LANcom Technology Blog

HubSpot, makers of an inbound marketing system, have a free Website Grader on their site which can measure the marketing effectiveness of your website. This Website Grader generates a free report which:

1. Gives your website an overall score out of 100.
2. Provides you with in-depth information about your site such as: the readability level, number of pages indexed by Google, Traffic rank, number of inbound links, and much more.
3. Allows you to enter your competitor’s websites and find out how their website grade compares to yours.
4. Gives you some great ideas on what you could do to improve your website traffic.

To learn more click here.

About a month ago we wrote about the main new features that are coming in Internet Explorer 8 such as the SmartScreen Filter, InPrivate Browsing, Accelerators, and Web Slices (click here to see this post). Well here is a list of some of the smaller, but still very useful improvements, you can expect from IE8.

1. Tab groups – Tab groups help you to quickly see which tabs have related content. In IE8 when one tab is opened from within another tab the new tab is placed next to the original and is colour coded to match the tab it came from. When you right click on a tab you can choose to close just that tab, or the whole tab group.
   
2. Improved Find On Page – The Find On Page feature (Ctrl F) now searches while you type, so that in most cases you don’t even have to finish typing to find the word or phrase that you’re looking for. This ’search as you type’ feature is already available in IE7 in the form on an Add-On but in IE8 it’s built in.
3. Smarter Address Bar – The new address bar now searches across your history, favourites, and RSS feeds as you type and displays matches from the website title or any part of the URL.
4. Re-open closed tabs or your last browsing session – If you’ve ever closed a tab or your whole browser by mistake then you’ll know just how helpful this feature can be. With IE8 you can reopen the tab that you last close or reopen all the tabs that were open when Internet Explorer last closed.

To learn more about Internet Explorer 8, or to download IE 8 Beta 2 click here. The final version of IE8 is expected to be released at the end of this year.

Self SEO has a free website speed checker tool, which shows you how the loading speed of your website compares with others.

Just enter your website into the box along with up to 9 others and click Check! The website speed checker will tell you the size of each webpage, the time in seconds it took to load, and average speed per KB.

In general you probably want your homepage to load in less than 5 seconds. Click here to try out this website speed checker.

Those of you who are familiar with Wikipedia will know just how helpful it can be when you are trying to quickly find out about a particular topic, but did you know there may be an even better way to find what you are looking for on Wikipedia than the search box that appears on the site?

There are in fact a number of search engines dedicated to helping you better search Wikipedia. One site you might find useful is Powerset.

With Powerset you can search for keywords and short phrases or you can simply type in a questions and where possible Powerset will answer it using text from Wikipedia. When you search for a person, place, or thing Powerset will bring up a short description of what you have searched as well as a list of facts from Wikipedia about your search term. If you want to know more information than this you can click on ‘Read enhanced Wikipedia Article’ and Powerset will display the Wikipedia article with a number of features that make finding what you need much easier.

These features include:

1. An Article Outline box- This box displays the headings and subheadings of the article, which you can click on to skip to. This is similar to the content box seen on the Wikipedia site, but what’s different is that as you scroll down the article the outline box moves with you down the left-hand side of the page, so you always have easy access to it. The Article Outline box also has a handy search feature which allows you to easily search for a term within the article.
2. The Show Factz feature – At the bottom of the Article Outline box there is a ‘Show Factz’ button. With this feature the outline box will display not only the outline but also the main facts within each section. This is a great way to quickly scan through all the information on the page.
3. A Factz word cloud – By clicking the Factz button at the top of the page Powerset will display a word cloud of what the main facts within the article are about. You can then simply scan this word cloud and click on words that you are looking for to find the relevant information.

Here is what the word cloud for the Wikipedia entry on Auckland looks like.

To watch a video demonstration of how Powerset works click here or to visit the Powerset site click here.

If you would like to learn more about Wikipedia itself click here.

Remember the Milk (RTM) is a free online task/time management tool which allows you to manage your to-do lists from any computer or cell phone with internet access. With RTM you can:

1. Create as many different to-do lists as you need and call them whatever you like. By default RTM will come with a personal, study, and work list but you can easily delete these if you don’t have a use for them.
2. Assign levels of priority to tasks. RTM will then colour code your tasks according to the priority you have assigned them.
3. Add tags to tasks. You could for example tag a number of tasks with the word ‘Shopping’ and then you could easily find all these tasks even if they are from different lists using the search feature.
4. Easily find the tasks you want. With RTM you can search though your tasks by priority, status, location, estimated time to complete, due date or tags.
5. Receive reminders about your tasks when you want, how you want. You can set RTM to remind you at the time tasks are due or a specified length of time before they are due. You can receive these reminders by email or Instant Messenger (MSN, Skype, Jabber, Google Talk etc).
6. Create Smart Lists. Smart Lists are created according to a set of criteria you define and automatically update as your tasks change. For example you could create a Smart List of all your tasks due this week and this list would automatically update itself accordingly.
7. Email tasks. When you sign up to Remember the Milk you are given a unique RTM email address. You can, if you want, use this email address to add tasks to your lists by email. All you need to do is put the name of the task as the subject and then put the other details in the body of the message e.g. ‘List: Work’ and ‘Tags: report’.
8. Share lists with others. If you need to share a to-do list with others then you can send them an email invite.

These are just some of the great features of Remember the Milk. The only downside to using this tool is that it will take to a while to figure out how to use it. Reading the three page Getting Started help guide is a must. To learn more about Remember the Milk click here.

Previously on this blog we posted about how Google can be used as a calculator, well here are 3 other cool ways you can use your Google search box.

Get a quick weather report for anywhere in the world – To get a simple weather report for any city all you need to do is type the word ‘weather’ and the name of the city into the Google search box.

Know what time it is in any city – Need to call someone overseas? Just type the word ‘time’ and the name of the city and Google will tell you what time it is there.

Find out how much something will cost in another currency – If you want to quickly find out how much something will cost you in New Zealand dollars just type the word ‘convert’, the price and currency it is in, then ‘to NZD’.

Note: You can use Google to convert measurements as well. Just type the word ‘Convert’, then the measurement, then the word ‘to’, and then what you would like it converted to.

PDF Split and Merge Basic is a free tool that allows you to spilt and merge PDF files. With PDF Split And Merge you can:

1. Split a single PDF document into sections or single pages.
2. Merge many PDF documents together, in the order you want, to form a single PDF document.
3. Extract a section your PDF document to create another PDF of just that section.

This tool could be useful if you have long PDF document but only want a small part of it, or if you want to add a page or pages to a PDF document but don’t have the software required to edit PDF documents.

I recently downloaded and used this tool to add a new page of text to the back of an existing PDF. I created the new page using the Office 2007 save as a PDF feature, but if you’re not using Office 2007 you could use PDF Creator instead. I then used PDF Split and Merge to merge the two PDF files together so that the new page appeared as the last page of the document.

To visit the PDF Split and Merge site click here (Go to the Download page to download it). If you would like more information on how to use PDF Split and Merge Basic click here.

We have decided to release the full versions of all our information reports on the LANcom Library site under a Creative Commons license.

If you would like to download the full versions of any of our reports such as: Free Technologies that could improve your business, Introduction to internet based marketing, Remote working for your business, Things you need to know when buying a server, and How does your computer support measure up, click here to visit the LANcom library.

If you want to reduce the amount of power your computer uses then Edison PC Power Management is a free tool that could help you do it.

Edison makes managing you’re your PCs power settings really easy. What it does is provide you with a sliding bar which slides between ‘Saving Less’ and ‘Saving More’ (see picture below). When you slide the bar Edison automatically adjusts the length of time it takes your computer when not in use to: turn off the display, power down the hard drive, and set the computer to suspend. You can also set different power settings for ‘Work Time’ and ‘Non-work’ time and then let Edison know when your work time is using the Schedule feature.

Edison also calculates how much money, Energy, and CO2 you will be saving with your selected level. These figures are estimates based on the average computer and so they’re not 100% accurate.

If you already have power management software that you’re happy with then Edison isn’t going to do a lot for you, but if you’re currently not doing anything to manage your computers power usage then you might find it useful.

To use Edison you must have Windows XP SP2 or later or Windows Vista.

To download or learn more about Edison PC Power Management click here.