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- Cool Websites and Tools [November 12]
- Learn How to Schedule Future Tweets With Taweet
- How To Easily Automate Backing Up Your Wordpress Blog
- Chipotle – An Example Of A Free iPhone Restaurant App Done Right
- 3 Cool Portable Webcam Apps For A Live Online Experience
- Manage Files On Your Windows Live Skydrive Account With Skydrive Explorer
- Escape From Your Cluttered Desktop With Show Desktop [Mac only]
- 5 Really Cool Video Entertainment Sites You Should Check Out
| Cool Websites and Tools [November 12] Posted: 12 Nov 2009 05:01 PM PST
(1) Cheapism – If you are a bargain hunter but also don't like to compromise on quality then Cheapism is a website you should bookmark. What it does is simple – it searches for best quality products among the cheapest ones. The site features budget product reviews in various categories like home & garden, kitchen utilities, computers, electronics, sports, travel and many more. Read more: Cheapism – Finds Best Quality Products For Cheap
(2) iBotanika – Social network for gardeners, plant enthusiasts and botanists in general. Users can upload photos, add plants and connect with other users. There is also a catalog for plants to record their health, maintenance, environment and location. Read more: iBotanika – Social Network For Gardeners (3) Mockingbird – New tool which makes creating and sharing website mockups a cakewalk. The service, which is completely web based, could prove to be extremely useful for designers and developers who work with large number of clients from all over the world. Read more: Mockingbird – Create Website Mockups Online (4) CHOW Restaurants Regions – Restaurants Regions is a recently launched food guide by CHOW. While there are many food and restaurant guides available on the internet, what makes this guide unique is the ability to filter results by the type of cuisine. Read more: CHOW Restaurants Regions – Find Restaurants By Cuisine (5) VeoProject – New and powerful web tool that lets you setup and manage projects online. Your projects will be hosted online and you can easily collaborate and share them with your team members. The application has a spreadsheet like interface where projects are organized in rows, with individual project parts and tasks hierarchically listed in between. Read more: VeoProject – Effective Project Management Tool Online
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Learn How to Schedule Future Tweets With Taweet Posted: 12 Nov 2009 02:01 PM PST
Enter Taweet. Learn how to schedule future tweets! There are a few tools I’ve come across that allow you to schedule posts for the future. Taweet is here to hopefully change the way we think about Twitter and tweeting from “thinking about the past” to “what’s going on in the future.” Twitter asks “What are you doing?” Taweet asks “What are you doing IN THE FUTURE?” Taweet, as you can probably tell, majors on the art of the future tweet. It allows for, amongst other things, talking about what’s going to happen, such as events or plans. Taweet actually offers several perks that can enhance your Twittering: tweet scheduling, threaded discussions, AND multiple account management. Let’s see what these are all about!
Taweet has an interesting way of posting future tweets. The user interface makes it quite simple to choose the date and time. When the tweet is posted,it gives the time and a link to the post on Taweet.com, allowing the viewer to comment. This is where threaded comments come in. I for one like the idea of having the comments threaded directly beneath my tweet so I can get a handle on the conversation. Taweet does this for you and the result is something similar to what Facebook does with its updates and comments. Taweet also gives you the option to add multiple Twitter accounts. This makes it easier to switch between them. Hey, if you like tweeting in the future with one account, why not all of them? Signing up is really easy. If you’re on the front page, you’ll notice the “Sign in with Twitter” button. Hit it. Next you’ll have to be willing to allow Taweet to connect to your Twitter account. If you want to use Taweet, you’ve got to hit “allow.” You’re then asked the question, “Would you like to link this account with one previously used on Taweet?“ If you’re new to Taweet, the obvious answer is “I’m new to Taweet.” After you enter your email address, a confirmation email is sent to you. Before progressing any further, you have to check your email and click on the confirmation link. Finally you’re given the controls! So there you have it; yet another Twitter tool emerges filling yet another void! There is obviously more to Taweet, such as searching other users’ future posts to find out what’s going on in the future. To me, this tool seems simple enough to use but it also has the possibility to change the way we think about and use Twitter. Now you too can learn to tweet for the future! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| How To Easily Automate Backing Up Your Wordpress Blog Posted: 12 Nov 2009 12:01 PM PST
However, it didn’t all go to plan. There was something wrong with the host which left my site back in 1982 until the MUO authors, more specifically Karl, was able to get her up and running while I yelled at my hosting company. So I was happy. For a while. But then the thought of 'what if the host was to go belly up right now?' popped into my mind. At any minute it could all just go wrong and I'd be left blogless. All my posts would be gone. The theme I’ve fine-tuned. The media I’ve uploaded. It would be the virtual equivalent of pulling the pin from the hand grenade and tossing it into the epicentre of my site. The only remnants of its existence being a ‘404′ error. And you want to know the worst thing? No matter how many times your press ‘F5′, the blog simply wont appear. Ever. Figuring out how to backup your blog is the way to go. Most definitely. One could do this the hard way. You could manually backup everything using an FTP client and an external hard drive. But that’s the hard way. So here is an easy way to backup your Wordpress blog – in three easy steps no less.
Getting a ‘back up’ plug-inIf there’s one thing that separates Wordpress from the other half dozen popular blogging platforms, it’s the abundance of plug-ins. There are quite a few which back-up your blog but I recommend using the ‘Wordpress Database Backup Plugin’. For those of you familiar with the innermost working of a website – this plug-in will back-up your tables in your Wordpress database. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the innermost working of a website – it will save you a weekend of going through the five stages of grief. Installing the pluginHave the plugin downloaded? You sure? You’re not just reading on through this post while your blog sits utterly vulnerable to destruction? OK, good.
First go to the plugin menu on the Wordpress admin page and under plugins click ‘add new‘ as seen in the screenshot. Upload the plugin. You can leave it in the .zip format if you like. Then click ‘Activate‘ once the install has finished. Setting it upGo to ‘Tools‘ along the left-hand sidebar in the Wordpress admin area. Under ‘Tools‘ you’ll find a new menu called ‘Backup‘. Click on that. There are three main areas that you have to fill out in the screen which appears. The first area is entitled ‘Tables‘ and put simply, it allows you to specify what you want to back up. I’d suggest leaving everything ticked. This will basically back up your entire blog including posts, comments, users and settings. Then, under ‘Back Up Options‘ you can select where you want the backup files to go. You can either save to your server, download to your computer or e-mail to a specified address. Pick whichever one works for you. I’ll be keeping mine on an external hard-drive so I’ll be downloading it to my computer. However the other two options – particularly the e-mail options are also good. Finally, the third table allows you to choose how often your blog is backed up. This is done automatically. I’d suggest doing it at least weekly. If your blog is really big with multiple posts per hour you can back up hourly, daily and twice daily. Finally click ‘Backup Now‘ under the second section to make sure you’re safe from the get-go. So now if it all does go horribly wrong (i.e. a virtual hand grenade has just blown up in serverland) you’ll be back up (no pun intended) in no time by simply uploading the backup files using an FTP such as FileZilla. For more great plugins for your Wordpress blog click here. Image Credit: John Loo Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Chipotle – An Example Of A Free iPhone Restaurant App Done Right Posted: 12 Nov 2009 11:01 AM PST
Most iPhone users relish being able to use our iPhone to get things done. We're always wondering if there is indeed “an app for that” – iPhone apps for free, from mapping directions, getting movie previews, to ordering restaurant food. I've tried ordering food using the traditional website structure of a few restaurants, but the iPhone web-formatted user interface for ordering food on those sites took more time than it was worth. The Chipotle app is the first of its kind that I've seen that makes ordering food very simple. You can tell the app developers put a lot of thought in how to make the user interface relatively easy to use and aesthetically appealing. The application is built in a hierarchical manner, whereby a limited list of menu items in which you click to further drill down into additional menu items for more levels of details. To order food using the app, you of course have to set up an account that includes your credit card. Based on the feedback the application has received, it is better to create your account online rather than through the application.
Clicking the Order Now button on any one of main entrée or chips pages will take you to the Create New Order section. The resulting menu presents you with a list of six menu categories: Burrito, Bowl, Soft Tacos, Crispy Tacos, Salad, and Sides and Drinks. Clicking one of these categories leads you to another menu page where you select for example the type of Burrito you want to order. Prices for those items are also listed. You click the plus button to add to your order. You can just as easily click the minus button if you change your mind. After clicking the Continue button, you are presented with a broad list of side items that you can add to your order, or your “bag”. So basically, the application is designed for you to easily build your order by clicking through the menu . Once you've selected what you want, you click the Add to Bag button. You're then presented with two input spaces, one for giving a name to your order (for example, Lunch) and “any special instructions” you may have. The reason you give this order a name is because when you are presented with your itemized order, you have the option to save that order as a Favorite, which is very convenient for making future orders. Clicking the resulting Checkout Now button will present your order with the subtotal price. After clicking the Checkout button you have to log into your account. Ordering food using this app is almost faster than doing so in the restaurant itself, especially if you have to wait in a long lunch or dinner line. Now once you arrive to pick up your order, you may experience a little breakdown in the process. Some users of the app have complained that when they arrived to a selected restaurant their order was either not ready or never received. I didn't experience that problem, but I can imagine it happening. This breakdown doesn't sound like a problem with the application itself, but perhaps what is done with orders when they are received. A Chipotle franchise may be overtasked and orders may be mismanaged. That's a customer service issue that needs to worked out at each establishment. But as for the application itself, I don't think the process can be simpler. Are there other restaurant menu apps that you recommend and find accessible? Are the ones that you find very difficult to use? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| 3 Cool Portable Webcam Apps For A Live Online Experience Posted: 12 Nov 2009 10:01 AM PST
While you might already be familiar with the many apps that are available for your personal webcam that you use at home, there are also many very cool applications that are especially valuable if you travel a lot with a portable USB webcam, or if you use many different computers that have their own built-in webcams. These days, most laptops or desktops have them. I’ve shared my own obsession with webcam software here at MakeUseOf with my own articles, such as adding VZOChat to your blog to interact with your visitors. I’m not the only one! Simon also wrote about how to use your webcam to control games, and Mark mentioned a couple of useful motion sensor webcam applications as well. To add to the MakeUseOf library of useful webcam resources, I’d like to turn now to three free applications that let you use your webcam live and online to take and share photos, broadcast or “tweet” video updates, and even speed date however, whenever and wherever you like.
Take Hilarious Snapshots From Your Browser With CameroidMakeUseOf covered Cameroid briefly before, and for good reason. If you like the ability to quickly take a snapshot and modify it in a way that will make people really laugh – you have to check this out. This isn’t an application you have to install on your PC. If you’re on any computer that has a webcam, or you have a portable USB webcam with you, just visit the Cameroid website and you can start taking and playing around with your snapshots. Obviously, you can take perfectly normal snapshots of yourself if you like, but the real exciting thing about this browser-based software is how quickly and easily you can insert various special effects. On the right, you’ll find the various types of special photo effects that are available, including adding a filter, distorting the photo (this can be really funny), inserting yourself into scenes, or framing the snapshot. My personal favorite is the hilarious “scenes” section where you can insert your face into any of a number of scenes. Here, I decided to go on my first scuba-diving expedition with the rest of the MUO crew, and they thought it would be funny if they unplugged my air supply. Thanks a lot guys. Wait – my even more favorite section is the “filter” section where you can select from a whole list of filters that add a very cool sense of drama or intrigue to your photo. As you can see here, the aliens were coming to get me and I had no way out. Luckily, I survived the ordeal and lived to tell about it, but the rest of the MUO crew got massacred during the battle – such a shame. As you can see at the bottom of each snapshot you take, if you have the nerve, you can add the photo to the public Cameroid Gallery for all of the world to see. Otherwise, you can either save it to your hard drive or print it out on paper. No registration and no fees required – all from the convenience of your web browser and any webcam. Speed Date From the Comfort of Your Home With RandomateSo you’re single, alone, and on a business trip. You’ve just suffered through a full day of conferences and you’re back in your hotel room with nothing to do – and you start lamenting the fact that you have no one in your life who even cares about you. So go down to the lobby where there’s a computer with a webcam, and log into Randomate to set up a free webcam speed dating session. You never know, you just might find the person you’ve always dreamed of. How does it work? Basically, you sign up for a session, and when it begins you get to chat with the other people in the session who are also looking for someone. The catch is that it follows the rules of speed-dating, which is you get to talk to the person for only five minutes. Then you move on to the next person, who you talk to for five minutes. Honestly – don’t you know within the first five minutes whether there might be a spark there? Sessions are ongoing constantly, but slots are limited – so if you know you want to take part in online speed dating, sign up for a session early and remember to be there when it starts! Seesmic TV is Twitter with VideoAnother very cool online tool that you can use from anywhere and with any webcam is Seesmic TV. David reviewed Seesmic Desktop not very long ago, so did Jason, and made mention of Seesmic Web as well – both tools that you can use to better interface directly with Twitter. However, Seesmic TV, the app which Mark briefly mentioned being integrated with Twhirl, is an interesting community where you can issue video Twitter-like messages in video format, and reply to other folks video updates just like you do on Twitter. On Seesmic TV, this amounts to an interesting collection of actual discussions with actual faces and actual voices…just like actual live. It really makes you feel like you’re right there having a conversation with the person face-to-face. The interface where you record your message is just as simple as in Twitter. You simply title your video clip, add a description and post to the community or send it privately to the inbox of another Seesmic user. You can do this from any computer anywhere in the world as long as it has an internet connection and a webcam (or you bring your own USB webcam with you). The beauty of all three of these applications is that they let you interface with Internet communities in ways that simply aren’t possible in a purely text or even an audio medium. Using facial expressions and tone of voice, you can convey your messages to the world much more clearly and effectively. Have you taken part in any webcam-based community? Would you ever consider it, and if not, what holds you back? Share your opinions and insight in the comment section below. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Manage Files On Your Windows Live Skydrive Account With Skydrive Explorer Posted: 12 Nov 2009 08:01 AM PST
We have reviewed quite a few online storage services in the past. Microsoft’s offering Skydrive is right up there with others when it comes to storage space, offering a staggering 25 GB of online space. In addition we also showed you how you can edit your Office documents stored in Windows Live Skydrive with Office Webapps. One of the most annoying aspects of nearly all online storage solutions is that you have to use a web browser to upload and manage files. Some of them offer Java applets to upload but there are a number of other operations that you may want to perform on the files you have in your account. Doing them in a web browser is generally not the best way to do such things. It would be nicer if you could integrate Skydrive into the Windows shell. Wouldn’t it?
Double click on it and you will be prompted to log into your Skydrive account. You can then view the contents of your Skydrive account just like any other folder without having to use the web browser. You should note that folders may take some time to load since Skydrive Explorer needs to send a request and then process it before it can display the relevant information to you. You should therefore avoid working directly with files stored in your Skydrive folders. The right way would be create a local copy, edit it and then copy it back to Skydrive. That said, the performance is acceptable and a large part of it would be attributed to your connection speed. Skydrive Explorer lets you perform almost all the file/folder management tasks that you can need:
With a little effort you can easily use Skydrive to backup your important files. You can use software like the previously mentioned Directorysync pro or Freefilesync to keep two folder synchronized with each other. Let’s say you synchronize the Documents folder on your Skydrive account with the Documents folder for your user account in Windows. Now changes to any file or folder will be automatically communicated to your Skydrive account – just keep in mind the 50MB file limit! You can also have a look at previously mentioned Gladinet and see which one would you like to use in case you are looking for a way to access your Skydrive. Which is your favorite online storage service and how do you access it? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| Escape From Your Cluttered Desktop With Show Desktop [Mac only] Posted: 12 Nov 2009 06:01 AM PST
There are of course other ways to organize desktop clutter, such as buying a bigger screen, opening less windows, or grouping the windows into several virtual spaces. I accidentally found a rather old application – but working just fine under Snow Leopard – which takes a completely different approach to the problem: making the windows disappear. To show or not to showWhether it’s only to hide your games when your boss is around, or to instantly switch your cluttered desktop into a clean working environment (where only the chosen windows are visible), Show Desktop is your solution. As the name suggests, this small application will hide all the opened windows and show the desktop. Maybe similar to Expose, but more powerful. And all it takes is just a click. When you run this application for the first time, Show Desktop will appear in the “Icon mode“. You can activate its function through the app icon in the dock.
If you click the Show Desktop icon while all the windows are hidden, the minimized Finder icon will appear at the dock ready to be clicked back to the desktop. But to restore everything back to where they belong, you have to click the Show Desktop dock icon again while holding the Shift key. You could also use Alt + Tab to restore only one of those hidden applications. Further enhancementsFor those who prefer to have a menubar item of Show Desktop instead of a dock icon, you could do so by going to the Preferences, either using the menu or “Command + Comma” key combination, and then tick the “Show in menubar” box. Changing between the Dock icon and the Menubar mode requires you to restart the application. From these General Preferences, you could also pick the icon style and choose whether you want Finder to stay open after you hide other applications. If you want to have access to this “hide/show all” ability the whole time, be sure to tick “Open Show Desktop at login” box. In the Menubar mode, the one that you could click to hide or show all the windows is the menubar item. To show the preferences, you have to use Control + Click (or right click) at the item. The pop-up menu will also show you a list of open applications. But the coolest feature of this app is the ability to make a kind of ‘whitelist’ of applications that will not be hidden. Users can add their own choice to the list. Using this ability, you could repeatedly hide all the other open applications and leave only one specific app that you want to work with. This allow you organize your desktop and focus more on the work at hand and discard all the distractions. A little trickThis app would be perfect if it has a shortcut key combination to activate the show/hide applications function. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have one. To overcome this limitation, I tried to create the shortcut key using the Keyboard preference pane. It was an unsuccessful attempt. However, I found a simple cheat. If you use a launcher – something like Quicksilver or Google Quick Search Box – to “launch” Show Desktop while this app is already active, a similar effect (hide all windows) would be triggered. The opposite is also true. If you use a launcher to open Show Desktop while holding the Shift key, all the hidden windows would appear. Have you tried Show Desktop to organize your desktop? Do you think you will ever need the function to quickly hide applications? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comment below. Related posts
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| 5 Really Cool Video Entertainment Sites You Should Check Out Posted: 12 Nov 2009 04:01 AM PST
It's hard to tell what people will enjoy or be revolted by. For instance I enjoy gruesome videos, my wife on the other hand like cuddly snuggly bunnies. So choose your videos wisely. Here are 5 Internet video sites that I frequent to find videos that will entertain me! Let's check each of them out. VeryFunnyAdsThe first one is called VeryFunnyAds. As you can imagine this website has only very funny ads, as in advertisements. It is a collection of awesomely funny commercials that have either aired on television or were mockups of what should have been aired! I worked for a company called Adforum way back when (10 years ago) and they catalogued advertisements as well - but long story short – VeryFunnyAds has very funny ads!
Here is a awesome ad with Coke as the subject. You see it plays onscreen in a flash player with the normal options like volume and full screen mode at the push of a button. By clicking on the most watched tab you are guaranteed to find some awesome videos. Let us know what your favorite is in the comments! MetacafeThe next Internet video site is Metacafe, located here. They also have similar categories as Very Funny Ad's (and most other video sites) but here you can find the category Highest Rated and Most Discussed alongside Most Viewed and Most Recent. Clicking on a video will bring it up also via flash in your browser window. I couldn't resist the Never Look At Woman ad…when the woman smacks….oh wait I won't spoil it for you! Let us know what you think of it in the comments. Funny Video ShackFunny Video Shack is online here and has – you guessed it – funny videos! The first video at the top of the featured ads is entitled NudeIT – New iPhone app. The tag line says Do you want to see someone nude? Yeah, there is an app for that! C'mon how could that be bad?! Go waste some time over there viewing their top rated, favorites, popular, most discussed or recently added videos. Let's see what the most popular video on here is… Hot Chick Eats Maggots? First off she isn't that hot and after seeing this I could not scratch that. I would not want to picture her naked. After turning off the lights you would think there were bugs crawling all over you – and maybe there would be. I stopped on What's a HO? Gameshow style as you can see below: YoutubeAnd of course we could not talk about video entertainment sites with out Google's good old YouTube . This is the one site everyone thinks of whenever someone says “video online”. They have been around forever and have been the innovators of the industry. Today I clicked on Videos and the categories listing and chose Comedy. That brought me to a lot of scary looking videos but luckily one stood out. Good old Family Guy and the Roadhouse parody… YouTube clearly has the best interface for actually watching the videos. BreakAnd last, but certainly not least, is Break which is meant as a video site for your breaks (i think!). I clicked on Videos at the top of the screen and was greeted by some strange ass videos! Romanian Lady Goes Crazy On Live TV? Maybe things like this are not strange in Romania but this lady is w-a-c-k-o with a capital W! Checking out their top videos I found some winners. And then I clicked on High School Girls Soccer Brawl….it did not disappoint. They have options to share the video you are watching via the popular social network buttons below the video. Where do you go to watch entertaining videos online? Share your sources in the comments! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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As a user of Twitter, I’ve written several articles about tools that help me use it more productively. 
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Now comes the installation. It’s pretty much the same as any other plugin installation.
I don't want this article to sound like a PR piece for the Mexican grill restaurant, 
If you’ve never tried webcam live online video conferencing, taking snapshots or otherwise playing with your webcam over the Internet, you’re missing out on another whole dimension of the web. Instant messaging, tweeting and blogging are lots of fun, but when you integrate video into one or more of these activities, they are transformed into much more personal and interactive experiences.
Not using the cloud is almost impossible these days. You can use the cloud for emails, document publishing and of course storing, backing up and sharing files as well.
When we were discussing about 
So you got some free time on your hands do ya? Looking to laugh so hard you will spit milk through your nose – even if you are not drinking milk? Maybe you want to see someone make a fool of themselves or even go nuts and hurt some people.
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