Tools « GotChance

Alexa Toolbar for Firefox

July 20th, 2007 2 Comments »

Alexa is service that collects and shows traffic details about a website. It also has it own ranking system called Alexa Ranking. But, the drawback is that it just counts the number of visitors who visit a website with their Alexa Toolbar installed. And unfortunately, it was available one for Internet Explorer, while majority (about 90%) of the people use Firefox. It remained a drawback for a long time now. And today, they have released their new toolbar for Firefox called Sparky. It looks less like a toolbar. It just adds a menu called “Related Links” and takes up a small space in the Status bar to show the traffic rank and the Reach Graph.

Sparky Features

Related Links: Find sites that are similar to the one you are currently visiting.
Traffic Trend: A sparkline showing the traffic trend from the last four months.
Reach Meter: A neat little indicator that shows the site’s Reach.
Traffic Rank: Shows the current site’s Alexa Traffic Rank.

Its really good news for all webmasters. I’m really excited. Lets see how the Ranking of various websites change due to the Firefox effect.

Gmail’s Plus Addressing

July 14th, 2007 2 Comments »

Today, i came to know about a nice little feature available in Gmail. It is called “Plus Addressing”. Some of you might already know about this. Even, Wikipedia’s article about Gmail mentions this. It lets you have Unlimited number of email addresses based on your single Gmail ID and all of these will be delivered to your single Inbox.

What it does is that, Gmail ignores all characters after the Plus(+) sign in the first part of your email address. For eg, if you have the email address yourname@gmail.com, all emails sent to yourname+anytext@gmail.com will also arrive at your inbox. This is really helpful to track the emails sent to you. In case, you are signing up many forms, you can utilize this feature to sign up each form with unique email address. This way, you can find out which one is sending you more Spam.

I tested it out and it works really well. You can also use this with along with Filters to perform specific actions on specific emails.

Yahoo’s new Suggest Tool

July 12th, 2007 1 Comment »

Yahoo have introduced a new Suggest feature at Yahoo.com. It isn’t new. It works just like Google’s Suggest Tool. You’ll automatically be given suggestions based on what you have typed – as you’re typing. So, not only does this limit the number of words you need to type into a query, it may also present similar queries to shorten your searching time and get to what you’re looking for quicker. This feature was earlier introduced in Yahoo toolbar for Firefox. It is also available in Google Toolbar.

The nice thing about the suggestions is that they’re not obtrusive, so if you already know what you’re searching for, you can overlook the suggestions without them getting in your way. But, when you experience those brain dead moments, it’s the type of feature that just might get things moving again. If you don’t like change, you can turn it off altogether by simply selecting “disable” in the bottom right corner of the drop down menu. And, if you’re having regrets, you can reinstall it by selecting “more” above the search box.

My Odiogo Podcast

June 24th, 2007 No Comments »

Today, i received a mail from Odiogo informing me that my blog has been accepted and a podcast feed was created. I visited the given link eagerly. But i was disappointed. Here is the link. They also linked me to a HTML page that had the feeds along with a player. It is here.

This page has links that allows the 1-click subscription of your Odiogo feed to major podcast clients (iTunes, Juice). The play button next to each item of the feed allows listening to the mp3 file on the PC or on a smartphone.

But that didn’t satisfy me too. Also, as on Talkr, the Text-to-speech conversion was not as accurate as it is on Feed2Podcast. Odiogo also has a WordPress plugin that adds a link to listen to every post. But, I didn’t try it as i am very much happy with what i have now.

So, after seeing all these, i’d like to recommend Feed2Podcast to anyone who is looking for a Blog to Podcast conversion service.

WP Zipper Extends to add Themes

June 17th, 2007 No Comments »

Today morning, i received an email from Noah, creator of WP Zipper that he had unofficially released the new version of WP Zipper. I already wrote about WP Zipper here. Along with the plugins, they were providing, they have not added themes. Users can choose the plugins and themes that they need and can generate a wordpress installation zip. This sounds more useful.

The new site allows users to search for plugins and theme right from their site and add them to the ZIPs. They have also added a user system, so that if you register, you can save your selections and regenerate your zip file anytime.