This is a cause that is near and dear to my heart. In this world of high-tech gadgetry and pageantry of marketing online, one of the key principles we are taught is to give away valuable content. I believe there is so much more we can do. It is well worth your time to take a look at this project I’ve been working on.
Tinyurl started the movement years ago, and now URL shortening services are all over the place, from social bookmarking sites to mainstream media sites which have their own shortening engines.
In a culture that is moving more toward 140 characters at a time, those shortening services are rather useful (especially the ones that let you track the statistics). Like almost everything else, shortened links have some drawbacks. Besides sometimes being slow, you also can’t see where the link is pointing. With a lot of malicious users in internet land, you can imagine the security risks. There are websites that will try to inject malware in your system as soon as you visit it. Others that will try to set special filters in your Gmail account and so on.
If you want to be safe, click on shortened links only if you trust the person that created them. If for some reason you don’t know if a link is legitimate, use a URL un-shortening tool. There is a tool that I have used a lot called Sucuri.net and it will reveal the real URL behind the link. It also checks with Google and SiteAdvisor to make sure the website is safe to be visited. Oh, and did I mention that is is FREE. Enjoy!!
As blogger’s and more importantly marketers, we want visitors to our sites to get the full effect of our blogs and sites.
If you’re like me and a lot of other blogger’s, your browser of choice is FireFox. When we designed our blogs or websites it probably didn’t occur to us to test our sites on other browsers. Should we load our site on a different browser, it is probable that some unpleasant surprises will appear.
Most websites are based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a method that allows blogger’s to have more manageability over the appearance of the pages, making sure everything is consistent throughout the site.
Unfortunately not all browsers infer CSS commands the same way, creating discrepancies such as misaligned sidebars, overlapping text and the like. The only way to solve the problem is to test your website on the many different browsers that people might use to access it.
Installing a version of every single browser out there would be time consuming, to say the least. What if you could find a service that takes screen-shots of your site in different browsers and report them back to you?
That is exactly what Browsershots.org does. And best of all, it’s FREE!! All you have to do is type the URL of your site, select the browsers you want to test and wait a few minutes to see the screenshots. The service includes all the versions of IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera and you can even select different screen resolutions. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
