PhotoRec

Posted on November 24, 2010 by admin

PhotoRec Splash imagePhotoRec (as in Photo Recovery) is an open source (“free”) file data recovery software application that recovers lost files from hard disks, CD-ROMs, and digital camera memory cards. It ‘understands’ the structure of over 300 file formats (like images, videos, archives like zip, and Office documents) and uses that information to recover them.

More information can be found here, including where to download a version for your operating system. It’s available for pretty much all Windows, Mac and Unix/Linux operating systems.

As can be read at the above link, the following is very important:

As soon as a pic or file is accidentally deleted, or you discover any missing, do NOT save any more pics or files to that memory device or hard disk drive; otherwise you may overwrite your lost data. This means that while using PhotoRec, you must not choose to write the recovered files to the same partition they were stored on.

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Instapaper

Posted on November 5, 2010 by admin

Instapaper BookmarkletInstapaper is another useful service, much like Readability in the previous post, for reading on the Internet. After installing the Instapaper bookmarklet, you have a button to store pages for reading at a later time. All that you supply is your email address on the site (a password is optional) and it then lets you start collecting articles. Combined together with Readability it lets you store fairly clean (ads removed and pages reformatted) version of documents you read or wish to read later.

It’s a bit like other bookmarking services, but it has some focus on mobile devices like the Kindle or iPad/iPhone (there are Instapaper apps for devices). Similarly to a service like Posterous, it also gives you the ability to email those articles or documents to you Instapaper account, often an option offered by sites as well (i.e. Email this to a friend, etc.), by giving you a unique email address for that purpose. All the documents sent to that address end up in your reading list.

Posted in Productivity, Tools | Tagged Instapaper, Readability | Leave a comment

Readability

Posted on November 4, 2010 by admin

Readability™ is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading. It is used via a ‘bookmarklet’, i.e. a bookmark in your browser with some script in it that performs a task other than just opening a bookmarked web site. They are often kept in a toolbar in the browser for easy access.

When you are on a web site that could use some beautification, you simply click the bookmarklet. Readability then does the job (based on the settings shown on their website and in the image below) by some formatting and combining multiple pages into one. The page reformatted by Readability replaces the one you were viewing.

Continue reading →

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About Splash Pages

Posted on December 6, 2009 by admin

What is a Splash page, what is it used for ?

Very popular at one point, specially in Québec, the Splash page is an introduction page to a web site. It either serves the purpose of showing a nice Flash animation or a language or specific technology selection.

However, in this new time and age of Web technologies, the advantages of the Splash page are no longer true except perhaps for the need of showing a nice Flash animation more for the benefit of the designer than the actual users. Languages and technologies can now be selected automatically and seamlessly based on the surfers browser specifications. In fact, the majority of Web surfers do not appreciated Splash pages and in more than 30% of the cases will leave the site before the Splash page is even displayed.

Unless the site is about visual arts, cinematography, artistic, music, etc., the rational behind the Splash page is not relevant and represents a lost of times to your visitors who want fast and efficient, direct to the point websites. Do not forget that Web trend surveys have shown that it takes less than 8 to 10 seconds for a visitor to decide if he stays or leave: No matter how nice it is and how well optimised, a Flash animation takes more than 10 seconds to download.

In addition to the above mentioned disadvantages, the Splash page prevents a proper search engine inclusion or good ranking on the search engine.

Too often, some web designers forget one crucial point with Splash page: The entrance page of a website is THE most important page of any given web site. Unfortunately, the Splash page has very little content to offer to search engines which are looking for a minimum number of words which are not met by the Splash page. Some designer in the past and still today, have tried to by-pass this issue by putting words that are invisible to the user (same color fonts as the back ground). Search engines consider this technique as spam and can blacklist a website that uses it.

The best recommendation we can give: do not use a Splash page.

Posted in Design | Tagged splash page | Leave a comment