Print Friendly is a web based service that is available on their main website, as a bookmarklet and for website owners as a script to put on their websites directly. Print Friendly will basically remove certain elements like advertisement by default from the website. By doing this it reduces the printer ink needed to print the website. More important than that is probably the option to remove additional elements before sending the rest of the document to the printer.

This makes it possible to remove additional unwanted elements such as tags or images from the document before printing it. Print Friendly offers an option to automatically remove all images from the document to make things easier if a document contains many of them. It also features an undo function in case the user wants to go back to a previous state.

The optimized document can then be printed or turned into a pdf at the Print Friendly website. The bookmarklet makes it easier to use the service while surfing the Internet as it will automatically load the active website in the Print Friendly website.

Print Friendly might come handy in situations where other tools or extensions that can remove elements from websites before printing are not available.

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Inexperienced users might decide to leave a comment on the website instead hoping that it will be spotted by the webmaster. Another option which has been discovered by Addictive Tips is the webmaster contact software (or script) Contact That Owner which will automatically retrieve the whois information of a selected website to retrieve the email address of the website owner.

It will furthermore display a small form on the website allowing the user to contact the webmaster directly from that form.

The form will display the email of the webmaster prominently which means it is equally possible to copy and paste it and process it in another email client. The form itself can be used to write a message to the webmaster directly. Users should keep in mind that the email will not be send from their email address this way. This means that it is essential to mention the reply email address in the form so that the webmaster has the means to reply.

The main advantage of the contact software How To Contact is the automatic retrieval of information which will make it easier for inexperienced users to discover a contact email address. Tech savvy users on the other hand will rely on manual domain lookups to discover the email address.

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But this is naturally not the only way how work gets reproduced on the Internet. Other websites may cite passages of an article in their own articles which is a totally legit thing to do.

Keeping track of all the websites and discovering new websites that use your articles can be a time consuming task. A manual way to track them would be to enter key sentences into Google to find the websites that are indexed in Google that are using at least that sentence of your article.

An easier way is to use a service like Fairshare. Fairshare monitors RSS feeds that the user enters into their form on the homepage. It creates another RSS feed that will add all the websites as feed items that copy at least 20% of the words of an article of the initial RSS feed.

FairShare lists the percentage of the article that appeared on the other website, if a link back to the original site is present, if ads are displayed on the website and the url plus title of the article. Those information are excellent to discover the sites that are copying your articles.

It usually takes a few hours after adding a new RSS feed before the first feed items appear in the RSS feed of the copied articles. Fairshare will create another feed that posts a weekly summary of all the discovered items.

While FairShare is surely not discovering all websites that make use of other author’s articles it does a pretty good job at discovering the majority. The information provided are great to help webmasters depending on their use policy. Some webmasters probably only want to contact webmasters copying articles without linking back to the original content, others might want to ask websites that use ads to remove the content while some might want to ask all sites that copy 100% of their articles to remove them immediately.

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The file upload service works by selecting the mirror sites that the file should be uploaded to in the first step. After that the file has to be uploaded to the Gazup servers. It is alternatively possible to pick the remote upload option instead which makes it possible to paste urls that point to files in a form which get then downloaded by Gazup. Once the files have been uploaded either way they get distributed by Gazup to the selected file hosts.

This is shown visually on a new page listing the current upload status of each individual file host. The download links are shown when an upload has finished successfully. This link can be copied and pasted as usual.

Gazup does offer special sharing links for forums, websites and friends. It is a simple code that can be embedded in the context. It does link to the main Gazup page where the user has the option to select one of the available file hosts mirrors. This is excellent for users who regularly upload files for forums and websites and want to make sure that the files are still available after some time.

via Download Squad.

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Trackerchecker is basically a website that lists hundreds of torrent sites on one page. The site regularly checks all websites and lists the registration status of each on the same site. Sites with a green icon are open for registration while red ones are closed.

There are also crossed out red icons which means that the site is not available at that time at all and blue icons which indicate timeouts. It basically boils down to checking the websites with green icons as all other sites are either down or closed for registration.

Trackerchecker will also list the time it last checked each website. If you create an account at the site you can select specific sites to track which makes things a bit easier. [via Torrentfreak]

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Bloggers can use the information generated by CopyGator to find out which blogs are publishing articles based on their work without having to perform manual searches on Google or blog search engines like Technorati.

CopyGator provides a few ways of submitting a new RSS feed to the service. Webmasters can add their RSS feed url manually, add the site to the list of sites that get pinged whenever a new blog post is published or add a badge to their website that points to the CopyGator service.

It takes a while before the feed will be processed by the service. Webmasters who want to know if and how their posts are quoted or republished find in CopyGator the means to do so effectively.

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One prime example where keyword filtering can be useful is a website that several authors write for. If you are only interested in one author you could use the author’s name as the keyword so that only the author’s stories land in your RSS reader.

Notify.me has been mentioned on nearly every tech blog out there in the past weeks. It is basically a keyword filtering service that monitors RSS news feeds and informs the user of posts that match the selected keywords.

It is a bit different from services like Yahoo Pipes because it can send those notifications only to an email client, cell phone or instant messenger. The process can be divided into the following steps:

• Configuring a destination (cell phone, email, instant messenger)
• Adding a source
• Configuring keyword filters

It is not really complicated but the user needs to know about RSS feeds. The keyword filter can be set to either include or exclude posts that match keywords. Setting up no keyword filters sends all new items to the selected destination. An include keyword filter will only send the items containing the keyword while an exclude keyword will send all except those that are excluded.

The keyword filtering is still a bit rudimentary. There is no option to filter parameters like title, tags or authors which is definitely a much needed option.

Another thing that is missing is the ability to configure multiple destinations of the same type. Only one account of each type can be configured. This basically means that it is not possible to setup multiple email addresses in one account.

I cannot really see the need for such a service right now. What’s your take on this?

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This year the Elf Yourself website has been redesigned. There is a bit more of advertisement on the website but also additional content to make up for it. Don’t worry! There is still the classic elves dance for those who might have missed it last year or cannot get enough of it.

In addition though you can now see them dance Disco, Country or Charleston as well each with a unique stage and effects. The music is obviously also different on every stage.

The developers have added possibilities to download the videos to the desktop or post them on various social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. Expect a huge increase in Elf Yourself appearances on those sites.

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These news feeds can then be subscribed to in any news reader so that the user can read incoming emails in his news reader instead of his email client. Why would someone want to do that? The only practical issue that came to mind was to publish the news feed on a website so that multiple users would have access to the email. It could also be interesting for situations where multiple users need read access to email accounts but that’s configurable in mail clients as well.

There is not really a reason to use this service independently, at least none that we could think of while reviewing it. Many users will (rightfully) dislike the fact that they have to enter the data of their email account on the website to enable the service. Another aspect is that the latest news entry on the company’s blog dates back to last year. The project feels abandoned.

Can you think of another reason why someone would want to forward email to RSS?

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RSS FWD (discovered at Donation Coder) is a service that can turn RSS news into emails. The service provides an easy to use interface. It works by entering the main url of the website in the form on the main page which is convenient for many users who do not like to search for the RSS news link on a website or do not know what RSS actually is.

The service will automatically discover the RSS news feed – if there is any – and display a preview of the latest items. The user has to sign up afterwards by providing an email address and password which will be used to login to the service and manage the subscriptions.

The interval of the updates can be selected during the subscription. It is possible to select real-time, daily or weekly updates in the inbox. Users with many RSS news feeds can import an opml file so that all feeds contained within will be automatically added to it.

Webmasters can make use of small pieces of code they can place on their websites to allow email subscriptions. Each email send out will contain an unsubscribe link which can be accessed to unsubscribe from the website. It is also possible to manage subscriptions directly on the RSS FWD website.

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Once you have grown your traffic to a fairly decent amount, however, downtimes that affect your site are a complete different story, a nuisance that can mean that hundreds of people are unable to get to your site, most of whom are likely to never come back again. In my experience, even when my hosting company promised 99.8% uptime, this began to increasingly seem like meaningless marketing hype when I started getting emails from friends and strangers alike informing me that my site was down at such and such an hour (many of which downtimes occurred in the early am hours when I wouldn’t have been online anyway).

I also noticed that the net effect of this was that I was becoming a bit paranoid; if my traffic seemed lower than it usually is I immediately wondered if me site had been down. I started looking for a resource that would monitor my site for downtimes and inform me automatically so I didn’t have to spend time wondering about it. This is when I found Montastic.

Montastic is a very simple service: create an account then enter in the URLs of the sites you would like it to monitor (up to a limit of 100 sites). It will then check the sites on your list within 10 minute intervals and from 2 locations. If and when it detects that any of the sites are down, it will immediately report this by email or through RSS. Once the site is back up it will report that as well.

What’s interesting about Montastic is that you are not limited to just your sites. After listing my 3 websites I decided to include 2 blogs that are similar to my main blog just for benchmarking purposes. To my surprise I discovered that while my site went down for about 2 hours once this week, these other sites seemed to be down for a few hours at least every other day, which was interesting to know, and made me think that perhaps my hosting company isn’t so bad after all.

Montastic was created by a team of “open source fanatics” that developed it for their own use and decided to make it available to everyone as a 100% free service.

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