MakeUseOf.com: “Cool Websites and Tools [March 20th]” plus 10 more |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [March 20th]
- Thank You To MakeUseOf Friends!
- How Many Computers Do You Have In Your House? [MakeUseOf Poll]
- 6+ Sites That Enhance The Instagram Experience
- Hot Tech Deals [Mar 20th]
- 10 Free MP3 Albums To Download [Sound Sunday]
- How To Add Rich Snippets for Reviews To Your WordPress Blog
- Latest Hilarious Picks [MakeUseOf Geeky Fun]
- Cool Websites and Tools [March 19th]
- Two Browser Tools To Hide Your Online Traces From Google
- Hot Tech Deals [Mar 19th]
| Cool Websites and Tools [March 20th] Posted: 20 Mar 2011 08:31 PM PDT
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. NEW: Download MakeUseOf iPhone App. FREE!
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| Thank You To MakeUseOf Friends! Posted: 20 Mar 2011 07:31 PM PDT
Thank you, guys! Follow MakeUseOf on Twitter. Includes cool extras.
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| How Many Computers Do You Have In Your House? [MakeUseOf Poll] Posted: 20 Mar 2011 06:30 PM PDT
The full breakdown of the 386 votes is this: 38% prefer Google Talk/Gmail Chat; 15% prefer Skype; 13% prefer Windows Live Messenger (MSN); 8% prefer Yahoo! Messenger; 5% prefer Facebook Chat; 4% prefer AOL Instant Messenger (AIM); 4% prefer using IRC; 3% prefer XMPP/Jabber (Other than Google Talk/Facebook); 1% prefer ICQ. Another 8% of people marked that they preferred some ‘other’ service. A few good IM chat services were mentioned in the comments, as were many multi-purpose IM chat clients. Full results and this week’s poll after the jump.
This week’s poll question is: How Many Computers Do You Have In Your House? Let’ see just how computer-obsessed we all are. Include any smartphones and tablets which you think are powerful enough, but don’t get silly and include all of your appliances. Now that you’ve told us how many computers are in your house, maybe you’d like to explain why they’re all there. Let us know in the comments! Need Assistance? Ask questions to MakeUseOf staff and thousands of other readers on MakeUseOf Answers!
 More articles about: multiple computers, Reader Polls
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| 6+ Sites That Enhance The Instagram Experience Posted: 20 Mar 2011 03:30 PM PDT
While Instagram’s popularity is undeniable, one of the main drawbacks of Instragram is that the developers have not provided a web interface to comfortably browse the latest images posted or discover new users. It’s all done directly from within the app. Whether you just want to browse images that are shared, keep up with your feed, create a portfolio of your Instagram images, or even keep up with the most popular tags on Instagram, each of these sites offers different ways of enhancing the Instagram experience.
SnapFinchOne of the most popular Instagram websites, Followgram, has relaunched as SnapFinch, a site that makes it easy to browse and search for photos shared through Instagram, as well as PicPlz, Steply, Burstn and Snapr. SnapFinch’s home page features the most popular photos, as well as the latest tags and users. Clicking on any given photo on the homepage, rather than open the photo up, will open up a page of photos with the same tag. From the tags page, you can then open up individual photos from where you can share the picture through Twitter or Facebook, or add your comments to the photo. InkstagramInkstagram provides a more interactive web-based user experience which actually reflects the Instagram user experience, but in order to do so you have to grant the site access to your Instagram account. Not only can you browse the most popular photos and search for specific tags, you can also browse your own feed featuring photos of the people that you , and a feed of your own photos, all from a small menu at the top of the page. Photos are displayed in a grid, and you can toggle the thumbnail size between small, medium and large. Opening up any given image, you will see how many likes it has received, comments, tags, when it was taken, and be able to like or leave a comment of your own. A great feature of Inkstagram is that you can actually discover and follow new users through the website. BajanbotIf your primary interest is to know what the most popular hashtags on Instagram are, in realtime, Bajanbot has you covered. It’s a simple, no frills site which updates itself every 15 minutes, displaying a list of the top 20 hashtags. Clicking on any given hashtag will take you to Snapfinch where you can browse the most popular tags. Instagram Popular PhotosInstagram Popular Photos is another option for browsing the most popular photos shared on Instagram, as well as providing a way to search for tagged photos. An extra feature that is unique to this site is the ability to filter search results using specific filters. Social Print Studio SitesInstawar takes a very different approach to browsing photos taken using the Instagram app. If you have some time to kill, play the tournament-style game, where two photos are pitted against each other and you choose which one is better. If you think the two photos look good together, click on Make a Pair instead, to create a diptych of the images, where they are then uploaded to the Diptych Tumblr blog If you want to submit your photos to Instawar, you can do so through the sister site, Instagrid. After granting the site access to your account, Instagrid provides you with an attractive online portfolio of your photos. Instagrid and Instawar have a third sister site worth mentioning, Printstagr.am, where you can order poster or sticker prints of your Instagram photos. Instagre.atInstagre.at is another slick option that allows you to browse the most popular images shared on Instagram, search for specific tags. Granting the site access to your Instagram account allows you to view your own photos and those in your feed, but there do seem to be a few kinks that need ironing out with this feature. Like on Inkstagram, you can follow new users through the Instagre.at web interface. What are your favorite Instagram third party websites? Let us know in the comments. Do you like MakeUseOf articles? Don’t forget to share our articles with others! It’s really important to us.
 More articles about: iphone, iPhone Apps, photo sharing, photography, photos
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| Posted: 20 Mar 2011 01:30 PM PDT
For more fresh hot deals, visit our Hot Tech Deals page, which is constantly updated.
Image credit: Modified from Svengraph’s icon set Follow MakeUseOf on Twitter. Includes cool extras.
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| 10 Free MP3 Albums To Download [Sound Sunday] Posted: 20 Mar 2011 12:30 PM PDT
Many of this week’s albums did not provide a widget I could embed. However, almost all of the music can be previewed at the respective download page, please click through. The upside is that few of them require an eMail in exchange for the download. As always, please share with your friends and donate if you find a piece you love. Questions, suggestions, feedback? Leave a comment or eMail me [tina at makeuseof dot com]. Enjoy the music!
Katie Davis – Terrible, TerribleGenre: indie, folk, pop Terrible, Terrible is Katie Davis’ self-released 2004 debut EP, which earned her rave reviews. The album sent her on tour through the US and the Mediterranean during the following years, until 2009 saw her back in her hometown Seattle, Washington. In the following year she recorded the EP Three Songbirds in Los Angeles, California. Looks like she did go back. Terrible, Terrible is a free download from Bandcamp. Katie Davis MySpace and Homepage. Frank Ocean – Nostalgia, UltraGenre: rhythm & blues, soul On his mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra Frank Ocean lays his soulful voice over re-mixed songs from artists like MGMT (Electric Feel > Nature Feels), The Eagles (Hotel California > American Wedding), and Coldplay (Strawberry Swing). Frank’s own compositions like Songs for Women make this album a well-rounded masterpiece. Nostalgia, Ultra is a free download from Frank Ocean’s Tumblr. Frank Ocean SoundCloud and Tumblr. Sick of Sarah – 2205Genre: indie, pop, rock
Download 2205 via your favorite Torrent client. The Torrent file is provided by Clearbits. Sick of Sarah MySpace and Homepage. Various Artists – Future ArchitectureGenre: electro, goa trance
Future Architecture can be downloaded from the netlabel Ektoplazm. Ektoplazm Homepage. Neogoa Homepage. Underground Alien Factory Records Homepage. Reckless Sons – selftitledGenre: rock
Preview and download Reckless Sons on their Homepage. Reckless Sons MySpace and Homepage. Jhené Aiko – Sailing Soul(s)Genre: soul, hip hop
Download the mixtape Sailing Soul(s) from Jhené Aiko’s Homepage. Jhené Aiko MySpace and Homepage. [adult swim] – Warm & ScratchyGenre: rock
You can preview and download Warm & Scratchy at the [adult swim] Homepage. The URL to the .zip file appears to be broken, but you can download the album one song at a time. [adult swim] Facebook and Homepage. The Sovernty – Turning the PageGenre: alternative, industrial, rock
Preview and download Turning the Page on The Sovernty Homepage. The Sovernty MySpace and Homepage. Stenobot – Sink or Swim We’ll Go TogetherGenre: electronic, pop, chiptune, game music
Preview and download Sink or Swim We’ll Go Together on CrunchyCo. Stenobot MySpace and Homepage. AC/JC – Double DareGenre: indie, down tempo, drum & bass, instrumental, hip hop From their MySpace profile: “AC/JC is a musical colaboration between brothers Andrew Cohn (AKA Anvil) and Jesse Cohn (Sound Syndicate Media). Their EP “Volcanic Message Output,” will be a limited release on 21 Balloons Productions in the spring. The songs on this page are still unfinished.” Double Dare is a free download from Bandcamp. AC/JC MySpace and Homepage. New to Sound Sunday? Past editions of Sound Sunday are available here. Feel free to get in touch with me [tina at makeuseof dot com] to share free material, suggestions, and feedback or simply add your comments below. Need Assistance? Ask questions to MakeUseOf staff and thousands of other readers on MakeUseOf Answers!
 More articles about: downloads, freebies, indie music, music, music albums, songs, soundsunday
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| How To Add Rich Snippets for Reviews To Your WordPress Blog Posted: 20 Mar 2011 10:30 AM PDT
Most recently, this was in the form of recipe meta-data, such as ingredients or cooking time. If you’re running a WordPress blog based around reviews of anything then adding semantic markup is easy. However, you may find your chosen blog theme is throwing a few errors, so let’s take a look at a suitable plugin and how to deal with some of the errors you might see.
GD StarRatings:If you do any kind of reviews on your blog, GDStarRatings is an absolute must-have plugin, and I’ve been using it right from the start on my iPad Board Games site to allow readers to rate games they’ve played. This plugin has been around along time and the developers were thoughtful enough to include Rich Snippet markup since last year. Unlike the new Recipe micro-format, the markup and rules for reviews has long been established, so the plugin itself produces well formatted review code without any Google validation errors. Let’s take a quick look at installing and getting the plugin set up, as it can be a little daunting with all the options available to you. First, let’s download it from within the WordPress interface. After activation, by default the plugin adds a rating block, a thumbs-up bloc, and comment ratings. Let’s disable some of those that we don’t need. Expand the new ratings section on your admin sidebar, and click on Settings. Start by disabling the “thumbs-up” ratings by clicking on the green thumbs-up icon next to the word article (check out the screenshot). Deselect all the options for Auto-insert ratings code, and that should remove them. I went ahead and did the same for all other auto-inserted ratings blocks except for the main article star rating which is the only one I want. Testing With Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool:Head over to the Google rich snippets testing tool here, and enter the URL of one of your reviews. After running through the testing tool, you may find some more errors as I did, but these will be related to your individual theme rather than the ratings plugin. For instance, on my theme I found that even such simple semantic information such as “entry-title” wasn’t being added. To fix these, you will need to know a little HTML.
Open up the theme folder of your blog, located at wp-content/themes/(name of theme) if you’re going through FTP, or from the WordPress admin screen, expand the Appearance sidebar item and go to Editor. Open up single.php in your favorite text editor, or just click on the single.php to the left of the editor screen from within WordPress. First up, Google told us we were missing an entry-title. Hit Find in your browser or editor and look for the_title(). Your can see it’s surrounded by an H2 tag, and in my case with the class=”post_title” applied to it. We want to add the entry-title class to it too, so in my case I simply added that into the class definition of the H2: Just below that, Google tells us we are also missing something about when the post was updated. I already have a class=”date” definition, so I simply add “updated” into that one too: Finally, I’m missing the author information. For now I’ll add it just after the published date. If you already have some code for the_author() somewhere, just surround it with the same span tags as I’ve added below. This tells Google who the author is, their name, and encloses the whole thing in a vcard. Now, checking the page again I see all the errors have been fixed. As a final step, I’m going to submit my site for Google to start drawing rich snippets from – it won’t necessarily happen automatically, so you need to fill out the form here and Google will consider you for inclusion. Recipes in WordPress?There are also a few plugins for adding recipe microformats, however at the time of writing Google had updated their microformat style and neither plugin produced valid results. If you are publishing recipes on your blog, I’d suggest you keep an eye on both hRecipe and RecipeSEO plugins, which I’m sure will be updated soon to reflect the recent format changes. Conclusion and further reading:Adding reviews or recipes Rich Snippet data is easy with GDStarRatings, but if your theme isn’t already compatible for the additional author and post meta-data needed, then you may find Google is unwilling to list your site. If you’re getting the same errors as I did, then follow the code tutorial carefully and be sure to make a backup the file in case you make a typo. Next week I’ll begin a series of articles looking in depth at creating a wordpress theme and the structure of themes so you can edit your own a little more, but for now if you’re still getting Rich Snippet errors then feel free to ask a question on the Q&A forum, or post in the comments below, and I’ll do my best to fix them for you.
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 More articles about: blogging, blogging tips, wordpress, wordpress plugins
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| Latest Hilarious Picks [MakeUseOf Geeky Fun] Posted: 20 Mar 2011 04:15 AM PDT
If you would like to keep up with all latest Geeky Fun additions, please subscribe to the Geeky Fun feed here. You can also subscribe and get the latest additions via email.
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| Cool Websites and Tools [March 19th] Posted: 19 Mar 2011 08:31 PM PDT
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. Hey Facebookers, make sure to join MakeUseOf on Facebook and get access to some exclusve stuff. Over 70,000 fans already!
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| Two Browser Tools To Hide Your Online Traces From Google Posted: 19 Mar 2011 06:31 PM PDT
The thing is, if you use the Internet frequently, your personal privacy is a myth. Most of the websites you are visiting store your data, log your behavior and even keep track of what you are doing before and after visiting some particular URL. There’s no escape. But if you want to hide your traces from at least the largest offenders, this post may suggest some existing ways for you to do that.
Track Me Not(Compatible with: Firefox, Firefox 4, Google Chrome) Their Explanation
Track Me Not was created as a simple information security software that hides all of your data in plain sight. It doesn’t actually keep search engines from seeing your searches, but instead it creates a large field of ‘ghost’ searches, which overwhelms the trackers. Since your actual search history is lost in a sea of other searches, the engines will find themselves unable to create an accurate profile of your search activity. How It WorksTrack Me Not is on by default. It displays the current query term sent to search engines in the status bar, on the right side of the icon. The icon also allows you to configure the tool settings and see the full list of queries being sent to the search engines. The addon is simple to use, and doesn’t need any third-party software or add-ons to work. This already boosts it above most alternatives, which require an additional proxy. IssuesThe problem with products like this is that they don’t have the capabilities of the large search engines. We are talking about some of the biggest and wealthiest companies in the world. They are adaptable, and employ some of the best minds in the industry. It isn’t a leap to think that they can filter TrackMeNot results using a basic analytic tracking code. You will also have to frequently delete your cache and cookies as it builds more information in simple searches than you ever could on your own. You might also find yourself having to fill in endless CAPTCHA’s (those annoying letter/number boxes on websites) to prove you aren’t a bot, based on how many queries will be flooding the search engine. Google Sharing(Compatible with: Firefox 3.0 – 3.6.) Their Explanation
Google Sharing works as a custom proxy that runs in the background of the browser. The idea behind it is interesting. It basically takes all of our information, mixes it together, and then sends it on its way. In the end, Google will still get all of the search data that it normally would, but because it is all being jammed together, it is next to impossible to create a profile on any individual user. Trends are harder to assess, and so it offers a certain amount of privacy. Everything is filtered through an ‘identity’ created by the proxy, as it watches for Google requests from Firefox. How It WorksGoogleSharing is on by default. You can disable it from the status bar. There’s not much to configure in it. You can only add/edit the proxy server used. IssuesIf you are already concerned with your search behavior being logged by Google, chances are this tool won’t make you feel safer. The idea that all your search history is being saved by a third-party tool and then used in some way is a bit alarming. Are there any other similar tools that prevent Google from creating a user’s complete profile? Or do you think tools like these are ultimately pointless? Please share your thoughts! Image source: stayofsearch Do you like MakeUseOf articles? Don’t forget to share our articles with others! It’s really important to us.
 More articles about: browsing tools, privacy, safer browsing, security, security tips
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| Posted: 19 Mar 2011 01:30 PM PDT
For more fresh hot deals, visit our Hot Tech Deals page, which is constantly updated.
Image credit: Modified from Svengraph’s icon set
Hey Facebookers, make sure to join MakeUseOf on Facebook and get access to some exclusve stuff. Over 70,000 fans already!
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