Web Glossary – RSS Feed Added

I’ve just added an RSS feed to Web Glossary so now you can keep up to date with with new terms as they are added to the site.

The feed will display the 10 50 latest updates to the site. At the moment that covers new definitions that are added or any rewrites and updates.

Web Glossary is very much a work in progress with new definitions being added on a nearly daily basis between now and the end of the year. Its design is continually being evolved as well and tried out in public.

I’m trying a number of advertising providers including AdSense and WidgetBucks and I have plans to publish in depth articles there as well.

Improvements to the search facility and a “Suggest A Term” feature are also next in line to be added.

So if you’re stumped by terms like 1U or typo-squatting try out Web Glossary.

If you’d like to subscribe to the feed or syndicate it on your own site, you can grab the feed from http://feeds.feedburner.com/webglossary

Filed under: Other BlueClock Websites, Promoting Your Website and Organisation, Web Glossary , feed, rss, syndication, terminology, web design, Web Glossary, web hosting

Free Fridays #3 Vista Drive Icon

This week’s recommendation of a free software product is a bit more lightweight than past weeks. In fact it doesn’t have much more utility beyond the fact that it’s pretty. But hey, that’s not always a bad thing.

Vista Drive Icon changes your original Windows drive icons to ones more like those used on Windows Vista.

So far, so good. The icons also have an indicator under each drive. This give a handy visual cue as to how full your disk is. This is particularly handy when working with external drives or USB keys etc as you can quickly tell how much space is left on each drive.

You can download Vista Drive Icon at drvicon.sourceforge.net

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software , Free Software, vista, vista drive icon, Windows XP

Cachefile Adds Datejs and JsUnit To Script Library

Two more JavaScript libraries have been added to CacheFile bringing the new total to 17 if you include script.aculo.us

Datejs is a small library that as its name would suggest, has a number of date parsing functions for dealing with date in human terms e.g. “Next Friday” or “6 Months Ago”.

JsUnit is a unit testing framework for JavaScript based on JUnit.

If you’re wondering what CacheFile is all about you can read my review or head on over there to have a look.

Filed under: CacheFile, How To Manage A Website, Support Articles , CacheFile, datejs, frameworks, javascript, jsUnit, libraries

Widget Bucks – Easy Web Site Advertising

If you’re looking for a simple, but impressive way to earn income from your web site or blog you should check out Widget Bucks here.

Widget Bucks began trading in October this year, and are backed by an established company, MPire.

The advertising widgets are attractive and you can customise the size and colour to fit your site. Unlike the plain text AdWords that people running AdSense have on their site Widget Bucks are much more engaging and show products and prices in rotation.

You can select your category of product e.g. mp3 players, laptops, pet products, books DVDs etc or like AdSense, have the adverts displayed automatically based on the content of your page. This automatic option is called MerchSense. I’ve opted for specific categories (digital camcorders, mp3 players and lap tops) on some of my web sites.

An example of the types of larger adverts is shown below.

Click Throughs vs CPM

At the moment you only receive money on click-throughs generated by visitors from North America. If a visitor to your site is from outside North America, you are paid for every 1000 appearances of the ads on your site. However, unless you run a very specialist web site or blog, it is likely that a lot of your web site traffic will be from the United States and Canada anyway so you still make money no matter where your visitors come from. (updated information is available here)

At the moment (until January 15th 08), they credit $25 to your account when you sign up and pay out when your account reaches $50 so you only have to make $25 to receive your first $50 cheque. It’s money for nothing really, and it shows they are serious about expanding their network.

You can also make additional money by referring people to the scheme. You will receive a referrers commission of 10% of what they earn in the their first year. You can either refer via text links such as the one below or there is a sign up link on each of your ad widgets which contains your referrer information.

They really have made everything incredibly simple to set up and I think that early adopters will benefit from the innovation of this new scheme. You can try out Widget Bucks here.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Online Advertising, WidgetBucks , adsense, advertising, adwords, make money online, merchsense, monetization, mpire, pay per click, ppc, widget bucks, WidgetBucks, widgets

CacheFile Expands Script Offering

CacheFile.net seems to be gaining in popularity and Jon Davis, the author of the project has to responded quickly to community feedback.

In addition to the original scripts (aflax, dojo, ext, jquery, mochikit, mootools, openajax, prototype, script.aculo.us, yui) he has added firebuglite, lightbox, msajax, qooxdoo and spry.

There’s also been a reorganisation of the some of the URIs, moves towards a using dedicated server and the adoption of the Coral Content Distribution Network to improve reliability.

This is a fast moving project so check out the latest at www.cachefile.net

The project is reliant on donations at the moment. If you can support the project please do.

Filed under: CacheFile, How To Manage A Website , CacheFile, cdn, Coral Content Distribution Network, firebuglite, lightbox, msajax, qooxdoo, spry

Free Fridays #2 How To Create Graphics and Edit Photos For Free

Photoshop is one of the giants of photo editing, but at over £500 for a new installation of the current version (CS3), it’s not worth the price if all you need to do is crop and tidy up some photographs for your web site.

A great alternative image editor for Windows users is Paint.net. It’s compact, easy to use, and feature-rich enough for most people. The project started out as an undergraduate project that was mentored by Microsoft and it has now developed into a mature open source project. Paint.net was ranked number 19 in the top 100 products of 2007 by PC World Magazine.

The great thing about Paint.Net is that they have managed to cram loads of features into a very small programme. The download is only 1.3 Mb. One very popular feature of Photoshop amongst amateur users is the wide range of effects. Paint.Net has an equally impressive selection of effects. All of the usual suspects are included; Gaussian, motion and radial blurs, distortions and red eye removal. There’s even support for layers, taking it beyond the realm of just amateur use.

Paint.net is an open source project, so if you’re into that kind of thing, you can download the actual source code for the programme and adapt it or contribute to the project.

If, like most non-professional users, your day to day requirements for photo editing software is to reduce an image size for your website, export it to a different format or to crop the picture to make it a bit slicker, Paint.Net covers all those bases. You can work in all the popular formats, bmp, gif , jpg, png, tiff, TGA and it’s available in several languages. (English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish)

At the time of writing, version 3.2 was in Beta. You can download this or the current stable version for free from www.getpaint.net

Update: 12 December 07, Paint.Net 3.2 was released.

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, Photography , Free Software, graphics, paint.net, photo editing, Photography, photoshop