Flickr is best known for being a photo uploading and publishing portal with a vast community of contributors. Lesser known is the video portion of the website. Uploading videos is limited to Flickr pro members currently but everyone - even guests - are allowed to watch them on the Flickr website providing the owner of the video configured them that way.

Flickr Video Browser is an external tool that provides access to public Flickr Videos in an easy to use interface. It displays thumbnails of 100 Flickr videos on each page which get updated regularly from public Flickr video listings.

A click on a thumbnails opens the video on the exact same page in an overlay providing options to view the video or explore the tags of it. A click on a tag loads all videos tagged the same way on the Flickr Video Browser homepage.

continue reading "Flickr Video Browser"

The file hosting website eSnips provides access to various communities that have been created for users with the same interests. You find communities about art and fun but also music. The music community is divided into communities for different music genres like rock, metal or rap.

Each music community offers a large amount of music tracks that can be played online in an embedded player. Some music tracks can be downloaded directly because the user who uploaded the track allowed that option. Other songs on the other hand can only be played in the embedded player.

There are however a few options to download those songs from eSnips as well. The first software that I try out for any kind of streaming service is Orbit Downloader and it’s grab++ link grabber.

continue reading "Download Music from eSnips"

Online media converters have several advantages over their software counterparts: They do not bog down the system and do not require software to be installed on the local computer. They are usually also easily accessible and convert media rapidly due to servers in the background that are used for the process.

One of the best, or at least one with lots of options to choose from, is Media Converter. The music and video converter supports a wide range of file types like flv, avi, mp3 or pdf that can be uploaded and converted online. That’s only part of their service though. Instead of uploading files to Media Converter to convert them online it is possible to point the service to a supported website and convert the media files found on that site directly.

This has the advantage that the source file does not have to be downloaded or uploaded. Only the final product has to be downloaded to the local computer. The media can be converted in the process. Pointing Media Converter to a Youtube video makes it possible to convert the video to mp3, ogg or one of the supported video formats before downloading the converted product.

continue reading "Media Converter"

Joshua was born naked, screaming and totally helpless during the late 20th century. Some people get over these things and now he freelances while attempting to develop his own blog; extendably.com – check it out!

It’s getting pretty hard to get excited about online image and photo editors seeing as they’re a dime a dozen. However just today I discovered one which I particularly liked and thought I would share with you:

Pixlr – The online image editor

Pixlr had been developed by a Swedish guy who launched the service with this understated blog post consisting of just:

“So it’s sunday afternoon in Sweden and tomorrow I will let a few know about pixlr. I wonder what they will say about the result of from a years work and thousands of lines of code?”

continue reading "Impressive Photo Editor"

A new version of Wordpress has been released today and I’m currently in the process of updating all of my Wordpress blogs with the new version. That’s always a lot of work because I tend to prefer a manual update and not the automatic option that was implemented into Wordpress a while ago.

Over 60 fixes have been introduced in the new Wordpress version, several of them critical and some security related. You can check out the complete list of fixes in Wordpress 2.6.1 by following the link to Wordpress Trac.

I’m usually not that interested in what has been fixed than to apply the updates to all of my blogs immediately. It does not look like as if new features have been introduced in Wordpress 2.6.1, more of a bug fix release it seems.

continue reading "Wordpress 2.6.1 released"