Shot.Co.Nr

Shot.Co.Nr is a free service that lets you get a very small URL redirect with only an ad at the bottom

Quote “This site alows you to create a short URL that can be effectively used instead of a long URL. Enter a long URL in the textbox below and click “Make Short” to create a short URL. Once you create a short URL, you can not only access the URL you have shortened but almost any page in the site by appending the path after the short URL.” (taken from Shot.Co.Nr)

http://shot.co.nr/?r=9q (Google)

Overall 4/5

Gabe Morris

K-Meleon

K-Meleon is a fast, stable, and unknown web browser. It has the normal features of browsers such as tabs, and automatic history, cookie, and cache cleaners. Its password manager is very nice, and simple. Another awesome feature of K-Meleon is that it allows you to sort sites into “groups”, which allows you to open a bunch of websites in tabs by typing “group name” in the url bar, and then pressing Shift+Enter. Or to open them along side with your already open tabs press ALT+Enter.
K-Meleon also has standard features such as source viewer and print preview.

What I think kills K-Meleon, is its lack of addons. While FireFox has many many many addons, K-Meleon has a couple hundred. But the best of addons has to be the privacy toolbar, it lets you clear passwords, cookies, and your cache with the click of a button. And lets you disguise your browser as another one like IE6, Opera, Netscape, or your own custom ones
To download K-Meleon, or to do more research about it, goto K-Meleon’s Homepage

Here is a full description of the features of K-Meleon:
Choose Your Desired Bookmarking System

K-Meleon is the only browser that allows you to use your existing Internet Explorer Favorites or Opera Hotlist in place of or along with Netscape/Mozilla’s Bookmarks system.

-”Tabbed” Browsing

Through the layers plugin, K-Meleon offers a convenient way to manage the many sites you may visit during a browsing session. Commonly known as “tabbed” browsing, this feature allows you to keep multiple web pages open simultaneously, navigating easily between them by clicking on each page’s “tab” located beside the others on a separate toolbar within the browser. This can be quite helpful when doing extensive web search as it eliminates the need to go back or forward repeatedly to find a previously viewed page. If you wish to have other applications running, this feature will provide a less cluttered Windows task bar.

Mouse Gestures

Introduced and popularized by Opera, mouse gestures are now a common staple among alternative browsers. Through the mouse gestures plugin, K-Meleon offers a quick, easy way to navigate the web by right-clicking on a page while sliding your mouse left or right to go back or forward. Like all of K-Meleon’s other features, the mouse gestures plugin is very customizable and allows initiation of almost all commands and macros.

Complete Toolbar, Menu, Context Menu, & Keyboard Shortcut Customization

One of the defining characteristics of K-Meleon is its extensive user customization feature. You can easily revamp your main menu and context menus by deleting or adding the items of your choice, access any function from your toolbar or assign any keyboard shortcut to any function. There is no need to extract and compile jar files or download various different extensions which may add other unwanted items to a desired feature.

Block Popup Windows

A hazard of browsing the web is the annoying popup window advertisement. K-Meleon comes equipped with a Popup Blocking feature that blocks these popups and also allows you to quickly enable popups at a particular site.

Fast Load Time

The time it takes for K-Meleon to open from when you click its application icon is the fastest of any Gecko based browser. There is even a symbiotic loader to further reduce start time for older, slower PCs.

Easy Web Searching

Click on the Search button in your toolbar to enter items to search for with Google. By default the keyboard shortcut to view the search prompt is Ctrl+G. This, of course, can easily be changed along with the search engine. K-Meleon also supports searching directly from the URL bar with support for Mozilla keywords and Microsoft Quick Search.

Themes & Skins

K-Meleon is one of the simplest browsers to skin and all of its images can be changed to your liking. Visit the TutorialSkinning Guide for instructions. Various user contributed Themes and Skins are available for download.

Macros

K-Meleon’s unique macros plugin greatly expands its features and capabilities. Take a look at just some of the many examples in the MacroLibrary. Once you gain a better understanding of the MacroLanguage you can customize the macros to your liking or submit new macros of your own.

Gabe Morris

Net Disaster

I walked into an IT room at my school yesterday to see some of my friends on my website, they weren’t looking at it, instead they were blowing it up with bombs. The site that allows this to happen is called Net Disaster (www.netdisaster.com). It opens up a webpage that you request and then it adds a flash component over the top of the page so that you can destroy it with a whole host of tools including guns, chainsaws and even cream pies. It also includes sounds so you can get a real feel for destroying the site. It’s a great site for if you want a bit of fun, so go over to www.netdisaster.com now.

Simon North, 25th January 2007

Froogle Price Comparison Site

Froogle is a Google Inc. website designed at comparing prices of items on the internet, it is still in beta stage currently (early 2007) and is the perfect resource for finding products on the internet.

You can filter your searches depending on what you are searching for, for example I searched for laptop and I could filter it by price, stores, seller ratings, and capacity of hard drive. It took results from a wide range of vendors especially Google Checkout merchants.

It gives you an image of the item, a description, a product rating (if it has been reviewed), the seller and price of the item. You can order them in relevance, ratings and price. You can also view the list in grid view rather than list view, grid view gives you the image, link and price.

By clicking the item, you will see a full description and full details and specification of the product, all still on froogle.

This service, as I’ve said, is still in beta so it is improving continuously, but it is one of the best shopping sites on the internet at the moment. Worth a look? Visit http://froogle.google.com and start shopping today

Simon North, October 2006

World’s Highest Website

What! The World’s Highest Website, I hear you say. Well, yes the world’s highest website. What a great idea. This wacky site claims to be 11.769 miles high, I haven’t actually measured it, but I do believe the creator behind this masterpiece. You can however if you get bored after the first couple of minutes, simply press Ctrl and End or you could just get hold of the scrollbar and pull it down to the bottom.

So how was this made, well the creator didn’t sit there for hours, weeks, months and input lines and measure every mile of it, it is actually created by using CSS, which is a website standard used mainly to style webpages (fonts, backgrounds etc.) There isn’t much more I can say about it than if you have a spare day or so take a look and scroll to the bottom, otherwise just take the elevator. You can find it at www.worlds-highest-website.com.

Simon North, December 2006

Spotbit EXE Magazine Creator

As a magazine editor myself, I found this fantastic tool on the internet. You simply upload your images of each page or add them into a zip file and upload that. Spotbit will then create an exe application e-book of your magazine and add a background to the application. This means that your potential readers will be able to view your magazine without needing software like PDF viewers or flash.

The produced application includes great visual and sound effects to simulate a hard copy magazine. You can turn pages, magnify (by simply right clicking)., skip to pages like contents as well as being able to input a page number and it goes straight to it.

The service is totally free and is perfect and produces relatively small filesizes, my magazine The Computing Expert for example was only 9.9MB in good quality colour. PDF files are much bigger. Head over to www.spotbit.com to start producing your magazines or take a look at an example of the service used for Simnor Computing’s magazine The Computing Expert.

Simon North, October 2006