Websiteforensics.com

So You Want To Build A Website?

Mark MacKinnon — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:48:22 +0000

Seriously, forget about it. No really, don’t even bother. As today’s web evolves, you’re better off creating your own one or two page site with a blogging platform with links to relevant social media where you’ll do most of your work anyway. Most important of all, provide useful and basic information that can be easily accessed with a mobile device !

Be to the point. Nobody cares about splash screens, flash intros, portfolios or any other useless drivel beyond the basics : Who, What, When, Where, How and WHY!
People perform searches on the go. They now spend more time searching with a mobile device than on destop computers.
People want to know WHERE you are. If you’re not on Google Maps, you don’t really exist.
People want to know WHAT you do. Be social. Facebook for instance is the best way to get people to know you and trust your services.
Get involved with niche web 2.0 services relevant to your industry.
Forget twitter. It’s basically for politicians, celebrities and news.

You Can Put Newsstand in a Folder!

Mark MacKinnon — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:50:52 +0000

Did you manage to finally get past that nasty error that kept us all away from iOS 5 all day? By 8 PM, the infamous “The iPhone “iPhone” could not be restored. An internal error has occurred.” was history and we managed to install iOS 5 on our iPhones and iPads.

Then we discovered a new type of app, one that refuses to go into a folder. That’s because Newsstand is a folder! Finally this afternoon, we heard of a hack that can move Newsstand into a folder. It’s a little tricky, you have to be quick, but this is the procedure : Take two apps and go to create a folder. The very second the apps are in the folder and it’s doing the folder creation animation, drag Newsstand into the folder. If you’re you’re quick enough Newsstand will go into the folder!

Don’t start it from here, it’ll crash the springboard. But, if like us, you don’t use it and don’t want more than one screen full of icons and folders, then away it goes!

How to use alternate SMTP services

Mark MacKinnon — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 05:03:01 +0000

We can finally send emails as our original domain identities! Our ISP, like many out there, has disabled SMTP on port 25 and forces you to use your ISP identity for all your email accounts. It hardly looks professional when someone writes to your domain email and gets a really personal looking ISP sender in their response. We decided we had enough, especially since we use many of our domains as email domains.

By subscribing to authsmtp.com, we were able to obtain services that meet our needs. Affordable pricing, quick service, support and full control of authorized senders.

Need an alternate SMTP service, go to authsmtp.com.

From Google Reader to Twitter?

Mark MacKinnon — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 06:19:21 +0000

Want to publish more up to date tweets automatically from your Google News Reader? We’ve set up some great Google News Reader accounts for clients, but one of them wanted to know how she could have selected articles appear automatically in her twitter feed? Well, here’s the perfect article on the subject: How to Share Articles in Google Reader on Twitter.

In fact, we should be doing this!

iPhone Battery Losing Charge Rapidly?

Mark MacKinnon — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 06:09:30 +0000

One of us at the office – Blake of course – thought his iPhone’s battery had just lost its ability to charge. A full overnight charge would be gone in 5 to 6 hours. He had to keep the phone plugged in all the time, would often end up with a fully lost charge by early afternoon in traffic… Did he ruin the battery by having the phone plugged in the cigarette lighter all summer during a long road trip?

Why was the iPhone always warm in his pocket?

Well, turns out, after upgrading to the latest 4.2 iOS, using Push Email was a major battery drain! We had tried everything: turning off bluetooth, turning off Wifi, turning off location services… nothing seemed to do much except when we finally turned off Push Email Settings, especially since we had more than one email account – 6 in fact at the time. Now Blake has a full charge that remains in the upper 70 % all day despite many calls, facebook, twitter, email and shreddder (chess).

So turn off Push Email settings on your iPhone and thank us later. We on the other hand, would like to thank the Battery App from www.empowereddesignapps.com – it is simply the best app with a great number of integrated tips.

A few useful tools

Mark MacKinnon — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 05:06:43 +0000

You’ve all been to our Site Admin Stuff page already right? Well, we decided we’d share the following tools we sometimes / always / can’t live without when creating various projects. Enjoy !

Please read through to enjoy our resources!

File conversions
- Zamzar – File conversion – From anything to anything
- Youtube-mp3 – Convert and download youtube video/audio
My name is URL
- Tinyurl – URL Shortener
- ShadyURL – Create alternative “shady” urls
L-Mail – Send letters via this online from anywhere
WhatTheFont – What font was that?
File hosting
- Dropbox
- MediaFire
- Ge.tt
- ZumoDrive
- DepositFiles
Other file services
- FilesTube – Search and Download Files
- MultiUpload – Upload to multiple popular hosting sites with 1 upload
- FileCrop – Search engine for shared files
WhatIsMyIp – Find your IP address – Make sure you’re on the right network…
Stuff to do with emails
- Mailinator – Disposable email
- 10minutemail – Disposable email
- FaxZero – Send/Receive faxes through email
Tools for text
- Scribd – Text hosting, scrapbook for snippets
- PrintFriendly – Make webpages printfriendly
- Lipsum – Filler text – the classic latin passage
Image hosting and management
- Imgur – Best image hosting
- DummyImage – Create dummy images of any format
- VectorMagic – Create vectors from any image
- Challonge – Create tournament brackets
- Tineye – Reverse image search. Great to catching liars!
- CoolUtils Image Converter – Resize images for avatars
Various tools
- Prezi – Because powerpoint slides are boring
- TypeWith.me – Online word document collaboration
- eBuddy – Web and mobile messaging
- Iedone – Online IDE & Debugging Tool
- Readability – Make articles easier to read
- RunPee – Find out when the best time to use the bathroom is during movie
- ShowMeWhatsWrong – Instant Screen Recording for troubleshooting
- Pipl – People search
- Mibbit – Web IRC
- DownForEveryoneOrJustMe – Is google.com down?

Comparison shopping with Canada Post?

Mark MacKinnon — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 05:02:02 +0000

It’s no secret WebSiteForensics has its northern office in Canada, so we’re quite familiar with the services of Canada Post. We didn’t know until recently that this great Canadian corporation has developed some new online tools for shopping.

No we don’t mean shopping services for buying stamps in bulk or bubble-wrap, we mean comparison-shopping for all kinds of items including laptops and desktop computers from HP Canada!

Is Canada Post selling computers? No not at all, they are however providing a great service by giving us the tools for comparison-shopping. This means that when we need to buy a new computer from HP Canada, we can get look up specific models and compare prices from various providers across Canada! The service also provides toggles so you can determine minimum and maximum pricing as well as discount levels.

As stated on the site: Canada Post Comparison Shopper provides up-front pricing in Canadian dollars and ensures that all products are available in Canada. Finally, a user-friendly online shopping experience that puts Canadians first.

And of course – le service est aussi disponible en français ! Don’t you just love Canada?

Twuffer – it’s a twitter buffer!

Mark MacKinnon — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 07:19:20 +0000

We recently discovered an amazing service that finally delivers what it promises: to be able to manage and post future tweets. If you run a blog, you probably would like to promote your postings evenly over time instead of the classic burst of links most users are accustomed to.

As well, if you have a major event coming up, do you have the time to promote in on twitter, or would having tweets arranged by date and time be a time saver? Welcome to Twuffer, a twitter scheduler with impeccable functionality, ease of use and – best of all – no link jacking. You know what I mean, don’t you?

Anatomy of a TypeFace

Mark MacKinnon — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:00:53 +0000

We don’t just do Website Forensics for our clients, we often have to work with print. It’s therefore quite important for us to know the basic lingo: apertures, arms, ascenders, ligatures, loops, tails … TypePedia is a shared encyclopedia of typefaces that will provide all the necessary knowledge. The site also has a collaborative effort where users can contribute to a forum or add to the knowledge base.

eBay Is No Longer eBay

Mark MacKinnon — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 04:14:51 +0000

For years, we’ve listed and sold stuff on eBay (not an affiliate links for sure …). Ever since the mid to late 90s in fact. We stopped selling for a while, and almost forgot about the service until we realized we had quite a bit of good quality equipment we wanted to offload. We went back to eBay … We were shocked. Things have drastically changed and not for the better, why this is we decided to investigate.

When John Donahoe took over eBay, he started a long term plan to kill off small time sellers. The total number of items listed on eBay fell below 8 million and kept dropping because listing fees were getting so expensive and Fewer and fewer items were being listed.

eBay tried to get the numbers back up by offering listing fee discounts time to time but it wasn’t a permanent solution. The next step in Donahoe’s plan was to start cutting deals with large retailers so they could sell on eBay. Buy.com was one of the first large online retailers to flood eBay with more than 100K items all with free shipping. These companies were basically paying no listing fees which was really an unfair advantage over the little guys.

A large number of small power sellers have gone out of business because of these corporate deals. To sum things up, eBay wants to shed its image as a electronic flea market and now want to be seen as a mainstream shopping mall. Not the eBay we used to know. In fact, seems the revolt has been brewing for some time now …