We all love our feline cuddly creatures just like they love a low-hanging piece of string, but often times we find the Internet doesn’t share the same love for us. Useful pet websites can be difficult to find compared to other topics such as sports and technology, so here are 5 useful online resources made just for cat lovers, like you and me!

1. How To Get Accurate Health Advice Concerning Your Pretty Pet

Cats are supposed to have nine lives anyway; and as pets, we usually take it for granted that they will live illness-free and content for the rest of their lives – only to be brought to a jarring halt when our beloveds suddenly begin to display sickly symptoms. Fortunately, most of what your cat may go through has been experienced by other cats in different parts of the world and can be diagnosed. For instance, I found out that my cat’s unretractable inner eyelid would heal by itself in the course of a week.

The Cat section of Ask The Vet’s Pets has a comprehensive log of the various different kinds of diseases your cat may encounter. It’s written with the intention to be easily understood, and as a bonus is written from the perspective of the author’s cat, so you actually get an entertaining read-through that empathizes with the cat folk rather than a medical report. There’s also an equally useful Dog’s section here if you, like many others, own both a dog and a cat.

2. How-To Tutorials On The Daily Rearing of Your Cat, plus Useful Hints & Tips

Cat Lover’s Only may seem like one of the millions of cat blogs “littering” (pun intended) the Internet, but beneath the homely front page and the 1990s design is a goldmine of tips and hints on the best way to care for your cat. What’s great about Cat Lover’s Only is that it doesn’t just contain facts written from the author’s experience; he or she was actually trying to compile a comprehensive database to advice other cat owners, with links to other websites appropriate to the topic.

This site details the author’s personal journey in finding the best cat food (from looking up on the toxicity of different kinds of foods to answering questions on organic cat food), gathers up research by different cat benefit groups to discuss the health effects on cats, and recommends acceptable cat foods with links to the manufacturer’s website.

And that’s just one page on cat food! The rest of the site is peppered with similarly valuable information on different topics, and there’s a good chance you can find whatever your fix is here.

3. Where To Buy Cat-Related Products Online

Want to complement your cat’s presence with an outfit of cat-shaped furniture in your home? Desiring to dress-up your cat in frilly bows or “cat shirts” like you see on TV? Fortunately, where there’s demand there will be a market, and from the looks of things it seems like cat-related goods are high in demand. Here are just a few places you’ll probably want to visit if you’re looking for something cat-flavored:

• Celebrating CATS: Mugs, bags, T-shirts & tumblers
• Cozy Cat Furniture: scratching posts, pet stairs, cat towers, cat houses & cat beds etc.
• CatToys : Cat toys, bowls, parasite solutions, litter accessories, odor and stain removers
• MeowStore: Cat stuff for humans!

4. Where To Share and Discuss Your Cat Love With Other Cat Lovers

If you own a cat, you must know by now how lovable, adorable, and all-sorts-of-able they are, and it’s hardly surprising that people in millions of other households feel exactly the same way. At the same time, Internet forums are a great place to discuss topics with others around the world at the speed of light. Mix both together and you get the ultimate combination of “awesome”: online cat forums.

Here, you can discuss topics such as pet health, share cat pictures to bask in their mutual cuteness, or just talk plainly about cat-related stuff. There are just too many cat forums around the entirety of the Internet, so I’ll just list down a few of the good ones I’ve come across:

• VetClick – talk about your furry felines in good company of veterinary professionals here!
• PetForums – Cat shows and events in the UK; photos, adoption classifieds and discussion forums for everyone else!
• CatWorld – from cats in Australia, for cats all around the world!
• PetLovers – concerning nearly any pet you can think of, including thousands of cat-related posts

5. How To Reach A Feline Adoption Agency or Helpline, or Travel With Your Pet

If you need contacts, this list provides crucial contact information in the event of a pet emergency such as the Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Society (VECCS) .  It works across many different countries, and is handy to have as a bookmark.

This post was written by Aaron Pek

Title Photo credit: ‘The Piano’ by Daniele Civello

The lure of attracting new clients is the primary reason why many freelance designers, developers, and writers set up portfolio websites. The key is to make sure your portfolio represents who you are and encourages visitors to give your services a shot. Here are 5 tips for getting the most out of your portfolio website:

1. Present Your Brand with Clarity

Within seconds of visiting your site, viewers should have a clear idea of who you are, what kind of work you do, and your personal style. A professionally designed logo at the top of your page should let visitors know they’ve landed in the right place. A brief tag line near the logo will further clarify you and your work.

Lee Munroe shares four key questions to ask yourself about your tag line at Smashing Magazine:

• What are you? A designer? A writer? A developer?
• What do you do? Design websites? Develop games?
• Where are you from? Country? City?
• Are you a freelancer or do you work for a studio? Are you looking for work?

A tag line requires sharp, concise writing that emphasizes the most relevant details about your work. In fact, all of the writing on your portfolio should have short sentences with strong verbs (avoid “is” or “was” if possible).

2. Focus on Your Work

Besides your logo and tag line, make sure viewers can find your work on your first page. Some portfolios include a link or small thumbnail on the home page that leads to a page dedicated to a list of previous work. Other portfolios include a grid on the home page so that viewers can move right to the heart of the site. One other option is to include some thumbnails of your most popular work on your homepage, and then include a link to a  portfolio page.

Each portfolio image and its associated text should lead to a page explaining the services you provide, the software you used, and customer feedback.  As you consider what to include in your portfolio section or page, only mention what you want to be hired to do. If you have experience with print media, but you want to focus on attracting clients for the web, mention your web design work and limit your examples to that category.

Beware of cramming too much work on your portfolio page. If you have a wide range of examples to include, look into the use of column and grid designs that will preserve the clarity of your page.

3. Meet Customer Expectations

Customers will be accessing your site with a variety of browsers at an even wider range of connection speeds. Make sure your site’s code is valid < http://validator.w3.org/> and that nothing prevents customers from finding the essential information they seek: who you are, what you’ve done, and how to hire you.

Designer Andy Stratton suggests,  “There’s nothing wrong with flashy graphics and fancy Javascript effects on your website, unless they are stopping users from accessing your stuff.”

Customers will also expect to find an “About” page where they can learn about your experience, specializations, and awards. Skellie Wag of Envato writes that an about page should include the following elements:

• Who is this person?
• What qualifications and experience do they have?
• Do they seem trustworthy and reliable?
• Are they looking for work?
• Can I see some examples of previous work?

4. Present Your Services Clearly

List your services with bullet points and make them easy to find on your home page and your about page. If you have too many to include on your home page, provide an overview on the home page and then click through to a page that contains a more thorough explanation if that’s required.  For example, a writer with a broad range of experience could say on his home page that he works for commercial publishing and business clients, and then link to a page with a list all of his services for each industry.

5. Provide Action Steps

Action steps may be the difference between a bounce and a new client. At the very least you’ll need a page with contact information. More importantly, think about your potential clients and what steps they need to take in order to hire you.

Some options for action steps could include bright, clear images that say “learn more” or “get a quote.” You can also make a softer connection by including links to your social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Plus.

Effective portfolio site design requires a balance between including essential information and keeping the site clean and uncluttered. If you aren’t sure where to start, check out Smashing Magazine’s incredible list of 50 portfolio designs.  Once you see how other freelancers and professionals present themselves and their work, you’ll be prepared to focus on what sets you and your work apart from the rest.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for the Tel Aviv University political communication major department, and who also works with inspection services in China.

As games evolve and become more complex, they start out as fun, but they can often be so challenging to the average gamer that it becomes frustrating.  If you’re stuck on a level, have no fear, we’ve pulled out 6 of the best gaming guides you can find on the Internet for cheats, walkthroughs, and FAQs.

1. IGN

IGN is the epitome of game guides on the Internet, and usually most people debate whether it or GameSpot possesses the better style between the 2 giants. While GameSpot tries to preserve the old-school feel of the yesteryears with a touch of personality and nostalgia that older gamers can relate with, IGN does away with the human aspect completely and goes for a mechanical and objective image. Its delivery of content is sleek, modern and efficient, all wrapped up in bright lights, perfect sound placement, and shiny packaging much in the same way Apple does.

Having said that, IGN excels where it is supposed to, and that is in its provision of game guides, which are nothing short of effective. They have game guides for almost every game of every console on the planet; and if you need extra help, they also have numerous video playthroughs, specific strategy guides and reviews on Youtube which may give insight into things you may never have realized.

2. GameSpot/GameFAQs

If you’ve been around in the tech industry since 1996, that means you’ve withstood the tech bubble of the 2000s and the recent financial collapse of 2008, which means people think you’re relevant. One of the oldest names in PC gaming guides, GameSpot has managed to maintain its top status in gaming by constantly revamping their techniques to keep up with the competition and what users want.

Their pages are updated daily with game guides, reviews and developer commentary, and the range of guides they provide are truly dynamic – there are guides in the form of videos which walk you step-by-step through the game (hover over the Cheats tab for more options); while its sister site GameFAQs is frequented by elite gamers who write their own ‘wiki’ of guides for gamers to peruse, so you actually have at least 2 or 3 different walkthroughs to consult for any one game.

3. CheatCC

Back in the day, CheatCC (Cheat Code Central) was an absolute behemoth of a game guide collection, with tons of walkthroughs and cheat code databases stored on their servers. It lost its top gun status in the early 2000s by retaining its 1990s grey-against-white look while IGN and Gamespot made major cosmetic revamps, but that doesn’t mean that it lost the terabytes of cheat codes and guides still locked away in its databases; and today, CheatCC is still a household name in providing cheats to gamers worldwide.

Since then, CheatCC has kept with the trends and updated its look to suit modern tastes, while retaining the essence of the game guides that it has long been known for. A quick search for Megaman X3 (a game I played in 1998) reveals that the guides are still there, so if you’re looking for old-school advice, you have some form of assurance that you’re getting quality stuff.

4. 1UP

1UP.com is one of my favorite go-to websites for gaming. Unlike the heavy relevance of user-contributed information that its mightier brethren employ, 1UP seems to write its own guides, so each game’s walkthrough bear the same distinctive style of the 1UP trademark. It also means that instead of being heavy walls of text, the editors have some measure of control over how their guides turn out; as a result, it’s picture-heavy, with some guides having more pictures covering its real estate than words.

As far as usefulness goes, the heavy picture reference makes it easy on the eyes and easy to follow, although the non-traditional style keeps it free of personal bias and hence useful perspectives which many walkthrough contributors usually pepper throughout their work. However, if you’re a fan of clean, convenient help, 1UP will become a favorite of yours soon enough.

5. SuperCheats

SuperCheats does not boast the massive library of walkthroughs that the above established sites have, but where it excels is in quick-and-easy gaming advice, cheat codes and short, helpful hints in the same degree that the bigger gaming sites possess. Perhaps a blessing of its sparser inventory of game guides, it’s an in-and-out, no-hassle kind of place, where you don’t have to wade through deep columns of menus just to find what you’re looking for.

For instance, if you’re just looking for the location of certain hidden items on IGN, you’d have to wade through a huge body of unnecessary text and meticulously hunt for what you’re looking for due to the enormous amount of information they provide – which is good for an overall guide, but less so on a contextual basis.

On SuperCheats, you can search for the name of the game, choose from a menu of perhaps ten cheat items, and they’ll be listed out in a clean, orange-against white interface. And then you’ll be on your merry way again.

6. Mahalo

Mahalo is something like a hand-crafted Google, where answers are provided by humans as opposed to software bots and crawlers searching the Internet. It covers a wide variety of topics, but I’ve never used it much except for its video games section, and for good reason – it’s an excellent nest for video game resources.

Mahalo contracts game editors and freelancers in the industry to write and provide their numerous guides, and everything I’ve seen so far is nothing short of spectacular. What especially draws me is their play-by-play walkthroughs with accompanying thumbnails on the sides, so if you’re the type who switches back and forth between games and reading guides, this is an exciting alternative to the pause-then-play-then-pause-then-play style of video guides, or the boring wall of text of traditional game guides.

Mahalo also makes excellent video walkthroughs, which can be found abundantly on Youtube and other video streaming providers. Their clean narrative, thought-out delivery, simple style and plain useful gaming advice sometimes makes me wonder why they’re not among the top 3 already.

This post was written by Aaron Pek

SEO experts know how powerful YouTube is. After Google, it’s the second largest search engine in the world. But what’s the best way to get your video found by the people who are looking for it?

If you’ve made effective use of the Description and Keywords fields when you uploaded your video, you’ve made good strides toward putting it in front of people looking for it. But think how much better it would be to get every word of the video recorded so that search engines can find it?

YouTube has helpfully made it easy to do exactly that — and at the same time, you provide captioning for the hearing-impaired and end up with text for your own website as well. It’s wins all around. I’m going to show you how to use YouTube’s closed captioning service, which puts the words in the picture as they’re spoken in the video. Once you see how this works, you’ll be add captions in other ways, but I was surprised and delighted at how easy it is to work with the machine transcriptions and found them to be a good starting place. YouTube’s machine transcription, like all voice recognition, is fairly poor in accuracy.

That’s not a knock on the transcription, just a recognition that there’s more brain power that goes into understanding what people are saying than most of us give ourselves credit for. You realize that when you see how badly a machine does it. What the machine transcription gives, though, is the formatting and the time stamps you’ll need to tell the words were to appear in the video. YouTube’s interface makes it easy edit the transcription to be correct and to make sense.

1. Upload and Save Your Video

When you upload your video, you include an enticing headline, thorough description, and relevant keywords. These items are as important as ever.

2. Edit YouTube’s Machine Transcription

After your video is uploaded, go to your list of videos, select the one you want to caption, and click "edit." Now click on the Captions and Subtitles tab. There will be a heading "Available Caption Tracks" and a checkbox beside "English: Machine Transcription," and then off to the right side a box that says "download."

3. If There’s No Machine Transcription

There may be a button saying,

Machine Transcription is available for the videos in this Channel. To enable Machine Transcription for this video, please ‘Request Processing’. We will try our best to get some results in a few days.

Click the button below that paragraph, "Request processing (English only)," and come back in a few days. It’s a fairly new service from YouTube, and I’m sure they’re adding transcriptions — and languages — as fast as they can. It’s also possible to modify these instructions to create your own transcription, without using YouTube’s machine transcription.

4. Edit the Transcription

To edit YouTube’s transcription, click the download button beside "English: Machine Transcription." After you’ve downloaded a file called captions.sbv, you can open it in a text editor. Now go back to the YouTube video and click on the "English Machine Transcription" link. The text of the transcription will appear beside the video. You can watch the video and observe the captions alongside. You can also click the words, and the segment of video will play back. Correct any errors that you find in the text file you have open.

As you’re editing, pay attention to the time stamps before each group of phrases: For example, "0:00:05.220,0:00:10.029" means that those words will appear between 5.22 seconds and 10.029 seconds of the video. You can change where the captions fall on the video by changing those time stamps, but be sure you keep the formatting the same, including all the zeroes at the beginning of the numbers. When you’ve finished editing your transcript, save the file.

5. Upload the New Captions

Now that you have your transcript just the way you want it, it’s time to upload it to YouTube. Click "Add New Captions or Transcripts" under "Add a Caption Track." Make sure the settings are correct and upload the file. Watch the video, and click the small CC symbol on the lower right of the video screen to watch the captions as they appear with your video. Correct errors to your text file and then click "remove" and upload the revised file into the system.

Put Your Transcription to Use

Now your video has clear and accurate closed captions for people who have trouble hearing the words. At the same time, the search engines have a complete catalogue of the words that were used in the video. And if you want, you can take your transcription file, remove the time stamps and edit it to be appropriate, and use it for an article, blog post, or to appear under the video on your website. Video is a powerful way of communicating with your audience, and YouTube has made it even more valuable with these free tools.

This post was written by Jan Bear who helps authors rule the age of digital publishing and gives book marketing tips and strategies at Market Your Book Blog.com

In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is placeholder text (filler text) commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font,typography, and layout.

Even though "lorem ipsum" may arouse curiosity because of its resemblance to classical Latin, it is not intended to have meaning. Where text is comprehensible in a document, people tend to focus on the textual content rather than upon overall presentation, so publishers use lorem ipsum when displaying a typeface or design elements and page layout in order to direct the focus to the publication style and not the meaning of the text.

-Source: Wikipedia

A short while ago, we went through some really useful free image placeholder generators.  In this post, we’ll be talking about text placeholders and the best 6 places you can go on the web to meet your needs.

1. How to Generate Lorem Ipsum Bullet Lists

While most generators out there can churn out standard text, Lipsum has a few neat features, most notably the ability to create bullet lists on the fly.  Useful when you don’t want to bother with spending time pasting text into a word processor and bulleting the text manually.

2. How to Generate Lorem Ipsum Text Within Microsoft Word

Most people don’t know this but you can actually generate Lorem Ipsum text directly within Microsoft Word itself.  Digital Inspiration, one of my favorite tech blogs of all time has a great post on this complete with video!

3. How to Generate Lorem Ipsum based on number of words, paragraphs, or sentences

Sometimes when you want to get your text just the right length, it can be tricky.  Ipsum Generator helps you through this process and also includes the ability to generate formatting like bold, and italics on the fly.

4. How to Generate Gangsta Lorem Ipsum text

Lorrizle is an engine which generates a whole bunch of lorem ipsum text and adds some gangsta slang into it.  It has no real purpose except it does however bring a smile on faces – which sometimes could make a big difference when you’re showing it off.

5. How to Generate Lorem Ipsum using Chrome and Firefox Browser plugins

Website? Pah – just do it directly from your browser!  If you’re on Firefox there’s the Dummy Lipsum plugin.  If you’re on chrome, there’s the aptly named Lorem Ipsum generator.

6. How to generate non-latin Lorem Ipsum

If you’re tired of all the latin gibberish and would rather have gibberish in ENGLISH – then F*** Lorem will help you churn that right out.  Makes for much more entertaining text, but bear in mind the purpose of Lorem Ipsum is to draw all the attention AWAY from the text in the first place.

Bonus link: How to generate dummy data really fast – In case you need DATA placeholders :)

Video is a powerful means of getting your message out, and podcasting can build bonds with your listener, almost as if you have been having a weekly conversation. You can use a home-made video very effectively, and people have been creating popular podcasts in their basements since the genre was invented just a few years ago.

The one thing though, that takes a video or podcast from "obviously amateur" to the next level of professionalism is music. You’ll almost certainly want a musical theme, something to mark the beginning and end of your show. And you might use a musical loop — a piece of music that circles around and never ends — as bed music, to play softly under your podcast or video to set a mood and cover silences, and if your podcast is something more dramatic than a simple conversation, then you might want special music to work like a movie soundtrack.

But you can’t just take a section of your favorite CD and use that for your intro or bed music. The Recording Industry Association of America actively enforces their members’ copyrights with expensive infringement lawsuits, but even if they didn’t, it’s just wrong to take someone’s creative work without permission. The good news is that there are musical resources online that can give a professional touch to your video, podcast for free, for a voluntary payment or in exchange for credit and a link. You will be able to find music that sets the right tone for your video or podcast without having to pay high purchase fees or recurring royalties.

Where to Get Songs

For this article I’m defining a song as a piece of music with a beginning, middle, and an end. It may have lyrics or it may not. If you use a song for your podcast or video, chances are that you’ll use only a snippet of it, maybe the opening for the introduction to your podcast and the fadeout for the end. Here are sites that specialize in songs.

Music Alley

This huge database of songs is always my first stop when I’m looking for music for a podcast or video. There is so much music, categorized into dozens of specific genres, that I collect song after song in my playlist. It’s hard to know when to stop. Then I go back and pick the one that best fits the project.

The music is published under a Creative Commons license. You can use the music for free with after signing up for a free producer’s account with the site. They only ask that you give the musician credit and a link.

Podsafe Audio

Podsafe Audio has a large selection of free downloads. They’re categorized into 25 genres, such as big band, hip hop, religious, and world — so there is a wide variety of musical styles.

My only criticism of the interface is that you can’t play music clips online. You have to download each song to listen to it. If you’re browsing through dozens or hundreds of melodies looking for the right one for your podcast, downloading each one can add a lot to the time.

Internet Archive Community Audio Project

Find open-source, out-of-copyright and Creative Commons music at this site of the Internet Archive that might be just what you’re looking for. The site has converted a collection of music from 78 rpm records and even the cylinders that preceded disks to computer files and has even taken the noise out of many of them. There are many genres to choose from and a usable interface.

Where to Get Music Loops

The difference between a "song" and a "loop" is that while a song has a beginning, a middle and an end, a loop is designed not to go anywhere. It can go on and on indefinitely and seamlessly. When your DVD keeps playing the same audio and video over and over at the "play" menu, waiting for you to make a decision, that’s a loop. There are two kinds of loops here — background loops and musicians’ loops.

Background loops are made specifically for presentations, whether it’s PowerPoint, podcast or video. They usually have more instruments, and often they run 30 seconds or more before they come to the place to loop back around. Musicians’ loops are usually one instrument, and they are often under 10 seconds long. They’re designed to provide backup for a solo musician or a band that needs some extra instrumentation to fill out a sound.

I’ve included both kinds of loops here because either one can work as music for podcast or video — depending on what kind of effect you’re trying to achieve.

Flashkit.com

Flashkit offers more than 7,000 royalty-free music loops. The site has different levels of rights: freeware, linkware, shareware. The license type is listed in the author information. In my random sampling, I didn’t hear any physical instruments, only electronic tones, and the site has a search box but no categories, so finding the right sound may take longer than at some of the other places.

Free-Loops.com

Free-Loops offers more than 7,000 musicians’ loops, including many drum beats and various instruments. The interface is easy to navigate, and you can play the loop on the site to find out if you like it or not. You can download them one by one for free or pay $9.95 to download all 7,000. Looperman offers a very usable interface, with musicians’ loops categorized by musical genre, instrument, and beats per minute. It even has sound effects. The loops are free, but you have to sign up for a free membership to download.

Looperman

Looperman offers a very usable interface, with musicians’ loops categorized by musical genre, instrument, and beats per minute. It even has sound effects. The loops are free, but you have to sign up for a free membership to download.

Imbibe

Imbibe offers free musicians’ loops, categorized by instrument. It gives a brief description, such as "Vocal Percussion Loop Nr. 1" along with beats per minute. It’s easy to listen to and quick to download the files you’ve found.

So Give Your Podcast or Video Some Zing

Music is not just a decoration. It sets the mood of your podcast or video, gives the listener or viewer a hint of what the mood and approach will be. It can be an important part of branding your information products. These free resources can give you good royalty-free music for your audio, video, or multimedia presentation.

The writer Jan Bear hosts a weekly podcast, Marketing Savvy, where she gives tips for building your web platform on the internet.

The everyday problem:

You want to be tweeting consistently and sustainably day in day out on Twitter – without spending all day there or spamming your followers with too many tweets in a row.

The simple tech solution:

When using Buffer, you can add lots of tweets in a very time saving manner. The app will then spread out your tweets over the day, reaching your followers one at a time.

Why we picked this solution:

There are plenty of different tweet scheduling functions available, however Buffer is quite different:

• You don’t need to schedule each tweet individually, you simply add to Buffer.
• You can do this super fast from any page you are on, by using a browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, Safari)
• You receive analytics for your buffered tweets to track your impact.

The Step-by-Step Tutorial

Step 1: Create a free Buffer account and install the one of the browser extensions right from there.

Step 2: Whenever you like an article, hit the Buffer icon. The App suggests the title of the post and gives you a shortened bit.ly link:

Step 3: Edit the tweet or write your own and then simply add to Buffer

Step 4: Set the time, when your buffered tweets, each at a time should go out each day. Here are mine:

Step 5: Go back to your account and see all your buffered tweets. You can edit them, delete or move them around via simple drag and drop.

Step 6: Track the impact of your buffered tweets. Simply click the œanalytics button to learn about your retweets.

Buffer makes consistent tweeting super simple! Do you know any other alternatives?  Tell us about your experience in the comments :)

Super geeky image credit to jrmski: Made using 8 second long exposure with ISO 100 speed. Each person is holding a laptop with the color corresponding to the letter he is motioning.

Amid the hustle and bustle that is the browser war, two distinctly different companies have long held claim to a monopoly over the digital landscape – community based, open-source champion Mozilla Firefox; and market-centric, protocol enforcing Internet Explorer. In an industry with extremely high barriers to entry, newcomer Google Chrome has done surprisingly well, so far garnering about 10% of the total market share from the two aforementioned heavyweights. If you’ve tried Google Chrome and have liked what you’ve seen, here are some hidden not-so obvious tips to encourage you to stick with it.

1. Themes – Customize your look and feel of Chrome

Google Chrome is famous for sporting its sparse, lightweight, minimalist design, which frees up more screen space for actually browsing websites and takes up fewer resources so that surfing the web is faster. However, that doesn’t mean that it needs to compromise on features that its competitors have looks-wise; and this is where Themes comes in handy.

Using Themes, you can customize Google Chrome accordingly to display your favorite singer, cartoon or even just miscellaneous backdrops, and the third-party support for themes are, quite frankly, much more robust than expected of a new browser. To access themes, click the wrench icon at the top right of the browser and navigate to Options -> Personal Stuff -> Themes to begin decorating your browser.

2. Pin Tabs – Keep a permanent tab for your most frequently used websites

Google Chrome circles around the problem of always having to manually open sites you frequently visit – like Facebook or Gmail – by providing a much-appreciated œPin Tab feature, which helps to save a tab’s position so that it always opens by default every time you restart Google Chrome. This also reduces the size of your tab to display only the logo of the website you’ve approached.

Pin Tab is a nifty feature which comes by default, is easy to access, and helps in keeping websites you commonly frequent accessible. Just Right-Click the tab you wish to pin, select Pin Tab, and you should have a neatly compressed tab which takes up approximately one-quarter of the original space; freeing up space for 4 times the amount of open tabs.

3. Task Manager – Find out what’s slowing you down

If you’re on a relatively ancient computer, you’re going to love this tip: Google Chrome has a task manager for managing the tabs you have open, and it’s particularly useful for monitoring the resources the websites you are visiting are using. The simple table that pops up gives you a breakdown of which websites you’re visiting, and includes information such as how much memory it’s consuming, how much data is being downloaded from the website, and how many CPU cores are being utilized by it – all in real time.

If you’re into this kind of thing, you can even click the Stats for nerds button on the bottom left of the task manager to delve even deeper into the available information. Even if you’re not, this kind of feedback is useful if you’ve ever been wondering whether a certain website you’re frequenting is eating up all your computer’s resources, particularly flash-heavy sites like Youtube or always-on types like Facebook. To access the task manager, just hold Shift-Esc on your keyboard, or click the wrench icon and navigate to Tools -> Task manager.

4. Custom Search Engines – Not just your neighbourhood search engine

One of the great changes made over the years to the web browser is the ability to search for stuff directly from the address bar, removing the need of having to first reach a search engine (e.g. Google), and then performing your search. However, Google Chrome goes one step further by providing the ability to make use of search engines of websites from within their own website, meaning that if you have a favorite site you’re always visiting, you can actually customize the browser’s address bar to use that site’s search engine instead of the stock standard like Google, Yahoo or Bing.

To understand what I’m saying, try opening Google Chrome and typing œyoutube.com or facebook.com into the address bar, and then hitting the Tab button on your keyboard. You should see a Search Youtube Video Search or Search Facebook tab pop up in your address bar, and anything you search after that will be searched exclusively from only Youtube or Facebook. Granted, you’ll need to know the specific search URLs to use this trick on other websites, but it’s a small step for users which translates into a great leap for time-saving.

To use this trick, Right-Click on the address bar, and navigate to Edit Search Engines; then add the related URL and keyword to begin making use of the search engines from within your designated websites right from your browser’s address bar.

5. Make Changes To A Website In Real-Time (Developers only)

This tip is directed toward the more technically-inclined, as it involves at least a basic understanding of HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Where other famous browsers allowed users to take a peek at the source code – which is also available in Chrome – Google Chrome goes a million steps further by offering web designers or those with the technical know-how to actually tinker with a website’s code and alter how it looks – should they want to experiment with a feature or learn from it – all in real time. It’s a little like Adobe Dreamweaver in that it allows you to see how it works immediately, rather than having to Save -> Refresh every time you want to see what your change has done.

The customization feature really takes the cake, as Google Chrome actually allows you to change the website you’re currently visiting on-the-fly. Those with web design experience can testify to just how useful this feature can be for learning purposes, whether it is to experiment importing their own version of code into another website to see how it would play out, or to gain new insights from stable, established websites and extracting these lessons for use on their own.

To do this, Right-Click on any part of the body of a website and click Inspect element, which should bring up a table with the source code. Navigate to the part of the code you want to inspect, double-click it to start making changes and poof! Try it out for yourself!

This post was written by Aaron Pek.  Contact us if you wish to try writing for this blog

If you’re even a casual coffee aficionado, chances are you already have more than a passing familiarity with the French Press coffeemaker. These coffeemakers are cheap, compact, easy to use, classy-looking, and they make a brew that is much stronger and tastier than more expensive autodrip coffeemakers. What you may not know is that the French Press is a true multi-tasker; it does a whole lot more than make coffee. Read on to discover the top five amazing tricks and hacks you didn’t know your French Press could do.

1. How to a French Press Coffeemaker as a Teapot

This hack might seem obvious, but it’s worth a mention: What the French Press does for coffee, it also does for tea. To make a great pot of tea with a French Press, just add one rounded teaspoon of loose-leaf tea for every cup, plus one more for the pot. Add boiling water, steep to desired strength, then push the plunger to strain out the spent leaves. Not only will it taste great, but loose-leaf tea expires later and is often cheaper than tea bags.

2. How to use a French Press Coffeemaker as a Milk Frother

Nothing compliments coffee quite like a few spoonfuls of hot, frothy milk. Luckily, it turns out you can make both the coffee and the frothed milk with the same French Press. To froth some milk, first heat it up in either the microwave or over the stove, making sure not to bring it to a boil. Then put it in the carafe of the French Press, no more than half full– to give room for all that foam, of course. Pull the plunger up and down rapidly, and the fine wire mesh of the filter will whip that milk into foam faster than any pricey espresso machine ever could.

3. How to use a French Press Coffeemaker as a Colander

This hack should appeal to the college dorm crowd. If you want to make a nice dinner of spaghetti or macaroni, but your kitchen is more likely to have a hot plate and some ketchup packets than a colander for straining pasta, do not fear: The same French Press that serves you life-sustaining caffeine during all night study sessions will also help separate your cooked pasta from the water. Simply pour the pasta and water into the French Press, put the plunger in place– without pressing down– and pour the water back out. What’s left is just the pasta, ready to be sauced and served.

4. How to use a French Press Coffeemaker as a Juice Strainer

Few things satisfy like an ice cold glass of fresh orange juice. Unfortunately, that usually means putting up with a mouthful of orange pulp after every sip. Enter the French Press. To take the pulp out of fresh juice, just strain it with the plunger the same way you would a pot of coffee. The hack works for more than just orange juice, too. If you have a neighbor with an excess of apples or pears, try liquefying them in a blender or food processor, then pressing and straining out the juice with your French Press. It will not disappoint.

5. How to use an Extra French Press Plunger as a DIY Coffee Catcher

Even if you’re already a French Press convert, you may not know that an extra French Press plunger can help make after-coffee cleanup a lot quicker and easier. Rather than dropping twenty dollars on a device like the Coffee Catcher, just take the extra wire mesh filter and place it at the bottom of the carafe before you add the ground coffee beans and hot water. Then brew, strain, and serve the coffee as usual. When you’re done, screw the rod back into the extra filter and slowly pull it out of the carafe. All of the spent coffee grounds will come out with it, so there’s no need to dump the grounds down the drain or hunch over the trash bin with a spoon.

Have your own French Press tips and tricks? Feel free to share in the comments!

This amazing life hacking post was written by staff writer Peter Miller.  If you want to join the writing crew, just contact us.

Most of us have at least put some thought into going green and living a more sustainable, eco-friendly responsible lifestyle. While some companies are really making an effort to fix this need by releasing better, healthier or just less harmful products onto the market, there are many that have to charge more to cover their overhead. This has left many with the misconception that responsible consumerism means spending more cash.

While at the base price this might be true, you don’t have to get caught on the bottom line. If you have ever been to sites like TheDailyGreen or GreenerChoices, you know that every little bit helps. For finances, the same principle can be applied. Sometimes it is as simple as finding the right ways to do eco-friendly shopping to lessen the load and keep your cash in your wallet where it belongs. But where do you start looking?

1. How to get free shipping deals for eco-friendly products

Sometimes you just can’t find what you need in stores, but when buying online you might find that shipping costs are a beast to be reckoned with. Cut your costs by checking out FreeShipping.org, a coupon site that is dedicated to showing you deals from around the web, from sites that – you guessed it – have no shipping charges. They have an eco portion of the site that you can check out.

Not only a source for free shipping deals , but for coupons and free giveaways, FreeShipping.org is a fantastic site filled with great offers, contests and huge deals of eco-friendly products.

2. How to shop using in-store paperless coupons

Two words: paperless coupons. A lot of stores are going this route, but CouponSherpa has taken it to a new level. You can use a mobile app to get the coupons to your phone, which can then be used in stores. With this being the largest coupon site on the web, they have tons of green eco-friendly deals for you to find, and an easy to use search engine.

Besides featuring green coupons regularly, they also have Eco-Frugal Life Guide which is full of green money-saving tips.

3. How to shop for green product makers

From Olive&Myrtle to MyEarth360, Pristine Planet has a ton of offers for well known green eco-friendly product makers all over the web. They also have a great collection of promo codes, and they update often. Definitely a must for anyone looking for a new favorite.

Any more sources of green coupons online? Please share your thoughts!

This is a guest post by Annie Wallace of Viral Mom, a new mom, frugal housewife and mommy blogger sharing her way to blogging success.  If you’d like to guest blog for this blog, just contact us.

A Captchas are a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process usually involves a server asking a user to complete a simple test.  Because other computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human – Source: Wikipedia

Feelings on Captchas are typically mixed.  On one hand, its a great way to keep spam at bay, but on the other hand – especially as a publisher, it really gets in the way of things, especially if you’re trying your very best to encourage participation.  So how do you find a middle ground?  Find a Captcha service which does other things besides keep spammers out.

Enter SolveMedia – a way to use advertisements as Captchas.  Aside from ReCaptcha (which is an awesome captcha service which helps transcribe books), this is probably one of the few solutions which strives to have a useful side effect – generating making money online for you. 

Rather than just getting people to type in strange strings of incoherent text, SolveMedia shows display ads, asks the user to type in a message based on those ads – and as a publisher splits the revenue derived from those ads with you (Publisher gets 40%).

SolveMedia claims that the average time to solve a Captcha is 7 seconds, which is around the same or less time as a normal captcha.  In fact, it’s probably less frustrating than trying to decipher some of the more complex tangled mess of captchas I’ve seen floating around the web. 

If you want to know more, check out this video below.

What are your thoughts on Captchas?  Love them? Hate them?  Tell us in the comments :)

The Internet has changed the way we teach and learn dramatically. When I was finishing school, things were as boring as most of you may still remember: we had books to learn new things, we had notebooks to summarize, visualize and structure our knowledge and we had libraries to find additional sources of information.

Nowadays things are so much more fun. My two-year old daughter can almost read because she enjoyed one iPad app so much that she had to learn the alphabet to play in it. I am not sure if student still frequent libraries as we did because they can find almost any book online now. Do they even use a pen to write things down or do they note it directly in the laptop?

I am not completely sure – but as a new parent I am excited of the new opportunities the Internet is offering to kids and adults who are learning something new.

This post looks at 5 fun learning tools and resources which both kids and adults can enjoy.

1. Fun Learning Through Interactive Games

Teaching through play is the most effective way to get your kids remember things easier and have them actually wait for the next lesson. Human beings learn new things by playing starting from the very first days – that’s the most natural learning process.

Featured tools:

• Geographic Kids from National Geographic offers the variety of educational games that teach kids to go green (“Score points by sorting trash with Gus.”), develop your memory, learn animals and natural phenomena, etc.
• NASA Kid’s Club: lots of entertaining games that help your kids learn colors, develop logical thinking and discover new things;
• SFS Kids – Fun With Music: the great website helping your kids learn music terms and sounds.

2. Learning Through Online Video

It is unbelievable how much video can do in terms of educational value. When I was learning English as a kid, spotting some authentic English video was a huge luck. Nowadays you have access to tons of video data to learn a language or anything!

Featured tool: TeacherTube provides the huge platform for teachers to exchange educational videos and share fun learning ideas.

Sample videos:

• Jamestown Colony: The first settlement
• Noun Eaters
• Global Economy

3. Self-Checking with Online Quizzes

From experience, the best way to learn anything is to start answering the questions. Therefore taking a self-checking quiz is so powerful. By answering multiple questions from the topic, you start looking for the right one, understanding your grounds and arriving at conclusions. That’s the necessary step of digging deeper into the data in order to understand the bigger picture.

Featured tool: ProProfs quiz software is a great multi-feature tool that allows to create fun learning quizzes of any type and also supports multimedia.

Sample education quizzes:

• Can you identify these historical landmarks?
• Are you smarter than a 5th grader?

4. Structuring Your Knowledge with Mind-Mapping Tools

Mind-mapping is the best way to organize and remember huge amounts of new information. With web 2.0 we have lots of interactive mind-mapping utilities that help us structure our knowledge and even share it within the group of collaborators.

Featured tools:

• Gliffy: free account comes with unlimited number of public mind maps.
• Flow Chart: multi-user support; multiple drawing tools.

5. Learning New Languages in the Community

As the one who has spent about 5 years learning a foreign language, I find these tools especially awesome. I can imagine how great it is to get help from native speakers who could manage your learning on a daily basis to improve your skills and track your progress.

Featured tool: LiveMocha (also mentioned in this post on learning new things with web tools) creates a friendly learning atmosphere where members share tips, check each other’s uploaded exercises and interact in various other learning processes.

How has the Internet changed the way you (or your kids) learn new things? Please share your thoughts!

This is a guest post by Ann Smarty, owner of My Blog Guest, the community of guest bloggers. If you seek guest blogging opportunities to get your word out or want to start guest accepting guest posts to broaden your blog’s perspective, join MyBlogGuest!

Just several years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a one-stop solution for all our media needs; and yet today, YouTube practically fulfils every part of it – from searching for our favourite music videos, to catching up with the latest media gossip.

But what if there was a certain song you wanted to listen to on your portable music player, or a business podcast you wanted to carry around in audio format – instead of watching it as a video online? Fret not, for here are a few magical ways to transform that YouTube video into an audio mp3 file for your convenience:

1. How To Convert Youtube Videos Online And Download Them Instantly

By far the easiest way to obtain an MP3 file from a Youtube video is to have all the work done for you beforehand, so that you can use it instantly with no extra hassle. This is probably the preferred method for most laymen, since it’s as simple as click-and-go in most cases.

Video2MP3 is personally my favourite site for online video conversion. All you have to do is copy and paste the Youtube URL of the video you want to convert into the text bar, select whether you want the MP3 file in standard or high quality (higher quality usually takes longer to download), and press the convert button. You’ll have to wait awhile for it to convert and download, but it’s mostly an automated process in which you don’t have to lift a finger otherwise.

If you like this kind of instant conversion, other sites to consider include VidtoMP3, FromVideo (which also supports Vimeo!) and YoutubetoMP3.

2. How To Convert Videos Locally On Your Computer Straight From YouTube

The first method converts the YouTube videos into MP3 files on a third party’s computer, then allows you to download them; but what if you wanted to skip the download and head straight to the conversion step? One reason you may want to do this is perhaps for security reasons, so here’s a way to bypass the third party and keep the process strictly between your computer and YouTube.

DVDVideoSoft provides a large warehouse of free conversion software, but by far their most useful offering is their free Youtube To MP3 Converter. As the name implies, the software extracts and converts Youtube videos directly on your computer, so you’re assured of a safe MP3 file if you’re cautious about viruses. The interface may not be as pretty as more recent software, but the entire process is easy to understand and user-friendly, with a straightforward guide to help you out in case you need some hand-holding.

3. How To Download Videos First, And Then Convert Them At Your Convenience

If you’re like me, then you probably won’t want to just convert the videos into songs, but would like to store a collection of the videos themselves as well. To do this, you’ll have to take two steps: firstly, to download the videos to your computer, then convert them into MP3s yourself.

To download the videos to your computer, you can either choose to download them via online downloaders, or use local software to do the job. Some of the online video downloaders include KeepVid and SaveVid, while the free Youtube Video Downloader is installable onto your computer. If you use Mozilla Firefox, you’ll be happy to know that Download Youtube Videos + offers a secure solution for downloading Youtube videos right from within your browser.

Next, you’ll want to convert the videos you’ve downloaded into MP3 files. If you’re using Windows, the free Freez Flv to Mp3 Converter works well to convert the downloaded Youtube videos (.flv) into MP3 files.

And there you have it, your untouched downloaded Youtube videos and converted MP3 audio files, all in one setup!

4. How To Download Videos & Convert Them Into MP3s On a Mac

If you’re on a Mac, then you’ll have to use slightly different software to perform the above steps, but the process is mostly the same. The reason behind this is because Macs are unable to run the FLV codec natively, so you have to download them as H.264 videos instead and use the appropriate software to convert them into MP3s.

Videobox offers a nifty solution for downloading Youtube videos to your Mac. In tech speak, it downloads Flash videos and converts them into H.264 format so that you can play them on Quicktime – but for the layman, it downloads them so that it just works on your Mac.

After you’ve downloaded the video, the next step is to convert it into an MP3 file. FfmpegX is an amazing conversion software which works exceedingly well and has independently amassed glowing reviews, and is by far the best conversion software I would recommend. In fact, codec fans will be happy to note that FfmpegX handles a wide variety of formats, so its conversion capabilities are not confined to merely converting videos into MP3 files.

Have you ever wanted to convert a YouTube video?  Tell us your experience in the comments

This post was guest written by Aaron Pek

The everyday problem

Supposing you just finished a party, and everyone had fun snapping pictures, and enjoying the night.  What’s the easiest way to get everyone’s pictures into a single place so people can view and download the entire collection easily?  Yogile.

The simple technology solution

Yogile is a freemium service which allows other people to upload photos, or send in photos to a specific (customizable) email address.

These photos can be viewed by anyone else in your group, or downloaded all at one go.  It’s free for 100MB of storage (which makes for great for a ton of mobile phone snaps).

You can also give people different email addresses to send the pictures to, and Yogile will automatically sort them out into different albums.  To make things simpler, your contributors don’t even need to register or sign up to use the service.

Whether you’re a student looking for a summer job, a businessman who just lost his job, or a housewife who wants to make better use of her time, freelance writing can be an attractive option – due largely to the fact that you’re able to work from home and still devote some time to other priorities in your life. Here are few hand-holders to introduce you to the world of freelance writing, and the opportunities they are able to bring:

1. Where to find sites which pay for content

If you’re still new to the freelance writing arena, you should know that there are two ways payment can be measured: per hour, or per article. However, you need to command a certain amount of experience before you can start charging hourly rates, so newcomers should approach the mainstream sites which hand out payments according to the number of articles accepted; the trick is in finding the ones which pay reliably.

Demand Studios is a fairly decent site which has been around for quite awhile, and is popular among freelance writers for its $15 per article policy. Keep in mind though that you lose your rights to your creative resources, which means that you can’t reuse your article on other sites or on other print mediums once you’re paid for your article. Other similar and reputable sites include Constant Content, TextBroker and Seed.

2. Where to find sites which give you your fair share for content

Article-publishing sites sometimes find themselves caught in a conundrum – they need a large amount of content to keep visitors happy, but they don’t have the ability to pay all their writers upfront since they can’t gauge which articles are popular before they’re actually up on their site. Enter Helium, a publishing site whose payment mechanism is ingenious in every sense of the word.

The way Helium works is like this: authors write their articles for no payment at first, and are given a free account where they can post their articles on the site. From there, how much they get paid depends on how much advertising their article draws in; where Helium splits their advertising revenue with the author 50-50. The advantage of this method is that if you can write an exceedingly popular article, you stand to draw a large amount of income from just one article, and this passive revenue can go on for a number of years if it’s good enough.

If this kind of payment method attracts you, Xomba and InfoBarrel also offer the same kind of service. Check them out if you’d like to scour the fields for the option which appeals to you most.

3. Where to find freelance writing which offers escrow

If you’re looking for freelance writing jobs but are cautious of default on payments, then Escrow is probably the way to go. Elance is arguably the most well-known freelance job offering online which deals with Escrow payments. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, Escrow refers to a system where the employer gives the money to a third-party manager beforehand – which in this case is Elance – so that freelancers have the peace of mind that they will be paid as long as their work is accepted.

The benefit of using Escrow sites like Elance and Guru is that you’ll never find yourself empty-handed after slaving day and night over a job. Elance works a little like eBay, where recommended employers are œstarred so you can identify trusted employers. They also offer a host of other freelance jobs, such as programming or professional assistance, so if you have a day job as an accountant, you might be able to make some extra income offering financial advice on the site as well.

4. How To Look For Specialized Academic Job Offers

Universities and research labs often need information related to a very specific branch of subjects – for instance, a fire-protection manufacturing company may need information relating to the different temperatures of fires burning on different kinds of fuel, e.g. wood, coal, stone etc. Rather than spend costly thousands recreating a live experiment, they often turn to others who have the same kind of experience to provide this information for them.

Academia Research is an academic platform which caters to these clients by recruiting reputable sources to provide this kind of information. You have to be a specialist in an uncommon field to take advantage of these article positions; but if you have the skills, their clients have been known to pay in excess of $200 for a knowledge-worthy 8000 word article.

5. How To Get Into The Freelance Writing Scene On Your Own

If you’ve gathered some experience in writing for the official big-name sites and are ready to take the big plunge into independent freelance writing, start off by visiting some of your local online forums. Most of them will have a job section, and you’ll find many freelance writing opportunities here. Some may pay below the market rate, but you’ll gain some valuable insight on how to command your desired price and being aware of where you stand in the freelance market.

Next, try searching classified sites for work. Craigslist has been known to offer some decent job offers wherever you are in the world under their JOBS -> WRITING/EDITING section; just make sure you stay away from the automated sites which don’t have a human presence, as these tend to pay extremely low.

Lastly, if you want to start a career as a professional freelancer, having a personal website is a must. This is largely because you want your clients to be able to refer you to their contacts, and they’ll need an online location to do so. Check out the personal sites of some of the more successful freelance writers: Sally Bacchetta, Dana Prince, Diane Selkirk.

All my advice is given with the benefit of experience, and the above freelance writing sites are reputable in their own rights and have gained their own following over a number of years.  For advice on avoiding plagiarism in freelance writing, try reading: 5 Simple Ways to Detect Plagiarism of Your Content

This post was written by Aaron Pek and edited by James Yeang

Also, if you’re good with words and have a passion for tech, try writing for THIS blog :) We’re always looking for writers.