Category: Tools

Image To Icon: 5 Ways to Easily Convert Images To Icon Files

January 14th, 2010 in Tools | View Comments

We use icons at a lot of places such as desktop application or favicon for our blog. For those who always change the Windows folder or application icons, you can always search for .ico images format, which is the icon files for Windows.

We had gone through a lot of articles that related to images and icons. But if you are new to our blog, then you may want to refer them back, which i would like to do a summary here:

  • Image Optimization tools: This article shares 12 tools for you to optimize and reduce the size of your images. They may not be important for you, but these tools are essential for bloggers and webmasters. As Google put more weight on page loading speed, it is good that you pay some attention on your image size especially if you have many images on your articles.
  • Free Icon Editors: 6 useful and free Icon Editors for you. Useful when you don’t want to install or fire up your Photoshop. Some of them are even portable, which mean you can carry them along with your USB flash drive.

But, if you want to use your own images as icons, then you may need some software/utilities to convert these images to .ico extension. Today, we are going to look into 5 different methods to convert your images to icon files.

Desktop Image to Icon Converters

1. SimplyIcon

SimplyIcon allows you to create icon files by drag and drop your images on to this application. This is a portable application and it requires .Net Framework 2.0 to run.
SimplyIcon

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7 Tools To Optimize The Speed of Your Website

December 15th, 2009 in Tools | View Comments

Google recently announced that it’s algorithm will factor in page load speed in addition to the other 200 or so ranking factors currently employed. This move, broadly welcomed by web developers and users, means it is now more important than ever to optimize the speed of your websites. Speed optimisation will not only keep Google happy, it will keep visitors engaged, increasing user retention and activity, as well as reducing your bandwidth and hosting costs. It’s a real win-win situation.

Using the tools explored below, you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly what’s slowing you down as well as get advice and recommendations on how to make the necessary improvements. Each tool is slightly different, but you need not use them in isolation. The best results come from utilizing a portfolio of speed optimisation tools to ensure you’ve got all the bases covered.

Still remember the WordPress web optimization article? If you are a WordPress user, i believe both these articles will bring benefit to your blog’s loading speed, as well as your page rank.

Yahoo! YSlow

YSlow is perhaps the user-friendliest of all the speed optimisation tools, useful for beginners and experts alike. It analyses web pages and suggests ways to improve the performance of your web site based on Yahoo!’s 34 best practices. These are divided into seven categories: content, server, cookie, CSS, JavaScript, images and mobile.

YSlow, which is a Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug (which you have to install first), judges web pages according to one of three pre-designed rule sets or a rule set of your own making. In addition to advising you on how to improve your web site’s speed it also summarizes each page’s components, displaying in-depth statistics.
Yahoo! YSlow

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Desktop Blogging: 20 Best Blogging Softwares To Help You Blog From Your Dekstop

November 9th, 2009 in Tools | View Comments

Blogs are the perfect forum to express your opinions about anything and everything. The best part is that it doesn’t need tons of knowledge on the internet to tart a blog. All you need is to choose a desktop blogging tool. These tools speed up the blogging process. They let you write a blog offline and then publish it later at a more convenient time

Many of these blogging softwares have a scheduled post feature which lets you define what time you would like to publish your articles. Some of the other features provided by these tools include a spell checker, drafts saver, remote publishing etc. These tools are available for all the three OS: – Windows, Mac, and Linux. So you just have to choose the right tool and then go ahead and blog away!

1. Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is one of the cleanest desktop blogging tools. It is equipped with the familiar user interface that other Microsoft applications come provide. You can use the rich text editor, and spell checker and can also add images and other media. However the USP of this software is that you can add plug-ins to the editor. Some of these plug-ins integrate with Flickr and Facebook photos. If all you want to do is write a blog post then this is the perfect tool since you don’t have to get into the complications of messing up with the HTML code.

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6 Free Icon Editors To Create and Edit Icons

October 26th, 2009 in Resources, Tools | View Comments

We use icons for our web designs, favicons and also Windows/Mac application. To create or edit an icon, you can use either powerful image editors like Photoshop, Paint.NET, premium icon editors, or just use a free icon editor.

Today, we are going to share 6 Useful Free Icon Editors where you can create and edit your icons for free. Some of them offer advanced features like extract icons from binary for free.

1. Greenfish Icon Editor Pro
Greenfish Icon Editor Pro is a very powerful icon editor. It is portable, with <1.8MB after unzip. It supports layer, able to create animated cursors, offers high-quality filters like Bevel, Drop Shadow and Glow.
Greenfish Icon Editor Pro

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12 Really Useful Image Optimization Tools For Web Designers

September 17th, 2009 in Tools | View Comments

Images are very important because they will make your web pages look nicer and more attractive. But, high quality and beautiful images always huge in file size. They make your pages load slower and consume more bandwidth. So we, the designers should optimize the images so that they are tiny in file size, but good in quality.

There are a lot of useful image optimization tools which can help us to optimize and reduce the file size of the images. These applications are available as both web-based and desktop-based applications.

Web based Image Optimization Tools

1. Smush.it

Smush.it is a popular image optimization tool that able to reduce the image file size but retain the quality, which is what we called “lossless” image optimization! You can run Smush.it through the web site (5 images at the same time) or through Firefox’s YSlow extension.
Smush.it

2. Dynamic Drive Online Image Optimizer

The Online Image Optimizer lets you optimize different image file formats such as GIF, JPG and PNG. You can either upload the image from your local machine or paste the URL of an image. This tool able to optimize and convert your image to different file format. The limitations of the Online Image Optimizer are 200KB per file, and only single file allowed per conversion.
Dynamic Drive Online Image Optimizer

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10 Adobe AIR Applications To View, Download And Share Photos On Flickr

September 8th, 2009 in Tools | View Comments

Flickr is the largest online photo sharing and you can find a lot of useful images or stock photos for your project. Adobe AIR is a technology that let developers to build rich internet applications that run across different Operation Systems.

With the powerful features of Adobe AIR and Flickr’s API, there are a lot of great applications that built upon them. Today, we are going to see 10 awesome Adobe AIR applications that will help you in viewing, downloading and sharing photos on Flickr.

1. Flair

Flair stands for Flickr search for AIR. It will search Flickr database for matched photo tags. The return results will be displayed in thumbnail format. Once you click the thumbnail, you can view the large image, together with the uploader’s user information. Clicking the uploader’s avatar will bring you to his/her photostream.
Flair

2. Flickroom

Flickroom is an Adobe AIR based application that provides the rich browsing experience Flickr users have long deserved. The dark theme ensures that your photographs look better than ever before.
Flickroom

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15 Helpful Web Based Broken Link Checkers

August 17th, 2009 in SEO, Tools | View Comments

Broken link, or dead link is a link that point to an address that is unable to reach. If your blog or website has many broken links, then it may give a very bad impression for your readers and visitors. Furthermore, broken links will also affect your SEO ranking. It is because Google PR will directly affected by the quality of your internal and external links.

In my previous post about WordPress SEO plugins, i had shared about Broken Link Checker, which is a WordPress plugin that able to check your articles for broken links. However, if you are not WordPress users, then you may not able to use this plugin.

So, i am going to share 15 helpful web based broken links checkers that able to use by everyone. These online tools able to check broken links without install any software or plugin.

1. W3C Link Checker

This Link Checker looks for issues in links, anchors and referenced objects in a Web page, or recursively on a whole Web site.
W3C Link Checker

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10 Really Useful Server Monitoring Tools

August 10th, 2009 in Tools | View Comments

To ensure that all your company’s SLAs (that’s Service Level Agreements) are met, you’re going to need a server that’s running smoothly under optimum conditions. Leaving your server’s health to chance is particularly unwise in this socially networked world, where the tiniest molehill of a server hiccup can be turned into a mountain of a problem once it’s been tweeted and blogged about around the globe.

Luckily for you, we’ve found 10 really useful server monitoring tools that will keep your server in tiptop shape, giving you complete peace of mind. These tools monitor a range of different things, from uptime to security and even the physical environment, but all let you identify and resolve problems before they can have a detrimental effect on your business.

1. Pingdom

Pingdom, which is also available as an iPhone application, makes sure that your website is reachable and responding properly at all times, providing you with email and SMS alerts if it’s not. It monitors uptime and overall performance, creating charts and tables that are easy to understand, enabling you to spot trends and accurately pinpoint problems.
pingdom

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15 Great And Free Photoshop Alternatives

August 6th, 2009 in Tools | View Comments

Adobe Photoshop is definitely the most powerful image editing software. It had a lot of great features and can be used by professional such as web designers and graphics designers. Its filters, plugins, actions, brushes and easy-to-use are the main reasons why most designers prefer Photoshop than other tools.

However, Photoshop is very expansive and not all designers afford to buy the original license of it. So, some designers try to look for free alternatives to Photoshop. If you are one of them, you consider yourself lucky as we are going to look into 15 Great And Free Photoshop Alternatives today.

1. GIMP

GIMP is probably the most popular Photoshop Alternative. It works across different platform – supports Windows, Mac and Linux. It probably doesn’t have every single features in Photoshop, but it is more than enough for a designer’s daily use.
GIMP

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10 Great Domain Tools To Help You In Domain Search

August 5th, 2009 in Tools | View Comments

When you start a website, everyone talks about finding a domain name.  But, going straight to Godaddy or some domain buyer does not help if the name you want is taken.  Domain registrars are not very good at giving creative options to a particular word.  That is why we have listed 10 good domain tools to help you get the best domain for your site.

1. Domains Bot

Domains Bot searches all the big top domains (.com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .us), lists those that are taken (with option to backorder), and gives you various suggestions on your typed in choice.  Takes a while to load the page, but is worth it.
domains bot

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