Category Archives: Free Software

Simple and Effective SEO Tool

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Posted by Phil on August 17, 2007 – 9:00 pm
Filed under Easy to use, Free Software, Search Engine Optimization, Web and Tech Helps

There are a plethora of search optimization tools available online. While one could do endless analysis and obsess over the Google PageRank for a domain, the real touchstone is folks finding your topic in a search for related information. Search optimization is a learned skill that comes in developing quality content and positioning it with effective URLs, titles, alt tags, keywords and well formed pages that are quick loading.

One simple yet very helpful utility is the SERPs Finder from 4neurons.com. This tool performs one helpful function, it searches one of the three top search engines for your keyword queries.

The results pop-up in a window indicating where that query ranked in the results.

For your strongest queries in the top page or two, the search engine itself does the trick. But if your result is several pages deep, this handy tool indicates where your site ranks for that search. This is the PageRank to be most concerned about as apposed to the general Google PageRank.

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What Color is Your Website?

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Posted by Phil on May 7, 2007 – 8:54 pm
Filed under Free Software, Web and Tech Helps

 

If you are new to blogging or website design, color usage on a website can seem a little cryptic at first. This post delves into the very essence of how color works on the web. There are many, many sites with color selectors that discuss the finer points of color and web usage. The point of this post is to give newbies to web colors a strip-down jist of color to jump-start their blog tweaks.

Color basics are …basic, i.e. boiled down to three primary colors: Red, Green and Blue. This color mode is commonly referred to as RGB. RGB colors are the three colors used for electronic formats which coincide with visual color.

Additive Color

RGB colors are additive because the more of each value you add the brighter the color. Red, Green and Blue have a value each from 0 to 255.

Colors R G B
Black 0 0 0
Red 255 0 0
Green 0 255 0
Blue 0 0 255
White 255 255 255

A mix of values create different colors and hues.

Colors R G B
Hot Pink 255 0 204
Lime Green 0 204 51
Light Blue 102 255 204

Web colors use Hexadecimal Values

Hexadecimal is just a different numbering system from our common decimal system. Hexadecimal colors follow the range from 0 to 255. Hexadecimal values are from sixteen places: 0 through 9 and A through F. Red, Green and Blue have two hexadecimal digits for each color value.

For Example:

Colors R G B
Black 00 00 00
Red FF 00 00
Green 00 FF 00
Blue 00 00 FF
White FF FF FF

Colors R G B
Hot Pink FF 00 CC
Lime Green 00 CC 33
Light Blue 66 FF CC

Web colors add a # sign in front of the digits to indicate a color value i.e.  #FFFFFF is the web color for white and #000000 is the web color for black.

Color Spectrum

This Color bar fundamentally is made up of the following colors in succession:

#FF0000    #FFFF00    #00FF00    #00FFFF    #0000FF    #FF00FF

The colors in between these values are gradations or variants.

Websafe Colors?

If you do much research on color usage on the web, "websafe" colors will show-up on some sites. As long as monitors vary as greatly as they do, there really is no such a bird as a websafe color. Primarily, web safe colors are considered primary colors with matching hex values, i.e. #FF00CC as apposed to #F206C3. Using these standard colors is a good idea, but one should not be limited to those color selections in design.

How to Choose Colors

  1. Find a color scheme from a website and capture the color values.
    I don’t advocate cart blanche copying someone else’s design, but you may find a color selection that someone has developed that fits with the direction of your site. One simple way to use those color values is to right-click on the page and view source.
  2. Use an online program. There are a number of good ones. Some of those are:
  3. Download a free program.
  4. Use a program installed on your machine. Look through your programs already installed on your machine. Professional programs like Photoshop and Illustrator have extensive color palletes for selection, but you will also find programs like Microsoft Word that have color selectors as well.

Google Now Offers 1GB of Photo Space

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Posted by Phil on March 15, 2007 – 3:34 pm
Filed under Easy to use, Free Software, Google Analytics, Reviews, Web and Tech Helps, great use of technology

ust when you aren’t looking, Google ups the anti again for free web services. They just announced that picasa web now gives users 1GB of space. This is some pretty beefy storage space if you, like me, want to off-load your photos from your overloaded HD at home. Very cool and very flexible. I’ve been using the online version of Picasa web today to upload photos for work and it’s a pretty slick app. Unlike flickr that only allows a limited number to be upload in one shot, Google allows for true bulk upload which is very convenient. Select, click, upload and go get a cup of coffee while the bits are transferred upstream.

Why Google Apps is so Cool

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Posted by Phil on March 8, 2007 – 3:39 pm
Filed under Easy to use, Free Software, Google Apps, Reviews, Web and Tech Helps, great use of technology

In one evening I "developed" an intranet system for my household complete with email, calendar, file sharing, chat, customized views of information, widgets and RSS feeds. If you’ve used gmail before, it’s basically the same concept only they are extending it to allow shared info under your own domain. I also have pointed the domain thoughtsparks.net to this blog which gives me an instant homepage for the domain. Yeah, with work and side pro-bono stuff it may be a while before I actually build-out the cool new site for thoughtsparks.net but for now I’m rolling. It’s a no-cost deal but if you want more than 2 GB space and a few other bells and whistles you’ll have to pay $50 a year. Still not bad for all the capabilities in one centralized deal that is quick to configure.

Still, this is a very new feature for Google, so they have some kinks to work out namely:

  1. The configuration for the "intranet" home page is a little clunky. It’s not as smooth as the customizable tweaks in Blogger. I was able to tweak the header a bit to reduce the screen space but what a bummer for folks who don’t want to mess w/ HTML tags.
  2. The website hosting capability they do offer does not yet integrate with Blogger which is kind of a drag. Sure I could use their clunky WYSIWYG tool and probably find a way to integrate an RSS feed but if I’m going to do much development on a new site, I think I’ll use something like WordPress on my hosted account with 1and1.com. (Which by the way I really do like as a host service). You can upload your own HTML files but who wants to mess w/ a static site, major retro move.

Okay, so it’s not perfect, but for small organizations, churches, clubs, groups etc. it provides a lot of functionality for the right price. It would certainly be possible for an organization to host all of their online needs on Google Apps, but you’d have to do some monkeying around w/ feed your blogger feeds back into the site. My recommendation at this point is to host a site with database capability and manage the rest of your services through Google Apps. That is until Google offers integrates Blogger well and/or ads db functionality, which they will do in time, just watch ‘em.