If you're away from your computer, using an online picture editor to resize, crop or otherwise do light image editing can save you having to find, install and use a graphics program on an unfamiliar computer. This can be especially useful if you are using another online tool that makes image files. For example, if you make a flowchart online, you can save it, and then use an online picture editor to make additional changes (like make a title, notes, etc.).

If you're using a public computer, like in a library, computer lab or internet cafe, email your files to yourself when you're done. Then delete the local copies of your images off of the public machine. It makes no difference what kind of computer you are use to connect to the internet, since many of these tools work the same in most browsers and on most computers (though it might need to be a relatively modern computer and browser to use some online tools).

Here is a list of image editors that show promise:

• fotoflexer.com
• splashup.com
• picnik.com
• picresize.com
• others listed at thefreecountry.com

Labels: graphics

You should be supporting iPhones with the YouTube videos on your web site. Link to the YouTube video page as a standard link, don't only embed it. iPhones have a YouTube application that will be launched by a link on a web page to the YouTube video page, but iPhones don't yet support flash, so they can't display the embedded videos right on the page in Safari, yet.

Including the link with also help search engine crawlers find the videos and better understand what is on your web site. Here's an example of how to support the iPhone when embedding YouTube Videos.

Labels: iPhone, video, web coding

Posting to a blog at different times affects the popularity of the post. Bookmarking that post at different times also impacts its popularity. There may be a "blog-cycle," like a news-cycle, for making blog posts popular.

According to some research, Thursday early afternoon and early evening may be the best times to seed blog posts into social bookmarking and social media sites. Others say that between 1pm and 3pm PST (after lunch) or between 5pm and 7pm PST (after work) are the best times and Thursday is the best day.

Labels: social media, social networking

Facebook has released a new version of the Facebook application for the iPhone which is available to be installed tomorrow at the launch of the new iPhone. The application includes chat which means you will be able to chat with all of your Facebook friends while on the go

(from allfacebook).

Labels: iPhone, social networking

BOSS allows developers to submit queries (and their associated parameters) via an API to retrieve up to 50 web, image, news, or spelling results in XML or JSON format at a time (from TechCrunch).

Labels: search, web coding

How long you register a domain name for impacts it's search engine rankings. Pagerank is essentially the first claim of US Patent 220050071741 (which is held by many people including some Google employees). It states:

A method for scoring a document, comprising: identifying a document; obtaining one or more types of history data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of history data.

Claim 38 says (my emphasis added):

The method of claim 1, wherein the one or more types of history data includes domain-related information corresponding to domains associated with documents; and wherein the generating a score includes: analyzing domain-related information corresponding to a domain associated with the document over time, and scoring the document based, at least in part, on a result of the analyzing.

And claim 40 specifies some of the domain-related information they are referring to (my emphasis added again):

The method of claim 38, wherein the domain-related information is related to at least one of an expiration date of the domain, a domain name server record associated with the domain, and a name server associated with the domain.

Therefore, amongst the over 100 factors used in determining a page's pagerank and its ranking in search engine results is the expiration date of the domain of the page. Reason suggests more legitimate web sites are committed to their domain names and would register them for the more time than fly-by-night sites. Google sums it up best in the patent's 99th claim (my emphasis added once again):

Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

Labels: google, search

Sometimes it's useful to see a website in many browsers to be sure the design looks good to all of the site's visitors. Short of installing many different browsers on different computers, there are some websites that can help.

Labels: web design

Labels: social networking, video

Google localizes search results based on the country from which you are accessing Google. This is intended to give the most relevant results based on where you are. You can choose which country's results you want to see, but you must use some sort of proxy. The international version (what the United States sees when searching) is accessible from outside of the US using a proxy, or proxy website that is located inside the US.

Dialing-up or otherwise connecting to the internet through an ISP located in a different country should also work. You can compare what different countries see in Google results using a geotargeted search comparison.

Labels: google, search

To let visitors chat with you, using Google talk, create a Google Talk chatback badge and place it on your website, blog or profile.

You can customize what the badge looks like, from just a link, all the way to a fully built out iframe. You need a Google Talk account to use this (you probably have one if you use Gmail).

Labels: google, web coding

When someone shares a page on Facebook, the webmaster can specify the title, the description and the default thumbnail image.

The title doesn't have to be the same as the the page's title tag, and is specified with:

The description is taken from the standard description meta tag:

The thumbnail used for Facebook sharing, and other places too, can be specified with:

Place the code in the head section of the web page replacing "[your thumbnail's web address]" with the URL to your thumbnail image, and both the title and description with what you want to have appear when the item is shared on Facebook.

Labels: social networking, web coding