utilities

One of the buzz topics last week was Security & Safety. The issue is URL shortening services. Read the rest of this entry »

Almost every business benefits by using photos to help tell their story. Increasingly, businesses are turning to Flickr as the perfect channel for serving their pictures. Read the rest of this entry »

For website owners and creators, it’s important to check for broken links. Here’s our favorite broken link checker. Read the rest of this entry »

Sxipper is a fantastic utility for storing all your online passwords. Very intuitive and easy to use. But what about exporting the data so you have an back up?

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Now and then, it’s good to check if all the links on your site are functioning. Here’s a handy online tool to do just that.

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Bigger is not always better. Not when it comes to the size of your webpage. We found a handy tool that measures your “page load.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another in our series of lab-tested, must-have free utilities for Mac nation. Read the rest of this entry »

As the usefulness of the web grows, we all have more and more passwords and user names. Some sites allow anything; others want 7 or more characters, upper- & lower-case, numbers. It gets baffling. But here’s a great utility for managing it all.

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We’ve blogged about this before, but because keywords are so important, we thought we’d go into a little more detail.

Keywords are nothing more than the most common terms people use to describe something. But choosing the right keyword can mean this difference between success or failure for your website.

For example, we almost called our website “interactive copywriter.” But a keyword search revealed that “interactive copywriter” was not anywhere near as popular a search string as “online copywriter.” Whew! Good thing we looked.

Keywords can be single terms or multi-word phrases (like “online copywriter”). Using a keyword tool gives you objective data about different words and phrases, an easy way to compare their popularity, helps you discover alternatives and gives you more surety about the words or phrase you choose.

We recommend the Google keyword tool for all online copywriting which involves the creation of keywords and phrases.

Here’s another Web 2.0 tip for Boomers.

Favicons (pronounced fave-IKONZ) are the tiny pics you often see preceding a web address in your browser bar. Here’s ours:

In this post , we’ll tell you how to create your own favicons– it’s so easy, you’ll wonder why you waited. Read the rest of this entry »

Part of our mission here at OCDC is explaining the web to digital immigrants such as ourselves.

Search was a 6 billion dollar business in 2006 and is projected to grow at 12% in 2007. Over 1/3 of all purchases of goods and services starts with an internet search. Optimizing your Home Page for natural search helps potential customers find your info on the web. In this post, we’ll tell you how to do it yourself in half an hour with basic web skills. Read the rest of this entry »

When we first installed WordPress, it came with some links pre-loaded in the blogroll.

The first link was for a gent named Alex King, a software developer who co-founded Feedlounge. Turns out there’s lots of great info on this site; we especially liked Alex’s favorite utilities and add-ons for Mac & Windows.

Lots of people make lists of stuff, but Alex’s utilities are really the cream of the crop. You probably have a few of these already, but check out the list for more really good stuff that’s free or shareware.

Here’s a couple more utilities (mostly for Mac) that we find useful in our work as online writers:

Transmit - Easy FTP and secure FTP. User friendly enough for noobie writers.
MacLorem (thanks to David Holt) - need Latin text (ipsum lorem stuff)? MacLorem generates latin text, Greek, Celtic… everything but Klingon.
Calendar Clock - Handy little pull down calendar that resides in your menu bar
Gmail Notifier - another menu bar app - this one notifies you when you have gmail.
SyncTwoFolders - one of the better utilities of this type. Even worked syncing two dreaded iTunes libraries.
Wiretap records any sound that is playing through your computer. We use it to record interviews conducted on Skype. Also good to record radio streams like our favorite KCRW.

Thanks again, Alex! If anybody else has a cool app, send it along and we’ll give it a try.