The Black Tech Report

Twitter has a new friend in URL shortners, Tweetburner with statistics

September 15th, 2008 3 Comments

Micro blogging has been around for a while now but lately it has taken off growing by leaps and bounds. Can you update your friends and colleges in 140 characters? It’s harder then you think and by no means is it easy when the real estate is so limited. So what happens when you want to save and share a URL link? As we all know some URL links could be 50 characters all by it self. so the shorter a URL is the better that is for you and what you want to say to the world.

Tweetburner lets you track what happens with the links you share on Twitter.

Last week I came across a URL shortner called Tweetburner. Not the shortest name for URL shortners but it ties statistics to those URL’s so you can gauge how many people click the link. It’s always good to know if people are really clicking your links. There are a number of URL shortners on the net, I found a blogger at cusumingexperience.com who created a blog post back in May of 2008 about is.gd called “Shorten URLs via is.gd – free bookmarklet for URL redirection“. Mashable created a post showing “90 of the top URL shortening services”

The reason why I’m talking about tweetburner is two fold, not only does it work but you can create your tweet right from the tweetburner website which will let you login to your twitter account and/or friendfeed to send a post right from the site. Most of the other URL shortners don’t do that cause they were not made with twitter specifically in mind. Give tweetburner a try if you want statistics or give is.gd a try if you just absolutely have to have the shortest URL.

I found a video of Tweetburner which explains a bit and shows you what it does check this out:

Enjoy,

TBTR

Agglom, share your websurfing with others

September 10th, 2008 Comments Off

If your like me you surf the internet quite often. The free time you have at work to the free time you have at home. Sometimes you want to show your friends what you come across that you think would interest them. You don’t want to pass your friends everything but maybe just specific sites. You can create a boring email with links all over the place which might be filtered as SPAM or you can use Agglom. Agglom lets you share the good stuff with your friends and maybe even some new friends.

Easily save and publish your sets of links

The cool thing about Agglom is that you can share a multimedia webpage as a RSS Feed or as a Web Slideshow. It’s like sending a book to your online friends. You can make them for public or private viewing. You can recommend other organized webs sessions that are created by other members.

Share them as a multimedia web page, as an RSS feed or as a Web Slideshow

To view most of the web sessions you don’t even need to sign up, but If you want the full experience it’s not hard to sign up which gives you access to your own page, with RSS access.

Agglom works by letting you tie together URL links, Presentations, & Videos into one easy to use bundle. A Permalink is created along with a RSS link. As you pass this out to your friends by URL, or email they can then view, each of the areas. The Slideshows are kind of cool it adds a little top bar to the site where you can click the arrow to navigate through each link like a powerpoint presentation. You also get a RSS feed to the user which would update each time they add a new content.

Make them private or public

Say you come across a web scene and you know of a link that would go great you can suggest this link to the person who created this Slideshow. The creator then has the option to include your link as added benefit, or dis-approve it as non relevent.

Example: vctr a user over at Agglom created a resource called Social Network basics concepts – how to build one with a Permalink: http://agglom.com/agglom/490/Social_Network_basics_concepts_how_to_build_one oh don’t forget an RSS is also created take a look and you will see why I’m liking Agglom.com

I think Agglom has a lot of potential to succeed, people just need to know about this site. It seems they are improving it (the creators) all the time. The only thing they need now is someone to really design the site, not that I don’t like it, but I just think it needs a web 3.0 look.

Enjoy,

TBTR

Wednesday Download – WinMerge

September 3rd, 2008 1 Comment

It’s not everyday that you will need a utility like WinMerge but, I will tell you this it can save you a ton of time. WinMerge 2.8.6 is another great Open Source tool created with you the user in mind. Why do you need WinMerge? Why should you even give WinMerge a chance to grace your desktop real estate? I think if you work with text based files such as HTML, CSS, or just Text files in general then this tool will help you a lot.

Visual differencing and merging of text files

Say your working on a new project where a client has updated his HTML code and your trying to fix the problem they are having because something is just not right. If you use WinMerge you can input the old HTML code on one side, and the New HTML code on another and compare the files. You can see where the changes have been made and with that being said, fix the issue without having to go line for line in a HTML document that could be pretty long. WinMerge will color code the changes and show you where the differences are no longer will you have to rely on site alone.

Handles DOS, UNIX and MAC text file formats

Not only does this tool let you see the differences of files, but if you want it can Merge the files together to create a new document. This is a great feature where changes have been made and you want to make sure to keep all text streamlined and in working order. WinMerge will do the trick with ease.

Website: http://www.winmerge.org/

Download Link: WinMerge 2.8.6

Enjoy,

TBTR

One last reminder on this holiday weekend

August 29th, 2008 1 Comment

Please don’t forget the doors to this years Black Weblog Awards is closing on 8/31/2008 if you have not voted please take the time to do so here.

Remember if you feel this blog has potential and you would like to see us win something then please vote for us under:

Best Science/Technology Blog
The Black Tech Report

Thanks so much for all those who voted and I hope you have a wonderful Labor Day weekend.

TBTR

Download Wednesday – SuperGenPass

August 26th, 2008 1 Comment

How many passwords do you enter on a daily basis? If you answered more than 4 you need SuperGenPass. SuperGenPass is a password generator but not in the normal sense. Normally with password generators you have to install a program. That puts another software program on your computer and that takes up precious system resources. Installing a program means when you want to use it you have to find the program, start the program, and use the program that’s time consuming.

SuperGenPass allows you to remember just one password (your “master password”), which is used to generate unique, complex passwords for the Web sites you visit.

The great thing about SuperGenPass is you don’t install any software on your computer. Remember when I reviewed Password safe & Any Password here each one of those programs had to be installed on your computer.

SuperGenPass uses MD5, a one-way hash algorithm, which means that no one can determine your master password from your generated passwords.

As we know the biggest problem on the internet now days is keeping up with every single new site we join and keeping up with that password. You could do what most people do and that is to create one to two password that you use all over the internet. In other words you use that for your email, bank account, and even your computer logon password.

Nothing is ever transmitted by SuperGenPass, and your passwords are not stored anywhere.

We all know this is not the smartest thing to do, you see if a hacker gets a hold of just one password, they could potentially have access to your whole internet life. Trying to keep up with all the different passwords is the issue here and SuperGenPass lets you use one Master Password and that generates the passwords for each site.

Don’t worry SuperGenPass does not save passwords to your computer it’s a bookmark that you save to your browser.

See the video I created to show you how this works: