I Help Stupid People » Web

Google Releases “Google Chrome”

Tym Phillips — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:00:56 +0000

Google released their browser named Google Chrome a few weeks ago. It is still in BETA but Google has done a really good job. I have used it over the last few weeks and really like it. If you’re a Google fan you will love this browser. [Download]

Gmail – Contacts

dm — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:42:02 +0000

Gmail finally came out with a “some what of a” solution to adding every email address you send to, to your contact list. They now have a category labeled “Suggested Contacts” So now when you email someone from craigslist post12345@oklahoma.craigslist.com wont end up in your contact list. But BE CAREFUL don’t just go deleting everything in there at first, google doesn’t seem to do a good job filtering right away. I had several of my contacts I imported end up in the suggested contacts.

Xoopit

dm — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:30:05 +0000

Xoopit connects with your email and lets you browse photos & videos, find files, and share them with your friends. You can use their website to search though your attachments, but I suggest you install the Firefox plugin for xoopit. It allows you browse your attachments inside gmail without having to visit their site and it integrates beautifully. Xoopit offers quick, easy searches for you pictures, videos, and files without having to search through your emails. Only gmail is available at this time but they are looking to add Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, & .Mac. Xoopit is currently in private beta, but I have a few invites and if your interested just post a comment in the section below.

Things I liked about Xoopit:
its quick
integrates well
easy upload to facebook

Things I’d like to see:
image rotate
select and download multiple files
go to message

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT6bF4RTn70 ]

Attention NES Fans!!!

dm — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:43:09 +0000

If you are not using Firefox download it now, you will thank us later. Now on to the good stuff, FireNES is an add-on to your Firefox browser that gives you over 2000 of your favorite old school Nintendo games. You can browse the games in your sidebar and you even have the option to select favorites, although it doesn’t seem to be working at this time. Once you find your game just double click and it will open in a little java applet, you don’t even have to blow on the cartridge.

Download FireNES

5 Free Tools To Help You Optimize Your Website

Paul Anderson — Thu, 22 May 2008 04:06:15 +0000

I’ve just spent 3 days at the 25th annual ACCM Show in Orlando, FL and wanted to share with you a few very helpful tools to help you better manage your SEO and Site Optimization campaigns. Oh, and these tools are completely free to use with the exception that you might have to register for a user account or two.

Google Webmaster Tools
If you are not using the various free tools that Google provides then shame on you. You’re ultimate goal is to rank well in the search engines and you have the biggest search engine of them all providing you with free tools to help you do just that. With Webmaster Tools you will be able to monitor and adjust how Google search bots deal with your site. It will tell you what errors it has encountered, when it last crawled your site, the top keywords that land visitors on your site and where you rank for those queries in Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Yahoo Site Explorer
This is Yahoo’s version of Google’s Webmaster Tools and although they offer some of the same features Yahoo does offer a few extra features to allow you to basically carve out the way they view your site. You can manipulate your URL’s to exclude some of the extra query information that is tacked on to the end of your site’s pages.
Rex Swain
The main tool I am referring to from Rex is the HTTP Viewer tool. This nifty Perl script allows you to read through the page headers of a website and basically see what the spiders and bots are seeing when they visit your website. Another outstanding use for this tool is the ability to view what HTTP responses you are handing back to browsers, bots and spiders. Why would you do this? If you are transferring your site from one domain to another or migrating pages a great way to make sure you have the correct redirect setup is to use this tool and verify it is working how you had planned.
Google Analytics
If you are not already using an analytics tool you need to change that as soon as possible. Analytics tools allow you to see how your visitors are using your website. Stop assuming how they use and start making well informed and educated decisions based on actual visitors data. This is the quickest method to find out what areas or your site are working and what areas or not. Once you have analytics setup be sure to setup the e-commerce and site search portions if they apply to your website. The site search allows you to know exactly what your visitors are wanting to find on your site, so repeat the the search yourself and make sure you agree with the results you are presenting. Another analytic to monitor is the bounce rate. Find your highest and lowest bounced pages and try to mimic what you are doing right on the low bounce to the high bounced page. There are much more tips but these should get you headed in the right direction.
Compete.com
This website lets you take a very close look at your competitors to see what keywords they are optimizing for and how you are comparing to them for those keywords as well as other factors. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to knocking on the door and asking to login to their analytics account.

Did I miss a great tool (which is very possible since this is such a short list) feel free to share you favorite tools with me in our comments section.

Family Safety & Parental Control

dm — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:44:39 +0000

I was asked by a concerned parent "How can I keep my kids from looking at stuff they shouldn’t?" Well "stuff they shouldn’t" is relative to each parent. Also being in my twenties with no kids I’ve never really thought about it. So I’m off to the races, that’s right I go straight to Google! LOL – from here I am flooded with a ton of information, there are a lot of products out there for just this situation but the more I look the more they cost. I’m here to tell you I’m cheap, I would probably stand over my kids shoulder than pay $50 for some software to do it for me. But your in luck, I found some good solutions the inexpensive way (or free )

There are plenty of different products out there some are an entire suite that monitor everything and some are on an individual basis. Again these may not be the best security features out there, but they are free and they can help get the job done.

Windows Live Oncare – Family Safety
With Family Safety, you can control the people your children communicate with, the websites they can view, and the search results they are shown. Contact list settings can help you make instant messaging safer in Windows Live Messenger and e-mail safer in Hotmail. Also you can block all sites except kid-friendly sites and those you specify or, you can allow all sites except specific categories and sites you block. You can also get activity reports to keep tabs on the sites your children visit.

Glubble
Glubble is a free parental control suite Firefox addon. It aims to help extend the appeal and adoption of Firefox to families of elementary school age children. The Glubble add-on for Firefox enables families to provide a protected, fun and educational web surfing experience for kids by enabling their family circle to link up via Firefox to decide what they can see online.

ProCon Latte
ProCon, another Firefox addon, is a content filter for the browser. It can filter any kind of material (pornography, gambling, hacking, cracking, etc…), it can also block all traffic, making sure that only desired websites (set in the Whitelist) can be accessed, and includes a profanity filter. ProCon also has password protection in order to keep others from changing the settings.

IMSafer
IMSafer lets you know when your children may be in dangerous situations online, and shows you how they represent themselves in their online profiles. IMSafer Basic is free and available to any parent who wants it. Basic will support up to one monitored IM account, IMSafer Plus allows for monitoring of an unlimited number of IM accounts and support for MySpace and Meebo. IMSafer automatically detects and starts monitoring any account it finds. You don’t have to do anything. IMSafer currently supports Microsoft (all versions), AOL (both AIM and ICQ), Yahoo! (all versions), MySpace and Meebo.

Now for those who want to take a more techy advanced roll in their children’s online safety. I found how to control the time a user can log in and there is also a program called Keylogger that records every keystroke a user makes.

Time Restriction
go to Start – > Run -> type CMD
now to select the user type net user (you will need to know the password of the account to set this up)

ok, you can see the user you want a time restriction on now so here is what we type
net user [account name] [Password] /times:DAYRANGE,TIME;

DAYRANGE codes: M,T,W,Th,F,Sa,Su
Time: use 24hr time

EXAMPLE: net user Paul janurary123 /time:Su-Sa,3-16;M-F,17-21;
to reset use /time:all

Keylogger
KeyLogger silently records all keystrokes typed including emails, word documents, excel documents, windows password, chat room activity, voice recording, instant messages, web addresses, and web searching.

Piclens

dm — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:07:23 +0000

Piclens is a plugin for you internet browser that transforms it into a fullscreen, interactive slideshow like experience. It is available for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. You can view and navigate images from Google, flickr, Yahoo and many more. You can also browse and watch Youtube videos from the “3D Wall”. You can immediately jump to the corresponding webpage by a click of a button. Piclens is free from adware and spyware so no worries there. On the subject of free, Piclens is absolutely FREE and can be found at piclens.com or here.

On a personal note I love using Piclens now to search for new wallpaper for my computer. It is really one of the fastest ways to find images on the internet. You have several sites you can search from, and there are many sites that have Piclens enabled (like facebook). Overall it is a cool interactive away to find images quick.

Picasa 3D Carousel Template and More

dm — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:38:33 +0000

Picasa is a great product from Google for locating, organizing, editing, adding effects, printing, emailing, and uploading photos. I pretty much use Picasa for all of these features, but the one I really like is the web albums. It comes installed with 6 templates, but if you want to add some flare to your albums Paul van Roekel has created 19 free templates, both flash and HTML.

They’re very simple to install you just download, unzip, and place in C:\Program Files\Picasa2\web\templates. Restart Picasa and they are now available to be used. Creating the web albums are just as easy, select the photos you want, go to Folder -> Export as HTML Page…, select the size you want to use (I usually use 640px), the title of the page, and the output destination. Then choose your template and finish!

Paul van Roekel’s Templates
Cool Fullscreen
Tiltviewer
Moonslide Reflections
ImageFlow
PicLens
3D Carousel
Page Flip
Photo Stack
JW Image Rotator
Polaroid Gallery
Jet Photo
Stopdesign
Lightbox
Photoplayer
Thickbox
XFade
Simple Scroller
Highslide

RSS

dm — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:00:49 +0000

[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU]

I wanted to write up an article about how RSS can be beneficial to everyone. This video by the people at commoncraft is simple, to the point, and in plain English (for stupid people ) This video was so good even my wife understood RSS after watching it. All you need now is a RSS reader (I use Google Reader as well) and you can start adding your favorite websites like ihelpstupidpeole.com.

Create a Google Toolbar Button

dm — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:00:49 +0000

Have you ever wanted to create a Google Toolbar button for your own website? Well it’s a pretty simple process that doesn’t take very long to complete. It can also help advertise your website if you submit it to Google. Let’s get started on creating a button.

You need to create an XML file, so open up notepad or whatever you prefer for making text files and paste this code in it.
Replace the title, description, site, and update them with your website information. The feed is optional but should be included if you have RSS feeds available. The icon mode is the icon that will be in the toolbar, and there are two steps to this.
You need to go here and create a favicon and download it.
Then upload your favicon here and copy its output to the icon mode
Save as a .xml file
Now you need to upload your xml file to your site’s root folder.
Share your button with the address http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=THE LINK TO YOUR XML FILE

Click Here to add I Help Stupid People to your toolbar