Grab Bag: Your Five Links of the Week

Posted in: Website Links

  1. http://tinyurl.com/yf9z5lx - Fifteen internet annoyances–and how to fix them.
  2. http://tinyurl.com/yedhe5l - A blog post written by Louis Gray discussing what social media is . . . and what social media is not.
  3. http://sketch.odopod.com – A fun online sketching tool for all the artists out there.
  4. http://tinyurl.com/yakcgnw – “The Copenhagen Wheel quickly transforms ordinary bicycles into hybrid e-bikes that allow you to capture the energy dissipated while cycling and braking and save it for when you need a bit of a boost. It also maps pollution levels, traffic congestion, and road conditions in real-time.” What a concept!
  5. http://tinyurl.com/mm5k3n - Find yourself needing to shred personal or financially sensitive documents every once in a while, but can’t justify purchasing a shredder? How about a pair of lovely low-tech shredding scissors for your office?

Online Tool #1 of the Week: W3C Link Checker

Posted in: Online Tools, Tips for Business Websites

Clicking on links in websites only to discover they take you to error pages is no fun. And this is exactly why I’m assuming you wouldn’t want to have broken links in your own website. (How did I do there? Was my assumption correct?)

To the inexperienced, the concept of fixing broken links may seem tedious. In fact, I know many people who once assumed that to address the issue, one had to go through a website and manually click every single individual link, one by one, to determine which needed to be fixed. Nonsense.

Head over to the handy-dandy link checker right here: http://validator.w3.org/checklink and pop your website’s address into the field at the top of the page. Check the “hide redirects” box, then click the big Check button below.

If your website is a large one, go grab yourself a cup of coffee and come back in a bit.

Once the link checker has finished up its work, you’ll have yourself a nice little broken link report telling you exactly which (if any) links in your website need fixin’. Easy as cake. (Now go fix your links before you frustrate more of your website’s visitors!)

Online Tool #2 of the Week: Firefox Adblock Extension

Posted in: Online Tools, Web Info, Tips & Tricks

“Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock now and get rid of them.”

Here’s a quick overview video: http://tinyurl.com/bcajka, the link where you can download the Extension: http://tinyurl.com/2cd87q, and the official Adblock website: http://adblockplus.org.

Remember, this is a tool that you can take advantage of only if you’re using Firefox as your web browser.

Give it a shot and see if it makes your web-browsing experience more enjoyable. If you don’t like it, simply uninstall it in Firefox by going to Tools > Addons > Extensions and clicking “Uninstall.”