All posts in Online Tools

Education 3.0 – New Way of Learning

by Ades on November 23, 2011 in Online Tools, Startup with 10 Comments

I really like the latest developments in the online education/learning field. Some of the startups are really creative and changing the traditional boring means to learn with more fun, gamified, self-learning online resources. On these sites, you will not only be able to learn, but also contribute to the community if you are good in certain subject fields. This is a great way to harness the benefits of crowdsourcing.

Below, you will find some of these websites:

Code Academy

Codecademy is an interactive and fun way to learn coding. By asking you to type set of words and answers to questions, it will involve you in a two-way communication. By the time you realize, you will be coding and understanding the concepts of object oriented programming. It also employs social elements to the site, so that you can learn together with your friends.

Website: http://www.codecademy.com

code academy

Khan Academy

Khan Academy has a huge collection of 2700+ free videos. And it’s a work of one man, Salman Khan. What started of as a casual online tutoring sessions for his relative’s kids, turned out to be one of the largest non-profit educational organizations in the world.

He has MBA from Harvard, he has three degrees from MIT: a BS in math and a BS and a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science. His website is mainly popular for his maths videos, which are easy to understand and appealing to school kids. You can read more on Khan’s story at the following sites; Money.CNN, Wired, and SiliconPrairieNews.

Website: http://www.khanacademy.org

khan academy

TreeHouse

Treehouse is a fairly new website that concentrates on providing instructional videos on Web Design, Web Development and iOS Development. As a part of its teaching method, it uses ‘badges’ similar to what FourSquare does, you will get a badge for answering questions correctly. Continue reading →

Google Web Fonts

by Ades on July 26, 2011 in Google, Online Tools with 13 Comments

Google Web Fonts has a new user interface which is a lot more user friendly than before. If you haven’t seen, check it out.

Google Web Fonts is a project by Google to provide webmasters and designers with high quality, free, open source fonts for website usage. What I like the most about this is that, Google has made embedding the fonts very easy. Basically you just point to them for the CSS source, and apply the fonts to your website via standard CSS styles. You can see the example here.

URL: http://www.google.com/webfonts

Endor.se – Site for endorsing other freelancers

by Ades on February 14, 2011 in Jobs, Online Tools, Usability with 30 Comments

Normally when you create stunning websites like these (below), you will be overloaded with client requests… It’s understandable of course, because everybody wants to have a nicely designed website.

These are works of Freelance Interface Designer, Sam Brown. And as with other great designers, Sam is not available for freelance projects at the moment. And this is the case with almost all the good designers. Most of them are already busy and has no time for your projects.

But Sam was kind enough to do a project called Endor.se to solve this issue, where busy freelancers can endorse/recommend other equally good freelancers who might be free to take up your project.

For example, you can see who Sam himself is endorsing at http://endor.se/sambrown

Website: Endor.se

How to have an ecommerce shop on your Facebook

by Ades on August 24, 2010 in Business, Online Tools, paypal with 49 Comments

Payvment’s E-Commerce Storefront enables you to launch a professional storefront on Facebook. This app gives you everything you need including a full-featured admin area to manage your storefront and products directly from Facebook.

The Payvment tab couples PayPal’s API with Payvment’s shopping cart, allowing you to sell products directly on your Facebook Page… for free! This is a comprehensive app which allows you to add products and assign those products to a category. Payvment’s tab allows you to upload photos, list terms of service, provides shipping options, offer coupons and much much more. Your customers can shop for products like they would from any other e-commerce site, right on Facebook.

One of the coolest features of the Payvment tab is that it is integrated with all other Payvment stores, both on and off Facebook. If a user adds a product to their cart from your store, and later goes to check-out after shopping at another Payvment store, your item will still be in that user’s cart.

URL: http://www.facebook.com/payvment

Google Font Directory – Embed Nice Fonts to Your Blog

by Ades on July 30, 2010 in Google, Online Tools with 21 Comments

Google Font Directory is a great place to integrate different fonts other than the usual Verdana and Arial to your blog. With the launch of Google Font Viewer, it got a lot easier to change the fonts of your blog to nicer looking fonts. With just a few selections and copy-pasting a CSS code, your blog’s fonts can be different.

I hope font designers will support this project and contribute more free fonts to the directory.

URL: http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview

WooRank – Free Website Analysis Tool

by Ades on January 25, 2010 in Online Tools, Trackers with 42 Comments

WooRank is a free website analysis tool similar to that of WebsiteGrader and BuiltWith, but it’s more on ranking and SEO.

Website: http://www.woorank.com

Generate CSS by Drawing

by Ades on January 7, 2010 in Online Tools with 25 Comments

Want to design a website purely in CSS, but don’t know how to code in CSS? Try Drawter then, with it you can just select the objects (H1, box, line etc) and draw, once you are done you can generate the CSS code. Can be a good jump-start for learning CSS.

Website: http://drawter.com

Editable HTML Invoice Tool

by Ades on December 25, 2009 in Online Tools with 23 Comments

Chris Coyier of css-tricks.com has created an editable/printable HTML invoice tool similar to FreshBooks concept. You can basically click on any part of the page and change the text and values. You can also upload your own logo and insert terms and conditions. Once you are done it’s ready to print.

Here is the Demo of the tool.

URL: http://css-tricks.com/html-invoice/
Download files: click here

BigCommerce – Making Selling Online Incredibly Easy

by Ades on September 4, 2009 in Online Tools, Sponsors with 23 Comments

BigCommerce offers easy to use e-commerce platform for selling things online. If you were thinking of having online store with your own domain name, you should really consider BigCommerce.

Since my last post, I have been playing around with my store which is under their free plan. The free plan offers fully functional store with 20 products. Their cheapest paid plan starts from $24.95/month, which provides up to 100 products for your store and 3 staff logins.

But for a beginner, I believe 20 products is more than enough. If your store becomes successful, you can always upgrade to one of the paid versions later on.

Ease of Use

BigCommerce’s main objective and competitive strategy in business is providing usable and easy to use products and services. And so far, according to them it’s really paying off a lot (read here).

bigcommerce interface

They should be commended for it, their hard work has really paid off, it’s easy to setup and customize your store in BigCommerce. Even if you do not know how to edit HTML, they provide innovative drag and drop customization options (see below). Continue reading →

Change Detection in Websites

by Ades on August 21, 2009 in Online Tools with 23 Comments

ChangeDetection is a great tool that I have been using lately. As the name suggests it’s a free service for website (or page) change monitoring, whenever the change occurs it will notify you via email.

You can specify the type of changes in the preferences; whether it’s a sizable change or when the text is removed from the page or when the page is updated with new content etc.

When it’s useful? It’s useful for keeping track of newly launched sites, for example when the site is up but you see a sign saying “we are in private beta now, come back later” etc. type of websites. Or websites that do not have RSS or other types of communication tools that can notify you of the new updates. Or just to keep track of your own websites… for example when it gets defaced :) sure it will notify you when your site is hacked and the content is changed. But let’s hope that you won’t receive such a notification, ever.

Website: http://www.changedetection.com

SitePal’s Talking Widget

by Ades on August 13, 2009 in Advice to Businesses, Online Tools with 17 Comments

SitePal, a website that offers animated speaking avatars has came up with a new free widget now. The talking character widget can be integrated into your blog or used as a messaging tool to send voice mails to your friends.

See the demo below… now you can have your own welcoming Obama for your blog :) I like the way he follows your mouse cursor.

Share button at the bottom gives you many options to share your newly created widget with your friends. Options include Email, direct URL, Facebook, iGoogle etc.

Some Suggestions

I think the idea of providing free talking characters i.e widget is great. Whether people will use it or not on their blog that is a different thing. However, I think incorporating the following suggestions into their next versions will increase the chance of people using the widget on their blog.

Provide different sizes
Especially compact widgets… web space is a scarce thing, more so on popular blogs and websites. If possible bloggers would rather monetize the space as much as possible than putting a widget that covers the half of the sidebar. Therefore providing smaller widgets will increase the chance of adoption by popular blogs. Continue reading →