If you’re selling online you probably are familiar with PayPal - and the gouge they take out of your incoming income. With the PayPal Fee Calculator you can avoid the aftershock by knowing what your fees will be in advance. That way, you can adjust your price to have the buyer absorb some of the cost. Cool.
This is a free tool - so enjoy freely.
Since MySpace is drowning in a sea of spam and no relief seems to be in sight, now would be a good time to start looking for a new online meeting place. If you want to get in on the ground floor of a social networking site that offers chat, photo albums and mp3 downloads (that’s very cool), join 3gb community www.3gb.biz.
3gb is so new in fact, their TOS reads: “This is the terms of service agreement.” OK. I can deal with that. Expect the usual bumps in the road as the platform develops. This is the best time to become part of a new community.
Relax a little, will you? Get on your computer and kill something.
Nexuiz is a 3d deathmatch game project, created online by a team of developers called Alientrap. It is available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux (all the same archive). The game is meant to bring death match back to the basics, with fast paced action, perfect weapon balancing, and very excessive battles.
Version 2 of Nexuiz includes a single-player campaign with completely new advanced bot AI, five new maps, new particle effect system, weapon changes, and complete precompiled bumpmapping with GLSL shaders. The first version was released May 31st 2005, released entirely GPL and free over the net, a first for a project of its kind. Since then it has been downloaded over 1.5 million times, and the game is still being updated and developed, currently at version 2.4 and new releases being developed.
Decent web directories that you can submit your sites to are getting pretty rare. Either they want a couple hundred dollars for each submission or what they have to offer for free is worthless. Sometimes listing your links at these sites can actually be harmful to your rankings instead of helpful. If you’re looking for a free web directory, you should look at Dirmania.
DirMania is a business web directory that provides free website advertising. The site has a PR 3, if you care about that kind of stuff and offers a direct link to your small or medium sized business/website. The directory is organized by categories and is very search engine friendly. Your listing can go live in less than 24 hours if you meet the listing requirements. (Not hard to do if you don’t try keyword stuffing or other lame 2002 tricks.) Be sure and provide a good, human friendly description of your site with appropriate keywords and a catchy title and you’re in.
The submission form has all the instructions and advice you need to determine if your submission is quality or not. Think common sense. Make sure you are submitting your link in the most relevant category to its content and make sure that the content is offering something useful to the visitor. It is, isn’t it? Then you’re good - otherwise, anything that is submitted to a blatantly wrong category or is nothing but spam will be removed from the directory.
Play by the rules and scoop up some link love. We all need it.
Here’s an easy-peasy way to create a favicon from any perfectly square (for example 100 pixels x 100 pixels) image on your computer. Yes, even your sweet mug. Wait - you don’t know what a favicon is? No shame, read on:
A favicon (short for “favorites icon” and also known as a page icon), is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage that is displayed in the browser address bar next to a site’s URL.
So obviously you must have one. Go here now –> FaviconGenerator and create t your heart’s content.
Spring always reminds me of the need to care for the Earth - while we still recognize it. Here’s a free download that can help you in your efforts to diminish your carbon footprint. If you have one.
Calculate your carbon footprint with this easy to use calculator software. Enter in data to figure CO2 generated from activities including transportation, energy, trash or waste, recreation, purchasing habits, food, and more. Lear n where you can go green by calculating your carbon footprint and then focusing on areas where you can make the most positive impact on the environment. The software gives you CO2 footprint details from each category. For transportation you can enter in up to 6 different cars and their respective fuel efficiency, airline travel, bus travel, and rail travel.
To figure your energy use and carbon footprint, you can enter in your location, number of people in your house, as well as energy use from fuel oil, natural gas, and electricity. Also included are indirect carbon footprint categories like recreation habits, purchasing habits, waste, recycling participation, food, and more. Different units are available so you can calculate your carbon footprint in metric units or English. You can also print out a summary of your carbon footprint results.
Enjoy.
Need to up the position of your sites? Why do I ask these questions? Of course you do. Hop on the backlink bandwagon and boost yourself up, baby.
Simply use this Backlink Tools page, which has “links to the best Backlink Tools on the internet and these tools will help you to optimize your website and move your search engine position higher. The following Backlink Tools links are selected from the top SEO tool web sites. These Backlink Tools links are the best of the best.”
You heard it.
Tired of finding out you don’t have the correct codec for whatever application you’re trying to run? Goes without saying. Here’s relief in a free package: Windows Essentials Codec Pack
Windows Essentials Codec Pack is a collection of the most essential Audio and Video DirectShow Codecs and Filters for Windows, that enables you to play and view almost all music and video files downloaded from the Internet. It adds support for (S)VCDs and XCDs as well as 3GP, AAC, AC3, APE, AVI, DivX, 3ivx, DAT, h.264, x264, Nero Digital, DTS, FLV, FLAC, HD-MOV, MPEG-1/2, M4A, MP3, MP4, MO3, MOD, MKV, OFR, TTA, OGG/OGM, S3M, Vorbis, VOB, XviD, XM, WV, UMX and many other formats. Essentials Codec Pack also includes Windows Media Player Classic. An integrated auto-update can automatically check for updated codecs.
Gets 5 Stars from 5 reviews. No adware or spyware. Sweet. Download your essentials at Snapfiles.
Want to see yourself as others see you? Or at least how search engines see your pages? SEOmoz’s crawl test tool is open to the public.
This tool is used to test how accessible your site is to search engines and can help you quickly diagnose potential crawling issues and give you an overview of your site’s search friendliness.
To run the crawl test tool you just need to register for a free SEOmoz account. Basic members are limited to one report per 24 hour period and the tool will only test 5 pages at a time. Premium Members can run as many reports as they like and the crawl test will test 50 pages at a time.
Knock yerself out.
If you haven’t tapped into the hot search spot known as “Spock” you’re really missing out on a cool way to find people and things you’re looking for. Spock is not like most search engines in that it doesn’t simply return a dry list of text links.
Say you use a keyword search to look for web design or a web designer. Hit enter and Spock bring up a list of people - with their photos when available - and all of the links associated to each person. It will show you their community links like LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and their professional links like their education, affiliations and associations they belong to.
Spock also lets you create widgets of your searches that you can embed in your own pages or blog posts. This adds cool functionality to your site, allowing you to offer information for other searchers. Spock is still in beta but it works without a hitch. It’s definitely not a “bares bones” beta, as you can see from the widget of my search result below:
Spock’s search engine allows you to search people by their names, by tags related to their work or profession, and - this is really cool - by their email address. Try that with Google and see how far you get. You get a document not found message. Once you register with Spock (don’t worry, it’s free and easy) and try the same search you will find what and who you are looking for.
But enough from me. You’ll only get the full flavor of Spock.com by checking it out yourself. You don’t even have to register to do great searches, but once you do you can access even more features. Enjoy your search for a change. You will find what you need - and, dare I say it - “prosper”?
