Category Archives: How to

TinyURL

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When you want to show someone something on the Internet, you must tell them where it is located, just as you might refer them to the street address of a particularly attractive house that you noticed for sale in your home town. On the Internet the address you’d give them is referred to as the URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, which is technically a sub-set of the URI, or Uniform Resource Identifier, but for the purposes of this discussion I’ll simply refer to the URL when talking about an address on the Internet to which you might want to direct your hypothetical friend.

(Wikipedia’s interesting article that explains the term URL and the more extensive one on the URI taught me some things I hadn’t known previously. So if you are so inclined, those articles might be an interesting bit of diversionary reading. The one on the URL contains a graphic that depicts each component in a URL and explains its function.)

Sending someone a link to something on the Internet has become quite common, and the recently passed holiday gift giving season provided ample opportunity for many of us to send links to friends and relatives as a way of specifying exactly which “precious” that we wanted as a gift. Fortunately, some URLs are short and sweet. For instance, http://www.cnn.com or http://www.nytimes.com are examples. However, once you have finally located that particular component for your new digital camera on Best Buy’s web site and want to let Aunt Susie know about it, the URL you’ve found can be quite long, because the component is buried deep in the bowels of Best Buy’s site. When you copy and paste the URL into an email for Aunt Susie, it may arrive in an unusable form because her email program may have wrapped the excessively long line and “broken” the URL you sent, meaning she can’t just click on it and have it open in her browser. Depending upon Aunt Susie’s level of geekitude, she may be baffled by the fact that the link you sent doesn’t work (she might get a 404 error) and you may end up with a scarf she crocheted for you instead of what you wanted, or at the very least, she might have to copy and paste the URL back together. Adding such an obstacle to Aunt Susie’s getting you the gift you want isn’t a good idea. Enter TinyURL.

Simply put, TinyURL makes long URLs shorter. Follow the link and read about how it works and about how you can put a link on your browser toolbar so that using the service becomes quite easy.

However, there is a downside to using TinyURL. When you receive a link that was condensed by this service, you have no way of knowing where you are being directed and hence, you run some risk in clicking on one that you might be directed to a malicious site. For instance, yesterday morning I received a link from my friend Paul Moor that mentioned in the message’s subject that it had something to do with the Osama bin Laden virus, and all that the message said was “Read this link (and then it gave the TinyURL) C A R E F U L L Y.” As a recipient of this message I had no idea where it was leading me, and while I trust that Paul wouldn’t intentionally direct me to a malicious site, it is possible that he might naively direct me somewhere I wouldn’t want to go.

Fortunately, TinyURL has added a feature recently that solves this problem. It is called the preview feature. What this feature does is create a TinyURL that takes you first to the TinyURL site where the original URL is displayed, thus allowing you to see where you are being directed before you choose to go there. You can turn this feature on and then any TinyURLs you create will be of the “preview” variety. Because this service is so useful, I use it often, but now that I have enabled the preview feature any recipients of TinyURL links I forward will have the confidence that if they click them, they’ll be able to determine in advance whether they wish to visit the site to which I have referred them.

Mediafire

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As audio, video, and digital picture files have grown in size, the problem of how to share them with others has become more of an issue.  ISPs and Email systems like Gmail impose a limitation on the size of file attachments, which is usually in the neighborhood of 10 MB.  It is quite easy to exceed that limit with the files most of us are now creating.

Therefore this “problem” has produced an opportunity for a new service, free file hosting.  One of the latest of such services to enter the field is Mediafire.  Unlike RapidShare, which I’ve used in the past, Mediafire imposes no limit on the file size or the number of simultaneous downloads or uploads you can initiate.  And having experimented with it this morning, I am pleased to report that the upload speed is quite good — over 350 KB/sec, though that of course depends upon the speed of your connection.  Once a file is uploaded, you receive a link to that file that you can share with others, if you choose, so that they can download the file.  I’ve reviewed the Terms of Service and find them to be acceptable to me, and I suspect you would conclude the same. 

You do not have to create an account to use the service, however doing so makes sense to me.  It is free, and I see no downside to it and some benefits.  When you create the account, the service stores a cookie on your computer so that when you revisit the site, you’ll be able to look under “my files” for the files you’ve uploaded previously.  There is a button with which you can delete any file you choose whenever you wish to do so.  The blog for the service indicates that at present there is no plan to remove the files.  Here’s what they said about that subject in a blog entry on October 25th.

As of this writing, uploaded files will remain on MediaFire for an indefinite period unless you choose to delete them from within the My Files page of your account. In the future if deleting data should become necessary as our user base grows you will receive an email to the account holders email address notifying you of any impending deletion so that you can manage your files accordingly. Any file deletion will be on an as-needed basis and will apply to older and less frequently downloaded files first.

If you have a need to share your home movies with your family or a large-sized Christmas letter containing several pictures you’d like to share with your friends, this would seem to be an excellent solution.  Check it out.  I think you’ll find it useful, as I do.

Support Creative Commons

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In the interest of having this page load more quickly, I have removed the embedded video from this page and am choosing to point to it through this link instead. It is a video that explains about what Creative Commons is and how choosing to grant a Creative Commons license “refines” your rights rather than relinquishes them. I should add that, at least for me, viewing the video at this link works better than it did when the video was embedded here on my site, as there are no pauses in the streaming.

For an explanation of how your watching this video supports Creative Commons, see this explanation on Dr. Lawrence Lessig’s blog.

Curling up with a good CRT

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I know many people are fond of waxing nostalgic about the joys of curling up with a good book and how much better that is than trying to read something on a computer monitor.  And to a degree I can appreciate that perspective.  Because you can take the book to bed and read it there or on a train or plane while traveling and because there is a certain joy in the feel of just turning the pages, staring at a CRT or an LCD screen isn’t nearly as convenient and that represents something of a hurdle that one must overcome to see any benefits to reading something online.  But as I’ve done it more, I’ve now actually come to prefer curling up with a good CRT to read many things.  Why?  Well, that’s what I want to talk about in this post for a moment.

Technology can aid aging eyes

This is a screenshot of an article my friend Paul Moor pointed out to me recently, shown at the font size I normally use for surfing.  If you click on the image to open it in a larger view, you’ll notice that the text is rather small and therefore uncomfortably dense to be read online, or at least it is to my aging eyes.  However in Firefox, I can quickly press Ctrl + a couple of times to increase the font size temporarily when I am going to read something like this online so that it becomes easier for me to see. 

Here’s what it looks like when I do that.  Why don’t I just make that increased font size my normal surfing mode, you ask?  The answer is pretty simple.  Although the font size is better for reading an article like this, that large font size distorts the web page layout when I leave it that large for most web pages, so I prefer to only increase it temporarily when I’m reading something this lengthy.  If you visit the link to the article, you’ll see that it is quite long and reading it took me about an hour, so I wanted the comfort for that period but not permanently.  When I’ve completed reading something like this, I can simply close the tab in which I have it opened and I am back to my preferred font size for surfing. 

This one simple change, increasing the font size, does wonders for my enjoyment of reading things online. 

Being online enhances the experience of reading

In my experience it has always been a good idea to have a dictionary handy when you are reading something.  While I have a pretty good vocabulary, it is limited, of course.  So if I really wanted to get something out of an article, I’d need to look up the meaning of some of the words in the article.  As I curl up with my CRT, looking up words like “ululating” is a matter of copying the word I don’t know to the clipboard, opening a new tab to Dictionary.com and pasting that into the search box and bingo I’ve got the definition. 

However, Firefox has made the process of looking up a word at Dictionary.com even easier through the use of a neat little concept called a keyword for linking to a web site.  At the right is a screenshot of the “Quick Searches” folder of bookmarks that are stored in Firefox by default.  If you’ll notice the items highlighted in yellow in this screenshot, you’ll see that for a number of them keywords have already been defined that for that particular link.  I can press Ctrl T to open a new tab, and type “dict,” a space and then paste “ululating” and press Enter, and it will open Dictionary.com with the definition of that word displayed.  Because it is so much easier to look up words when I am reading something online, I find myself much more likely to actually look up those words that I’m unsure about than I would be if I had an Oxford English Dictionary at my side.  And I am back to reading the article in which I am interested much more quickly than I would be otherwise. 

But reading online is not just useful for solving my ignorance about the meaning of some words.  Sometimes references are made to someone like Norbert Weiner, with whom I am not familiar, so I can copy that name to the clipboard, open a new tab (Ctrl T) and type “wp,” a space and then paste “Norbert Weiner” and press Enter, and bingo I have an elaboration of who that person is.  “Wp” is the keyword assigned to Wikipedia in the default installation.  By becoming familiar with the various keywords already defined in the Quick Searches bookmarks in Firefox, it is possible to speed up the use of these resources for enhancing the experience of whatever you are reading.

And for me, the advent of tabbed browsing, which has finally come to Internet Explorer too with version 7, has made using the browser so much more efficient that I can’t imagine having to go back to surfing without it. 

Have it your way

What I have described up to this point is using the out-of-the-box configuration of Firefox.  However, I can change things to suit myself and my own habits better.  For instance, “wp” doesn’t seem as natural to me for Wikipedia as the keyword “wiki.”  I find that easier to remember.  So if I prefer “wiki” to “wp” as the keyword for Wikipedia, I can just change it. 

Here’s how. 

In Firefox, go to Bookmarks / Organize Bookmarks and open the Quick Searches folder.  Highlight the Wikipedia entry, right click on it and choose Properties, and change the keyword so that it is what you want rather than what it was.  This is what that dialog looks like.  Notice the Keyword field is highlighted in yellow in this screenshot. 

What’s best about this capability is that you can assign your own keywords to any link that you have bookmarked.  If you want to create a keyword for a link to your blog, for instance, you can bookmark the page, then go to this dialog in Organize Bookmarks and add the keyword, say “myblog” for instance, and then any time you want to visit that link, you just open a new tab (Ctrl T) and type “myblog” and press Enter.  By tailoring the browser like this, I think you’ll find, as I have, that the experience of curling up with a CRT is more pleasant than you might have previously imagined.

Well, Duh!

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I am almost embarrassed to admit that I have only today discovered this technique, but I must swallow my pride and state what to everyone else may be obvious.

For a long time, I and a number of my friends have lamented the fact that in Windows XP it is frequently difficult to find a program because the list of programs listed when you click on All Programs wasn’t in alphabetical order. This morning I began trying to find an answer and the answer, it turns out, is so simple that it’s embarrassing.

If you will click on All Programs and then RIGHT click on any one of the programs’ names, a context menu will appear in which one of the options will be “sort by name.” If you click that, the entire list will snap into alphabetical order! Who knew?

Okay, now you can begin your comments to ridicule my ignorance and tell me that you’ve known that forever and that I am a dunce for never having discovered it before, but just in case you didn’t know it, now you do. I suppose I can now die in peace because I have made the world just a little bit better. Enjoy.


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del.icio.us turns three

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The social bookmarking service, del.icio.us, turned three years old yesterday.

For some time I have been meaning to discuss this service and how I use it, so the occasion of its third birthday seems like a good stimulus to do that. Because this service is tightly integrated and therefore essentially effortless with Flock, I have relied on it more since I began using Flock than I did prior to then. Any time I mark something as a favorite, it is also added to my del.icio.us bookmarks. It’s true that in Flock you can choose to use Shadows rather than del.icio.us but since I have chosen to use del.icio.us I’ll ignore that fact for the purposes of this discussion.

So what the heck is a social bookmarking service anyway? First and foremost is it a site on the web where the things I bookmark are listed so that when I am away from my own computer, I can find those sites if I wish. But more than that, it is “social” in the sense that you can, if you choose, see the things I’ve bookmarked, and conversely I can see yours, if you also use the service. In fact, I can, and have, set up a network of people whose bookmarked sites I check periodically, and when I see a link they have bookmarked that interests me, I can add it to my bookmarks as well. By using the service like this, I benefit from what others discover and thus extend my “coverage” of all that’s new on the ‘net. It is also easy to recommend a site to someone who has a del.icio.us account by simply using the “for:username” tag, where the username is their username on del.icio.us.

Perhaps the most useful part to me about using del.icio.us is that I can tag a site when I bookmark it with as few or as many different words or combination of words as I think will help me recall it when I search for it later. In addition to all those tags, I can add notes to my bookmarks that permit me to write a narrative description of that bookmark if I choose. I’ve noticed that many people don’t do that, and that’s okay, but I find that writing some brief description only takes a few seconds and can prove quite useful when I look at the bookmark later.

When I visit my del.icio.us page, the most recently bookmarked sites are at the top of the list and in the right hand column all my tags are listed. Those tags can also be listed as a tag cloud, if I choose. The site has a search facility with which I can search for a tag and have all the sites that contain it displayed.

If you are interested in using del.icio.us, I recommend you spend some time reading through the help facility there. Among the things that are covered in that help facility are a few suggestions about ways to use del.icio.us, and one of those is that tagging can help as you research a particular topic. For instance, as a blogger I frequently encounter topics that I might want to blog about. By tagging those sites as “blogfodder” I can later return to them and write a blog post about them if I choose. So as you can see, the tags you apply don’t have to be real words. They can be anything you find useful.

One final thought. In my opinion, there are no right or wrong tags. Tagging web sites isn’t about guessing what other people would use to tag it, because it doesn’t matter how others tag it. The purpose in adding tags is to give you a way to find the site again when you want to return to it. That’s why, when I tag, I add as many tags as come to mind when I bookmark it. Who knows what I’ll be thinking when I try to go back to find the site later? So the more tags I have used, the greater the likelihood I’ll be able to find it.

Whether you choose to use del.icio.us or not, I must say that having used it now for more than a year, I can hardly imagine not having it available to me. So when I say “Happy Birthday” to the service, it isn’t just that I wish them well. It’s that I find their service indispensable to my life online. If you’d like someone else’s perspective on this service, you might enjoy reading my friend Mike Neel’s post called Golden, Blogged and Del.icio.us.



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Eureka!

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For a long time, at least since December of 2004, I’ve been searching for a tool that will permit me to record both sides of a Skype call. Finally, I’ve found it.

Yesterday, I downloaded and installed Hot Recorder, a simple little application that is designed to do just that, and it works like a charm. The problem had always been that when you turn on an audio recording program while in a Skype call, the person on the other end of the call would get feedback of their own voice as they were speaking. If you don’t think that inhibits the thought process, just try to keep talking sometime when your words are coming back to you with about a half-second delay. It’s almost impossible.

Though I have no idea how it does it, Hot Recorder captures both sides of the conversation and merges them into one without the feedback problem. You can save the conversation after you stop the recording in the application’s proprietary format (ELP), but the program also comes with a tool called AudioConverter that permits you to convert that proprietary format into a WAV, OGG or MP3 format.

The trial version of the program only permits recording 2 minutes of a conversation, but upon paying for it ($14.95) and registering it, those time limitations are removed. It works with Google Talk, AIM, Net2Phone, Yahoo! Messenger, FireFly and “many other VoIP applications,” and can also serve as an answering machine for your Skype installation, giving callers the chance to record their voice message, if you aren’t at your machine when they call.

This discovery is significant for me because having the ability to call someone and record the conversation greatly enhances my ability to get the raw material that I can use in podcasts. One of the things I have long wanted to do in a podcast was to interview friends and associates so that I could introduce the world to some of the interesting people I know. Up until now, I hadn’t known how to do that.

Once I had demonstrated to myself that I could record without the feedback problem, it was a no-brainer to pay the very-reasonable registration fee for this program. If you have an interest in similar capabilities, you might want to download the trial and give it a whirl.

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Hermits gather, eye monthly conventions

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The title of this post might be the headline if the Knoxville News Sentinel chose to cover the August 23rd meeting at 7:00 PM in South Knoxville of the nascent Knox Bloggers group.  Bloggers, after all, are a solitary breed, eschewing as they do associating even with editors, so the secondary goal of determining whether to meet on a monthly basis is a bit like skiing uphill.  Still the first gathering could prove interesting enough to warrant a return engagement.  It, I suppose, remains to be seen.

An initial invitation has gone out to a magnificent seven bloggers in the area, and the group is open to others attending.  If you have an interest in attending this first (and possibly one-time) event, just drop me an email, and I’ll be glad to supply directions. 

The agenda for this first gathering will be to discuss some tools and techniques bloggers use and maybe learn something from each other that we didn’t already know.  Mike Neel will discuss using Flickr and Picasa Web for photo sharing and how to get photos to your blog.  Daryl Houston, a local employee of Flock, will discuss Flock in all its wondrous amazement and glory.  And yours truly will discuss how to do a video blog, the tools to make the video and how to share it.  We expect the discussion to be lively and wide-ranging if prior gatherings of portions of this group are any indication. 



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Another catch up post

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One of the things I was going to catch you up on was OpenDNS that I began using on August 6, 2006, to speed up my connection.  Tonight, I noticed that Paul Stamatiou has explained it for me, so I won’t have to try to duplicate that.  He gives an excellent explanation of what it is and how you might benefit from it in this post.  Check it out.

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