Wednesday, May 31, 2006

What is your domain name worth?

What is your domain name worth?
Leapfish have a free appraisal system.

At our site, you are able to recieve a free domain name analysis and estimated appraisal. You can also find many other domain name resources and interesting articles worth checking out and if you are unable to find what you are looking for, our forums have knowledgeable people who are willing to help with any of your questions.


Saturday, May 27, 2006

RSS Reader - Google Reader

Google has a RSS Reader now. It is web based so can be accessed anywhere you have web access.
Google Reader is still in beta, but I have found it to work pretty well. You are able to import an opml (subscriptions list) file and also add new subsciptions easily. You can categorise feeds, show a single feed, a category (known as a label) or the entire list, filter for read and unread and also use a star system to flag items you want to see again later.
The only beef I have had with it so far is it sometimes has taken a while to refresh some feed updates. However this is something I have noticed with a fair few RSS readers so am inclined to suspect it is actually more of an issue with the feed publisher.
Google Reader is also integrated into your My Google account, a customisable portal and also connects to gmail.
Google Reader - worth a look if you want a web based reader or use gmail.


Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Money making news from Pro Blogger, Drupal 4.7 and Adsense news

Darren has been posting prolifically, as usual over at ProBlogger.

One particular article of interest on his site is a story illustrating the power of affiliate links.

Drupal have finally released version 4.7
. I have one site in development using the beta version of this. I will have to upgrade it and test it out.
Darren posts an article listing the main release changes:

* Multiple Block Regions: Were you feeling constrained by only two choices for block placement? You can now dynamically specify as many block placement locations as you want.
* ‘Offline for Maintenance’ Configuration: You can now easily configure your site to display a friendly notice to visitors when you have to take down your site for maintenance.
* Free Tagging Support: Free tagging functionality is now built into the taxonomy system.
* Site-Wide Contact Form: You can now easily enable a contact form page that will let you easily collect feedback from your site visitors.
* Author Information Block: There is now a block you can enable that will display author information alongside posts.
* Public/Private Profile Fields: You can now specify permissions for profiles on a per-field basis.
* Block by IPs/Hostname: It is now possible to block users by their IP address or Hostnames. Good bye trolls!
* Aggregator now Supports Atom: It is now finally possible to aggregate Atom formatted feeds like those created by Blogger.
* Aggregator Generates RSS Feeds: It’s now easier than ever to use Drupal to power ‘Planet’ like sites.
* RSS Feed Settings You can now configure how much content and how many items to publish in your RSS feed.
* Better Search Index: The search module indexer is now smarter and more robust
* Advanced Search Operators: You can now search by advanced search operators (e.g. phrase, node type, etc.)
* Custom Search Results Ranking: The search module now lets you weight search results by keyword relevance, date of post, number of comments, and number of views.


Finally Darren and I both received an email from Adsense today - indicating that they can now make EFT payments to Australian Adsense Publishers - yippee!


Colour Schemer and Open Source Gallery Tool

Color Schemer Online V2 is a really simple, easy to use color schemer.
A fantastic resource for blog template developers and tweakers as well as regular web designers or even photshop users.
Color Schemer allows you to select a colour or a palette, lighten darken and generate RGB and CSS Hex codes.
Link from Doug

I have also come across a open source photo (and movie) gallery tool for use on web servers. It runs well on Apache, and can be made to run on IIS if you are stuck using Microsoft. The software is actually called Gallery. While I haven't installed it yet or used it, one of my business colleagues has just started using it and recommended it to me. Check out his galleries and see some of the crazy people I have been working with the last 5 months.

I note that it also runs on Drupal and there is a drupal module named gallery written to work with it.