Send Free SMSes with Sendible

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.

Sendible

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