Ifttt is a new service that lets you create if then actions on the Internet. It basically lets you create automated tasks that consists of a trigger (the if) and an action (the then).

Lets take a look at a few examples:

• Post a message on Facebook on January 1 midnight
• Receive an email when a new Kindle Top 100 free ebook is available
• Get an email if it is raining tomorrow
• Get SMS notifications when you receive new emails
• Archive Tweets to Google Calendar
• Tweet when you publish a new blog post

Triggers and actions rely on channels to function. A channel can be a website like Twitter, Facebook, or a method to communicate like email.

New tasks are created by selecting a channel and a trigger for the if part of the task. Lets say you have selected Dropbox as the channel. The program displays triggers on the next page of the task creation wizard. Two triggers are available for Dropbox: new file in your public folder or new photo in your public folder.

Once you have selected the if, you are asked to configure the then, the action.

The service displays a list of channels that you can use the Dropbox information with. You could select to receive emails whenever a new photo is uploaded to a selected public folder, upload the photo to your Facebook account automatically, or post a new Twitter message that links to the photo.

You need to link most channels to your account before you can create actions using them. The program will use authentication on the official site to do that, which means that you never have to enter those account information on the ifttt page.

Tasks are then saved and checked once every 15 minutes. You can turn tasks on or off, delete them or publish them as recipes. You can take a look at existing recipes and all channels here.

The service keeps track of all user activities which are accessible in the activity log. You can also remove channel authorization right on the ifttt website.

The majority of tasks that you can create either notify you, or automate the publishing of information for you. Users who use at least one or two of the supported websites or services may be able to automate and speed up their workflow significantly.

The next best thing is a web service that allows the creation of charts. You have the option to use a service like Google Docs or Microsoft Office Online for that, or something that is not as complicated to use.

Chart Creator is a free lightweight tool to create charts online. The program supports a total of 12 different chart types, from line and area charts to scatter, pie, map and trend charts.

A click on Editor opens the configuration menu where you can configure how the chart should look like. A click on the customize tab offers to make additional modifications to the chart. This includes the layout of the legend, the chart title, values for the axis and additional features like log scale, reverse or stack.

Once you are done with the initial configuration you can start entering data that you want displayed on the chart. The program limits you to charts with two data points, for instance countries and their population.

A click on draw draws the chart on the screen. You can then use a screen capturing software to save the chart to your local system or use the print button to print it on a connected printer.

Chart Creator offers an easy option to create simple charts online. Users who need more functionality, for instance the ability to import data into a spreadsheet need to look at services such as Google Docs to do so as that is not possible with this chart creation service. (via)

When I say outsource I mean to hire a third party to perform that task for you. And this can be anything that you are comfortable to share. From homework assignments to creating a new website, writing an article or converting documents. Outsourcing on the Internet works best for tasks that are technology related, even though they are not limited to that.

Lets take a look at one of the marketplaces where you can outsource your tasks. Fiverr on first glance does not look like a place where any sane person would outsource tasks on. You pay $5 regardless of the task which, depending on the task, feels awfully low. I’d suggest to use the search first to find suitable providers. Lets say you are looking to get your math assignment done. Enter math, or something more specific like algebra or geometry in the search form and look at the results.

Some providers offer to solve math problems, homework or assignments for the $5 that you pay. Before you click on the first best provider you need to know how to find a suitable provider for the assignment. Click on all providers and check both their gig rating and seller rating. A good provider has a rating of 100% or near that percentage. Make sure you read all user reviews on the gig page as well.

I would suggest to contact the seller prior to ordering to make sure that the provider is currently available and able to complete the task. If time is of an essence you may want to look for express delivery providers who can complete tasks in 24 hours or less.

But solving math problems is obviously only one task that you can easily outsource on Fiverr. Lets take a look at a random selection of things that people will do for you for $5.

• I will do your Programming and Algorithm Assignments and related work for $5
• I will convert an image or a basic psd template to valid html for $5
• I will create and design your wordpress blog or site for $5
• I will give you my 15 years experience as a talk show, radio voice narrating your script for $5
• I will improve your website with 10 tips for $5
• I will give you full ranking stats for up to 3 websites for any keywords you want in Google, Bing and Yahoo for $5
• I will professionally review YOUR Linkedin Profile and make Recommendations for Success for $5
• I will plan your trip to Vienna, Austria for $5
• I will create an artistic watercolor wallpaper of any person for $5
• I will create a christmas theme LOGO intro for $5

As you can see, there is lots of variety going on. Website owners and administrators for instance find many offers on Fiverr to promote, advertise or improve their websites.

Here are five tips to get the most out of Fiverr:

• If it sounds to good to be true, it usually is.
• Always contact providers first to see if they are available and if they can complete your tasks. Make sure you describe the task thoroughly to the provider.
• Check provider ratings and user comments before ordering.
• If no one is offering what you are looking for, try requesting a gig instead and make sure you describe what you need thoroughly.
• If you are ordering a lot of gigs on Fiverr, think about enabling the DamnQuickPay option for one-click payments (without having to log into PayPal every time).

Some providers offer a lot for the $5 that you pay them. It can happen that you get a lot of value for the money.

Fiverr is not the only place on the Internet where you can outsource to. Sites like Microworkers, Peopleperhour and even the more expensive Elance and Get a Freelancer can be used to outsource your tasks.

The tips above with the exception of the fifth tip are valid for all those sites. Always make sure you read reviews of a provider before you hire them. Have you outsourced before? If so, what was your experience?

Sometimes you only need to access the contents of a site, but do not need to interact with it in other forms. This can be the case if you are researching a problem on the Internet, and the site that appears to have the solution posted is blocked on your computer.

You could now try the cached version if the search engine offers that to you, or hunt down for a working proxy to access the website.

Or, you could try the Text Mirror service which basically returns all textual contents of a web page to you.

All you need to do for that is to enter the website address into the page mirror form, check the I Accept TOS box and click Create.

It does not take long before a stripped down version of the page is presented to you on the Text Mirror website. Most formatting and style options are removed, which means that you cannot click on links (you actually do not see them at all) and that you do not see images or other media either.

You can change the font size and color scheme at the top which are remembered in future page look-ups. The biggest weakness of the service is that it does not display links at all, which can be problematic if the article that you have retrieved is divided onto multiple pages, or if you’d like to access a source cited in the article.

Text Mirror is a nice service to retrieve contents from single-article pages only. It is more likely that you can use the service under the radar for a longer time, as you do not retrieve that many files from the original site as you would with a proxy or direct access. That said, it is still likely that the service will get blocked in IT departments eventually. (via)

It is relatively easy to check for whois information, which may give you information about the domain’s registrar, and more importantly, the name of the registrant, administrative and technical contacts. It is a good sign if those match.

But what about finding out where a website is hosted? You could look up the IP of the website and look at the company who owns that IP range, but that is rather complicated and not as speedy as the following option.

The website Who Is Hosting This offers an online service that will give you information about the company that is hosting a website. Why would you want those information? If you are like me, you’d like to verify the seller’s claims. But you could also use it if you are a webmaster and stumble upon a super fast loading site, or if you want to contact the hosting company, for instance if the website in question is infringing on copyright.

All you need to do to find out where a website is hosted, is to enter the website’s url into the form on the service’s frontpage. A click on Search displays the results after a short scan on the next page.

The screen displays a thumbnail image of the website and the hosting company prominently. The latter with a link to its web page, if available.

Listed on the page are furthermore the website’s IP address, name servers and links to futher details. This includes Whois lookup, DMCA Takedown and the BuiltWith website.

The whois links directly to the registrar’s whois page, DMCA Takedown to a service that sets you back $99 for filing a DMCA notice, monitoring the site for removal, filing a DMCA with major search engines and preservation of the evidence trail.

Built With finally displays technical information about a website. This includes server information, advertising, analytics and tracking or frameworks used.

Who Is Hosting This is a nice to have service. It works really well for most domain lookups. I have tested it with US-based and German domains. The links to the company websites are not working all the time, especially if a parent company is listed and not the hosting company. Users can add webhost urls in this case to fix that issue, provided that they know the host. If they do not they still need to research the company on a search engine like Bing and Google for that information.

But similarities end here. If you analyse how people use the keyboard to type. Some prefer the one or two finger method, while others are confidentially using all ten fingers without even looking at the keyboard. This behavior directly corresponds with the typing speed of the individual computer user. Typing speed is usually measured in characters per minute (cpm) or words per minute (words per minute) with the former being more accurate than the latter.

Individuals can save lots of time by improving their typing speed, and companies money. A ten percent increase in typing speed for instance means that the users task is finished 10% faster as well. Now imagine raising the typing speed of one or multiple employees by 50% or even 100%.

Some say, the typing speed increases naturally with use. While that may be correct to some extent, it is often the case that users hit a wall eventually. From that moment on, they cannot improve their typing speed by simply typing, they need professional typing tools to improve it further.

The two most common tools found are typing games and typing tests. This guide concentrates on free online typing tools that everyone can use to improve the typing speed.

Typing Tests And Games

Keybr

Keybr supports seven languages and differentkeyboard layouts depending on the language selected. It displays text on the screen that the typing student needs to type on the keyboard. Available text options are random (gibberish text), Robert Scott’s Jabberwocky or text from a website or blog that the user can select individually.

The program keeps track of the typing speed and error, and visualizes the next character for the user. The typing test keeps track of the top speed, average speed and progress as well.

TypingTest

Typing Test is a website dedicated to improving the typing of its users. The website offers a basic English typing test after which it will grade the user’s result and compare it to the average computer user.

The website offers typing games as well, including a game of KeyMan, a PacMan clone in which the player controls the movement by typing keys on the keyboard.

TyperShark

A basic game where the player has to type the words appearing on sharks approaching the player’s character. The game offers several difficulty setings, and will display statistics in the end. Included in the stats are the words per minute, and the accuracy.

Power Typing

Offers various short typing tests.

Type Online

Learn2Type

Offers both a typing test and a ten key test, which tests the numpad typing speed.

Typeracer

A fun typing game where you compete in a race with other human players.

Nimble Fingers

Typing test that concentrates on various keys on the keyboard.

State Universities Tying Test

Test with instructions, required text for various examinations.

Key Hero

Typing Courses

Typing Web

Offers typing courses that are sorted into beginner, intermediate and advanced courses. Registered users can save their typing progress.

Sense Lang

Rapid Typing Tutor

A website with typing related information, from base finger positions and general typing tips to typing games, online typing tests and typing software.

Typing Tips

PC Drome

• Position of your body
• Placement of hands
• Memorize the Keys
• Maximize Use of Shortcut Keys
• Practice makes man perfect

7 Good Tips To Faster Typing On The iPad

• Right Way to Position iPad?
• Suggestions & Corrections
• Most Used Words
• Editing – Cut, Copy &Paste
• Capitals & Periods
• Voice-Over & International Settings
• Practice, Practice, Practice

Now of a typing test, game or tutorial that we have missed? Let us know in the comments.

Here is a visual representation of the process:

And here how it looks like on the homepage:

The service is currently in private beta with a few invites still available on the site for a price. Apparently only users who buy the Web Trend Poster for $49 can apply for a private beta invitation on the website. It is likely that this is going to change in the future. Users with an account can create their own maps. Everyone else is currently left with the information that are posted on the homepage of the service.

A click on any icon on the homepage will display trends posted by that specific user or website. Each link includes a small preview and the option to open the website to retrieve additional information about the topic. Interested users can visit the Web Trend Map website by following this link. (thanks Jojo for sending in that tip)

The first section will display information about the blog’s responses. This includes checking the web server’s IP, RSS feed, robots.txt file, web caching and search engine indexation in Google and Bing. The second section will display technical details about the blog which are mostly interesting to the webmaster of the website.

The technical details will display page generation and fetch times, transfer speeds, information about compression as well as the version of the blog software and the theme used.

The site links to three additional services that can be used to check out a website or blog. This includes HTML verification at W3c, feed validation at Feedvalidator and HTTP header checks at redbot.com.Is My Blog Working is a great way to quickly check various technical details of a blog. A bookmarklet is provided that can might also come in handy.

Readability is a bookmarklet that aids the Internet user in improving the online reading experience. We have discussed other options before like the Tidyread add-on for the Firefox web browser or Washer which turns colors into grayscale for better readability.

Readability is a little bit different as it offers some choices during the creation of the bookmarklet. The reader can select an individual style (newspaper, ebook, novel and terminal), size (small, medium, large and extra-large) and margin (narrow, medium, wide and extra-wide) to improve online reading. The bookmarklet will use the parameters that the user selects during configuration.

But Readability will not only change the text that is displayed on the website; It will also remove all the clutter – and by all we mean everything from advertisement, sidebars and comments – from the page so that only the title, images and text remains. Below is a screenshot of the original article HP Photosmart Premium All in one of Otakugadgets.com and the same article after having used the Readability bookmarklet with the ebook, medium, medium settings.

You can configure and bookmark the Readability bookmarklet (via Shellcity) to improve online reading at the developer’s website.

Evernote

Everyone, it seems, has covered Evernote in the past, talking about how great it is, how to use it, and all of its wonderful features. You’d think it would have been done to death by now, right?

Nope. Here are six features of Evernote that are equally awesome and useful, that don’t get the press or coverage they deserve.

Saved Searches

One of the great features of Evernote is the ability to use Notebooks and tags to sort all of your notes – its organization features are among the reasons it’s so useful. Saved Searches add even more functionality to tags and notebooks, because it lets you weed out only exactly what you want. You can search for, say, everything in your “School” Notebook that doesn’t have a “History” tag, or only things that are tagged with “To Do” and are in either your “Home” or “Office” notebook. The more notes you have, the harder it can be to weed out exactly what you want – Saved Searches are a lifesaver.

To create a saved search, right-click on the left side of the Evernote client, and select “New Saved Search.” Then, enter your parameters, and you’re set!

Sub-Tags

Within a given tag, you can create sub-tags that will make it even easier to sort what you’re looking for. To do so, right-click on a given tag and click “Create tag in ___”. You can create as many tags as you want within a given tag.

I have a ton of tags within my Evernote, but sub-tags lets me put them all underneath the general topic of what I want. This isn’t so much a feature as it is a way to further organize your notes under umbrellas, to be able to access all the appropriate ones at the same time, in the same place.

Global Shortcuts

This is the single most-used thing in my Evernote workflow. From any window or application on your desktop, a particular keystroke (that you create) can create a new note in Evernote, clip a screenshot into Evernote, or paste selected text right into Evernote. This means getting information into Evernote is super fast and simple, and makes Evernote the easiest place on your desktop to put information.

HTML Export

One worry I hear from people, when I tell them to use Evernote, is “what if it goes away?” It’s a fair point, as Web apps are prone to up and disappear without any warning. With Evernote, though, there’s no worry. First, because the desktop app works offline, and will still function even if something happens to Evernote.

And second, there’s no worry because Evernote lets you export notes to HTML. Most other applications will read an HTML file, so exporting it that way makes it easy to import into another application, or even keep accessible on your hard drive. Thanks to this export, there’s no fear of ever losing your Evernote data – you just might, possibly, one day, have to move it around a bit.

To-Do Lists

Since Evernote is aiming to be your “second brain,” your place to keep everything in your head and in your life, it’s a natural place to keep a to-do list. All the information is there; why not have your action items there too? Evernote does a great job with this – you can easily, with a mouse-click or keyboard shortcut, create a checkbox next to any line of text.

You can also search for to-do items, and keep track of any number of lists within Evernote. It’s flexible, easy to add to and edit, and a perfect solution for to-do lists simple and complex.

Formatting Goodness

What a lot of people don’t realize is that Evernote actually works fantastically as a word processor. It’s not especially feature-rich, but it has all of the basics you’d need when you’re writing – font, color, size, bold, italics, underline, justifications, bulleted lists, and even tables can all be featured in your documents. They’re all saved automatically into Evernote; it’s great for writing everything from a journal to a novel.

What about Evernote works (or doesn’t work) for you?

According to a newsletter sent by eBay to its members, eBay will allow sellers to list their first five items each month without having to pay a listing fee. In the past, eBay has offered large discounts to bulk sellers on eBay leaving the burden of cost on the shoulders of those who list only a few items at a time. Former users have said, “because of this, what used to feel like an online garage sale where some treasures can be found has turned into just another online store.”

With the new fee structure, eBay hopes to turn around sales on the site. The change allows sellers to list items without paying a listing fee for the first five items listed a month. This is aimed at bringing in new sellers and bringing back many of the sellers who have left eBay because of rate increases. In lieu of the listing fees for the first five items, eBay charges a flat 8.75% commission known on eBay as the final value fee. Those familiar with selling on eBay are probably aware of the final value fee as it is charged on all sales. Because of the flat rate final value fee offered with the first five items sold each month, sellers could end up paying more in fees by using the “first five items listed are free deal” than the traditional fee structure. When a seller surpasses the first five items listed per month, they will be subject to the insertion fees, but will benefit from the tiered final value fee system.

The reaction of the eBay community is mixed with many sellers stating that the final value fee system that goes along with the free insertion fees is “a hidden way to get more money” and “more punishment for the little guy.” Following the announcement on June 16th, eBay’s stock fell 1% closing at $17.23 per share. eBay stock hit its lowest point since 2001 earlier this year, closing at $10.43 per share on March 6th. The fee change has left many to wonder, will the free listings bring eBay out of its slump or will the change in the final value fee structure drive the auction giant further into the ground?

Even those who read the terms and conditions during sign-up should be aware that website terms-of-service can change at any time. Even website policies often change. The problem is, most people don’t have time to visit 10 or 15 sites regularly and read through terms-of service agreements and website policies.

Thankfully, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group is keeping track of some of these changes. You can see these changes by visiting TOSBack, a site dedicated to terms-of-service tracking. The aim of the site is to show how these agreements change over time.

TOSBack is currently monitoring agreements for 58 popular websites. These include social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, user-content run sites like Flickr and YouTube, as well as online shopping giants Amazon and Ebay among other sites.

Updates are posted on the home page, as and when a policy changes. Clicking on a specific link opens up a page with the agreement text. Changes to the agreement are highlighted so that you don’t have to spend time searching for additions and deletions.

A site like TOSBack provides an important service. User agreements are the basis of a trustworthy relationship with a service provider. However, they are often forgotten until a problem with the site arises and then people scramble to read website policies. With TOSBack, a user can stay in touch with policy changes and quickly recognize anything he is not comfortable with.

Do you read user agreements and other policies when you sign-up with a service? Have you heard of TOSBack before? What do you think of this tracking mechanism? Let me know in the comments.

Deletionpedia provides a mirror of these deleted pages so that they can still be accessed by interested users. The website offers for example pages like “2008 United States presidential election controversies and attacks”, “Elvis Sightings” or a “list of female basketball players”. Searching for some of the phrases on Wikipedia will lead the visitor to a more general page that covers the topic. A search for “Blood Angels” will for example open the Space Marines (Warhammer 40,000) on Wikipedia while Deletionpedia still offers the original Blood Angels Wikipedia entry.

Most Deletionpedia pages contain links to the deletion discussion on Wikipedia which can shed some light on the deletion motives. Some pages contain additional information that the page is going to be transferred to another Wiki in the future.

Deletionpedia is an interesting project that currently hosts more than 60.000 Wikipedia pages that have been deleted. Interested users can browse Deletionpedia by various parameters including date of deletion, by number of revisions or editors.

Categories range from computer hardware to digital cameras and camcorders, office equipment and even baby and kid stuff. Users looking for a specific product can use the search form on top of the service which will display suggestions during the process. The approach is best suited to find a specific product quickly as it makes more sense to type in the product name directly than to browse the specific category on the website.

Browsing one of the categories is the better approach if you know that you need a new product but have no specific company and model in mind. Products can be sorted by various means including price, popularity, name or FreakScore. FreakScore is a weighted index of all aggregated professional and user reviews. The main advantage of this approach is that scores from different review sites and user reviews are combined to compute a better score for each product.

Expert and user reviews can be read to get a better understanding of the score. Testfreaks mashes up reviews from sites like Amazon with reviews on professional review sites like Benchmark reviews.

However, I really, really don’t care what people are doing right now. The people who I do care about are very limited, I would follow about 3 Twitter users, even then I wouldn’t read all the tweets. Twitter can be cool if you find something funny or interesting on the net, you can send the link to your firends without needing to create an email. However, I really don’t care when someone gets up, when they brush their teeth.

Call me anti-social, but I just can’t see the “addicivity” behind all this. In fact, following a lot of people would clog up my twitter clients, so I would miss a lot of valuable stuff. I am not criticizing you guys who follow hundreds of people, I completely understand that we are different. Regardless, Twitter is an awesome idea and a well-implemented service. So do you like Twitter? What do you use it for?

Performing that task manually can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days depending on the type of website or project. Hundreds of factors can play a role in determining the real value of a website.

There is another solution albeit less accurate and not suitable for serious business. Website value calculators will analyze and calculate a value of a website in seconds. Stimator is one of those websites and it provides one of the slickest professional interfaces in the niche.

The value of a website is analyzed and calculated as soon as the user enters the domain name in the form on the page. Several different values like backlinks, traffic levels, social and inlinking scores, web recognition and linking data are computed and part of the calculation of the final value.

The site seems to be more accurate than most comparable sites as it lists $1,349,935 as the value of ghacks.net, hehe.

A report can be opened that is displaying several of the scores of the analyzed website. These scores are explained in the about page. The page does not say how they are computed but it lists factors that influence the score.

No value calculator will ever be dead on but there are some that can provide a first impression of a websites value. Serious website buyers on the other hand will never rely on these tools alone but perform a manual analysis before they consider bidding or buying a website.

Are you a webmaster? What is the value of your website according to the tool? Do you think it is dead on or way off?

A letter that has been send out by the Google Docs team seems to have made the worst case scenario true for some users of the online service. According to Techcrunch who received a copy of a letter that has been send out the following happened: The Google Docs team identified a bug in their online service that may have caused the sharing of documents without the knowledge or permission of the user.

“This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.”

While it is unclear as to how many users have actually been affected by the bug it does outline the problems of storing documents, files and information on the Internet. There is always a chance that the documents will fall into hands that they are not intended for.

The author’s at Ghacks are Duty Fullfillers according to the analysis of Typealizer. Duty Fullfillers are the responsible and hardworking type that are careful about getting facts right and reluctant to take risks. Rarst on the other hand is a guardian, one of the organizing and efficient type who are attuned to setting goals and managing available resources to get the job done.

Most technology blogs seem to fall into those two categories, think Lifehacker (Duty Fullfillers) or Download Squad (Guardians). Typealizer works best with blogs but it can actually be used on many websites that are not blogs as well. Some websites cannot be processed at the moment including CNN but most English or Swedisch websites and blogs should return a result. (Perez Hilton turned out to be detected as a Thai blog..)

What type is your favorite blog? Let us known in the comments.

Clicking on the central “star” will close in on that star and fill it with exactly 235 picture thumbnails. The planet can be rotated with the left mouse button and zoomed with the mouse wheel. A click on a preview image will load that image in front, another click will load information about the picture like the name of the artist, a description and a link to the Flickr page.

The Flickr page of the selected photo are loaded in a new tab. The user can use the navigation on top of the screen to load another batch of thumbnail pictures from Flickr which replace the old photos shown on the planet.

Tag Galaxy provides an intuitive way to browse for photos on Flickr. It does require a good chunk of system resources though to function properly. Computer memory usage went up between 250K and 400K when using the service.

Sure you could use a ruler to get an understanding of how the objects compare to each other; Or you could visit Sized Up, a website that visualizes objects in 3D. Working with the service is a breeze. All that is needed are the height, width and depth of at least one object in millimeters or inches which will then be generated by the service and displayed as a 3D object.

It is possible to enter multiple items to compare them against each other or pick one of the default items from the service like a box of matches, a CD case or different paper sizes.

Every comparison that has been saved by users of the website can be looked at. Most items are electronic items like mobile phones and laptops but you find the occasional odd comparison like a Boeing 747 and Antonov 225.