With the popularity of Twitter and the need to keep ‘tweets’ within the 140-character limit, someone came up with the clever idea of a link-shortening service. The idea is that sometimes you want to include a link in your tweet, but some URLs are really long, like the following link to a Wikipedia article which has 67 characters in the URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening#Registering_a_short_URL
If you wanted to include this URL in your tweet it would take up almost half of the available characters, so you might have to shrink your message to accommodate the link. Link shortening services like bit.ly and goo.gl and others provide you with a unique short URL that will redirect to the longer one, so you drop the short link into your tweet—or in your email or web page: you can use them anywhere you would use a link—and when someone clicks the short link it directs them to the longer URL. This leaves more room in your tweet for your message, and minimizes the number of characters used for links.
For example, I shortened the Wikipedia article URL above using my own shortening service I set up yesterday, which uses only 17 characters: http://stacy.cc/4
I used a free PHP script-based tool called YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener) found at yourls.org. You can register a short domain name of your own, install and configure the YOURLS software on the domain, and you’re up and running with your own service. Domain registrations are pretty cheap as well, so this is a very low-cost solution if you need it. I registered the stacy.cc domain through my hosting provider, Dreamhost, for $25. I had the whole thing up and running in less than two hours.
Why create your own rather than use one of the freely-available services already out there? The best reason I can think of is control. If you use someone else’s service to handle link redirecting for you, then you run the risk of losing this function if the service shuts down, and your shortened URLs will no longer work. For most people I don’t think it’s a big deal if they’re just using it for Twitter, but if you like the idea of running and controlling your own service, and you’d like to use a custom/branded domain for your redirects, setting up a service like this is a quick and inexpensive option.
Posted: June 16th, 2011
Filed under: Development, Free (or low-cost), Innovation, Social Networking, Software, Tips Tags: twitter, url shortener | No Comments »
If you’re looking for some expanded design options for your web site, Google’s Web Fonts gives you access to a growing collection of free open source fonts that you can easily link to in your CSS style sheet and display on your site. You can create detailed previews of all the fonts first to be sure you know exactly how your site’s text will look when you’re done.
Since it’s all done through a standard style sheet link you can specify alternate fonts that all users will have on their computers in the event that the Google fonts are ever unavailable or for whatever reason you can’t connect to them. CSS provides a reliable method for fallback, so I don’t see any risk to trying these out on your site.
Here’s the link that goes inside the <head> tag on your web page to load a web font (the Open Sans font, in this example):
<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans"
rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" >
And here’s a sample CSS entry where you need to define a font face (body, p, H1, H2, etc). You can—and should, as a practice—specify other fonts in the event that the primary one is unavailable.
font-family: 'Open Sans', Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;
I just implemented it on this site using Droid Sans for the body text and Open Sans for the post titles and primary navigation along the top. I like the looks of it.
Posted: June 8th, 2011
Filed under: Development, Free (or low-cost), Web-based Tags: design, google, open source | No Comments »
According to Netcraft’s June 2011 Web Server Survey, the open source Apache web server software is far and away the leading platform today. It’s a powerful statement for the viability of FOSS (free and open source software) when the majority of the web is running on it.
Posted: June 7th, 2011
Filed under: Competition, Development, Free (or low-cost), Software, Web-based Tags: apache, open source | No Comments »
If you do web site development you’re probably well-acquainted with browser testing*—checking your site in a variety of web browsers to ensure that you know how it’s going to look and behave for the vast majority of users. You especially want to test against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser: it has been one of the worst in terms of rendering consistent with HTML and CSS web standards.
Adobe has a free online tool—BrowserLab—that will let you check your site in a simulated browser session using a wide variety of rendering engines, including IE 6, 7, 8 and 9, various versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera and Firefox. You can specify Windows or OS X versions and quickly check where you may need to fix some coding errors, or even hack your perfectly-compliant code to accommodate IE’s willful ignorance of basic CSS rules.
BrowserLab is really useful, and seems to give an accurate rendering. I fired up Windows in a virtual machine on OS X and did some testing with the Windows versions of IE 7, Chrome, Safari and Firefox, and then checked the results against BrowserLab—the results in Windows looked the same as what I got from BrowserLab, including some ridiculous scrolling issues on Chrome 11. You just need to create an account on the site and log in to use it.
* If you’re not testing against other browsers besides IE on Windows, or whatever development platform you use, give it a try and make sure that your site looks the way you expect it to across different browsers and operating systems. Your users will appreciate it.
Posted: June 3rd, 2011
Filed under: Development, Free (or low-cost), Software, Web-based Tags: adobe, browsers, code, css, html, microsoft, web-standards | No Comments »
Some beautiful images for your desktop, Mac or PC, at simpledesktops.com.
Posted: May 15th, 2011
Filed under: Free (or low-cost), Photos, Whatever | No Comments »
Amazon just announced their Cloud Drive service. It’s not an automated file syncing service like Dropbox—it’s (currently) a manual, browser-based upload to a file share on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Dropbox is built on the S3 infrastructure, though, so I wonder what Amazon will do in terms of building their own application or API for syncing. Amazon knows storage and Dropbox knows syncing, so maybe there’s an acquisition in the future here.
Pricing looks very good for what they’re offering. You get 5 GB free to start with if you have an existing Amazon account.
Posted: March 29th, 2011
Filed under: File Sharing & Storage, Free (or low-cost), Web-based Tags: amazon, backup, cloud, dropbox, storage | No Comments »
I recently upgraded to a Nikon D7000 and began shooting HD video with it, but ran into a problem with importing the video into Final Cut Express (FCE): every time I made a minor edit on the timeline I had to do a complete rendering which ran very slowly. I found some discussions about this in several places on the web so I thought I would post a solution here that’s worked well for me. I can’t say for sure whether this will help with all DSLRs, so to be clear here’s what I’m using:
- Nikon D7000
- Shooting 720p30 HD (produces a .MOV file)
- Importing into Final Cut Express HD 3.5
The challenge here, I think, is the MOV container that the camera generates—this format doesn’t lend itself to editing, so I did a conversion to the video files using the free MPEG Streamclip tool and had much better results with quick rendering on the FCE timeline.
* Note that what I’m describing here applies to Final Cut Express. If you’re using Final Cut Pro you should have the ProRes codecs installed and you can convert your MOV files using the ProRes 422 codec to get the same results. I don’t know about the other NLEs like Premier or Avid as my experience is limited to FCE.
The process is basically this:
- Import the MOV files from the camera to a folder on your computer.
- Open MPEG Streamclip and drag the first MOV file onto the canvas (or do File > Open Files…)
- Go to File > Export to Quicktime… and select the options as shown on the screen shot below (the Apple Intermediate Codec is the important thing here to get your video into a timeline-friendly format).
- Click Make Movie and save the converted file—I save mine in the same folder as the original MOV files but add “-aic” to the file name (like D7K_1234-aic.mov).
- Bring these converted files into FCE and edit as usual.
When I did it this way the occasional rendering on the timeline went really quickly, and I can’t detect a noticeable change in video quality.
Posted: March 14th, 2011
Filed under: Free (or low-cost), Tips, Video Tags: final cut express, vimeo | No Comments »
Learn the Switch to Mac is a really clever new 99¢ application designed to help with the switch from Windows to the Mac (App Store link here). It walks you through common functions, showing how you currently do it in Windows and then demonstrating the Mac equivalent. I haven’t installed it but the five-minute demo video (below) is impressive.
If you’re considering moving from Windows to the Mac, or just want to see how the Mac OS compares to its PC counterpart, this looks like a great way to do it.
Posted: February 11th, 2011
Filed under: Apple, Free (or low-cost), Software, Tips, Windows Tags: mac | No Comments »
Dashkards is a site with keyboard shortcuts for some popular Mac apps. This is a good reference tool for learning how to get around your apps quickly, especially for commonly-used functions. They currently have a limited number of apps there, but it’s a good site to bookmark.
Posted: February 11th, 2011
Filed under: Apple, Free (or low-cost), Software, Tips, Web-based Tags: dashkards, mac | No Comments »
If you’re not familiar with Monoprice.com check them out sometime for some of your tech product needs. They carry a huge variety of cables, cords, adapters and such, and their prices for some of this stuff are amazing. This week I was looking for a Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter so I could connect my MacBook Pro to our Samsung TV. The Apple store sells this little doohicky for $35 — I ordered one from Monoprice.com for $7.65. It was less than $10 with tax and shipping.
I’ve ordered several HDMI cables and some other adapters from them and have had no problems with their products. I don’t know if all of their products offer huge savings like this, but it’s the first place I check when I need something.
Posted: December 9th, 2010
Filed under: Finance, Free (or low-cost), Tips | No Comments »
