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Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto

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You are here: Home / Archives for Web and Technology / Cool stuff

Advantages of becoming a top commenter on this site

March 25, 2007 by Tricia

In an earlier post I was telling you that I’ve been working on our sites and that I’ve added a few new WordPress plugins as well.

One of the new plugins is one that allows me to show who my top commentators are in my right side bar.

See that area below Recent Comments? Yep, that’s where my top commentators for each month will be show. I can change that to daily, weekly, monthly or yearly top commentators if I want. Right now it’s set to monthly but I might change it to yearly.

One thing that I like about this new plug in is that it gives my top commentators a real link. There is no rel no follow tag added to the link, so Google can pick up the link. This might help you, my visitors and those making comments, build your sites Page Rank. So it’s in your best interest to leave comments on this site and work towards becoming the top commentator each month.





Filed Under: Cool stuff, Web and Technology, Web Design, Website Promotion Tagged With: comment, comments, google, page rank, plugin, PR, real link, recent, Top Commentators, visitors, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugin

SimpleTags a great WordPress plugin

March 25, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve been busy working on organizing, fine tuning and even changing the themes for several of the blogs that my husband and I work on.

One of the new WordPress plugins that I’ve added to a few of our sites is called SimpleTags. It’s a wordpress plugin that allows me to tag each post, bring up related posts, and create meta tags for each page of my site, as well as a category and tag cloud.

Take a look at my category section on the right. I have a tag cloud there now so that you can see what subjects I talk about most. The tag cloud is in a roll up menu that I made using the Flooble Expandable menu script, and I’ve labeled the cloud “Category and Tag Cloud”. You can’t miss it if you’re looking for it.

If you do take a peek at the tag cloud you’ll notice that one of the biggest topics right now is “General Musings”. Now really … not everything I write about can be categorized as general can it? In fact there’s probably very few things that really are general. I just got lazy when I created this site and didn’t use categories as well as I should have from the start.

I know that a lot of people make this mistake. How many of you have a huge category section called “Uncategorized”? Yeah, I suppose the subjects you’ve talked about really are uncategorized if you left them in the default WordPress category, aren’t they? LOL

If you want to optimize your site so that some of the topics you write about will end up coming up on search engine search result pages you really should go over your site and make sure that each of your posts are categorized properly. Or that your posts are at least in somewhat descriptive categories. Believe me – you’ll end up getting a few more visitors if you do categorize your posts properly, and your current visitors will be able to explore your site and read any posts that you’ve written about on subjects that interest them too.

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Web and Technology, Web Design Tagged With: category cloud, importance of categories, optomize, organize, plugin, related posts, search engine, SEO, SimpleTags, tag cloud, tag comments, technorati tags, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugin

New digital media convert makes it easy to convert video and audio formats

March 12, 2007 by Tricia

Last summer I was lucky enough to be given a free Nokia smart media phone. My new phone could take pictures, record audio and voice, play MP3’s, and record video. One of the very first things that I did with my new phone as I returned home with it was to record a video as we were driving. You see, my husband and I had accidentally discovered that we could drive on the Molson Indy race track that was being set up in downtown Toronto the day before the big race was to start.

How exciting! Our car on a race track and we could record our adventure too!

Unfortunately, when we got home I discovered that our new cell phone recorded video in 3GP format. At that time, I don’t believe that YouTube or Google video accepted uploads in that type of format. That was a huge drag since I wanted to post my little film on this site.

I got busy searching the internet for a free program which would convert the 3GP format over to AVI which was accepted at Youtube at the time. Problem was I could only find programs that would convert 3GP to another format, before I could use yet another free conversion program to convert the video to AVI. My video lost a lot of it’s quality along the way and I was very disappointed with the results. As a result of this I’ve made very few videos with our cell phone.

Lucky for me, and any of you who have gone through some of the type of experiences I’ve just described there’s a new digital media converter available and it converts a multitude of video and audio formats quickly and easily. No more fiddling around and losing quality!

You can easily convert video and audio files from one format to another. You can even batch convert too. Common formats that work with the new digital media converter are VCD, DVD, AVI (DivX, MS MPEG4, uncompressed, etc), MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (PAL, NTSC), MP3, MOV, WMA, WMV, DVR-MS, ASF, AIFF, AU ,VOB (DVD Video files), SND, DVR-MS (including radio station DVR-MS file format), 3GP, DV-AVI, MP3 and WAV formats.

We have a DVD recorder but it doesn’t record in a format that our DVD player accepts. Now, if I were to get this software, I can record shows and movies with our DVD recorder onto a re-recordable DVD disk and pop it into my computer and convert it to a format that our DVD player will accept.

You can also use this converter to extract the audio from a video and save just the audio tracks. That would be great for recording really wonderful movie sound tracks wouldn’t it?

There are all kinds of great features in this new digital media converter. Using the advanced settings you can change the video frame size, audio/video compression codec, number of channels in an audio stream and the frequency too.

I think I could go on and on about this media converter. Probably because I spent so much time searching for a decent one last summer. So I’ll just tell you about one last feature that I think just about everyone would want to try. If you have an iPod, Sony PSP or another type of portable media device and say that you are about to take a long road trip, or perhaps your commute to work daily is by bus or train and it takes an hour or so to get from home to work. Why not convert DVDs and films that you like to a format that works with your portable media player so that you can watch them whenever your out and about, traveling or commuting? I know that if I had a long commute or a long trip coming up I’d do that.

You can learn more about this digital media converter by visiting the information page I listed above. You can also read a number of articles that will teach you how to use the media converter in different ways.

If you want to try this software there’s a free version at http://www.Deskshare.com. You’ve got nothing to lose by downloading the free trial. Give it a try.

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Entertainment, Recreation, Shopping, Software, Video, Web and Technology Tagged With: 3gp, AIFF, ASF, AU, AVI, cell phone, computer, Cool stuff, Digital, digital media, digital media converter, DivX, DV AVI, DVD, DVD Video files, DVR, DVR MS, file format, Home and Lifestyle, ipod, MOV, Mp3, MPEG 1, MPEG 2, MS MPEG4, Music, NTSC, PAL, radio station, record, Shopping, SND, Software, soundtrack, uncompressed, VCD, Video, VOB, WAV, Web and Technology, WMA, WMV

Free ringtones for your cell – top bands and TV shows

March 10, 2007 by Tricia

Have you ever gone looking for free Ringtones for your cell phone on the Internet only to find a bunch of ringtones that are just muzak. You know – electronic music that sounds a bit like the song you were looking for, but not really? They never have any vocals either of course, and are often worse than elevator music.

Well I was just visitingMSNEmotions.org and I spent some time in their free ringtone section. They have a huge selection of more than 1000 ringtones to browse through. I mean they’re real songs! There’s a top 40 billboard list, as well as songs from all the top bands. They also have TV show ringtones too.

I really like the Red Hot Chili peppers so when I saw that they had Californication I immediately downloaded it for my cell. It was really easy to do. I just downloaded it to my computer and then uploaded it to my phone. Done!

The ringtones should work on any cell phone that supports wav/mp3 ringtones like Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Ericcson and most of the major cell phone brands.

Check it out if you want ringtones from your favorite bands on your cell. Oh, they also have free cellphone wallpaper too.

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Entertainment, Recreation, Services, Shopping, Web and Technology Tagged With: cell phone, Cool stuff, download, Entertainment, Favorite bands, media, Mp3, Music, Paper, Recreation, ringtones, songs, sound, top bands, TV

Amazing zero click picture correction software

February 28, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve found an amazing software product. I couldn’t wait to tell you about it either because I know that many of you enjoy taking photographs, but might not be all that great when it comes to editing them and making a good photo turn into a fantastic photo.

Well, look no further. I found software that you’re going to wish you knew about years ago. It’s Photobot, the world’s first ZERO CLICK picture correction software. I visited the site and saw a demonstration of how the software automatically brightens dark photos, takes red eye out of pictures, and gives life like color to photographs automatically.

You can download Photobot for a free 30 day trial, or purchase it now for the low introductory price of $29.95.

Now you can put fantastic photos into your posts or on your websites and you’ll save a lot of time using Photobot because you won’t be tinkering with your photos. You’ll have more time to concentrate on other aspects of your blog or website.

Want to know more? Here’s the company Press Release:

Photobotâ„¢, the First ZERO-CLICK(TM) Picture Correction Software, Now Commercially Available Find Photobot at major outlets including Amazon.com and Overstock.com, and at leading camera stores like Adorama and B&H Photo-Video Tribeca Labs (www.tribecalabs.com), a leading developer of digital imaging software and services, and winner of the DIMA 2006 Innovative Digital Product Award, has announced the release of PhotobotTM, the first Zero-Click picture correction software.

With Photobot, consumers now have a fully-automatic program that instantly brightens dark images, reduces red-eye and gives their pictures life-like color. There are no more buttons to push, no more sliders to slide – no work to do and no time wasted. Photobot does it all for you, automatically.

Photobot is now available for purchase at major outlets like Amazon.com and Overstock.com, and at leading camera stores, like Adorama and B&H Photo-Video. “We are pleased to announce the commercial availability of Photobot in conjunction with such well-known retail partners,” said Mike Bevans, one of the Partners at Tribeca Labs.

How It Works Once installed on the computer, Photobot continually searches the user’s hard drive for photos. When “he” finds them, he goes to work applying award-winning, multi-patented technologies to instantly and automatically optimize picture quality.

Photobot uses Perfectly Clearâ„¢ to improve brightness, Full Spectrum RGBâ„¢ to deliver vibrant, life-like colors and FotoNation’s Red-Eyeâ„¢ to reduce red-eye. Importantly, Photobot’s technologies are all adaptive, which means that he only makes adjustments to images if they are needed, and then only to the degree necessary to achieve optimal results.

“Photobot is specifically designed for the everyday point-and-shoot consumer that wants to take lots of digital photos, and have them come out looking great,” said Bevans. “Busy moms and dads don’t want to have to do photo-finishing work on their computers. Taking pictures is fun, but correcting them is homework. With Zero-Click technology this chore is eliminated forever; users simply save pictures to their computers – and seconds later Photobot provides them with great looking photos.”

Correct your pictures – Protect your pictures In addition to improving images, Photobot also automatically uploads them to the user’s personal Swiss Picture Bank account, where they are protected from hard drive failure, accidental deletion, theft and disasters of all kinds.

Tribeca Labs operates Swiss Picture Bank in the same high-security data centers that Swiss banks use to store billions of dollars in electronic assets. “Swiss Picture Bank is the first practical, effective solution to the problem of digital picture backup,” said Bevans. “Most consumers aren’t very diligent about backing up their pictures.

With Swiss Picture Bank, your precious memories are automatically backed up for you so that you’re never at risk of losing years of your life’s history. Swiss Picture Bank keeps your photos safe. Forever.”

MSRP: $29.95 including a free introductory account at Swiss Picture Bank. For more information, visit www.photobot.com. # # #

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Entertainment, Photography, Recreation, Shopping, Web and Technology Tagged With: automatic picture correction, camera, Cool stuff, digital camera, digital photo, digital pictures, Entertainment, free software trial, photo, photobot, Photography, photos, picture correction software

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