One Tip A Day » tools

Free Tools to Create Banners Instantly

Umar — Mon, 25 May 2009 09:42:21 +0000

Creating small banners for websites use to take a lot of time a few years back. Thanks to the internet and all the developers who are spending time and money to produce some of the finest web tools so that you can enjoy the same features many software offer. Interesting enough for me, with these web 2.0 services a 20 minute job can be done in less a minute or so.

Following websites offer the easiest way to create free banner in less than 3 minutes.

BannerFans

BannerFans is first ever web application I discovered last year that allows you to create banners for your site and then download in popular image formats including JPEG, PNG or GIF. It comes with a very user friendly interface and provides tons of options to customize your banner.

You can customize your banner layout by changing its size, colors, text, fonts and border. No registration or sign ups are required.

Animation Online

AnimationOnline is an excellent web application that lets you make custom animated banners online instantly. Just like BannerFans it doesn’t require any registration or sign ups. The website features a number of free template you can use and edit according to your needs. You can easily customize is with various color schemes and text.

Since there is no limit on the number of banners you can create, you can create as many banners as you want.

Banner Generator

Last but not the least Banner Generator provides a cool tool that allows you to create your own banner totally free of charge. To create your own banner click “Start Banner Creation” and choose the size of your banner that are already available in JPG, PNG and Flash format.

From there simply follow the on screen instruction and get the job done in hardly a minute or 2.

You can always use the comment box below and mention websites that you think are banner than these.

Get A Favicon For Your Site

Tony Williams — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 13:19:23 +0000

Favicons are the small icons that are displayed next to site names in address bars. They are only 16×16 pixels big, so creating one can be tricky unless you are a design whizz.

There are a few sites out there that have Favicons that are ready to go. A good one is favicon.cc, which is where gHacks found their great Mona Lisa favicon.

The top rated Favicons are listed, as well as the latest favicons. If you’re feeling up to the challenge, then there are tools to help you create your own favicon. Once you created or chosen your favicon, just upload the favicon.ico file to your webserver directory and it will be displayed.

Twitter Tools

Tony Williams — Wed, 02 May 2007 21:15:32 +0000

If you haven’t heard of Twitter yet, then you must have been on another planet. Twitter is a cool online service that lets you see what other people are doing right now, and you can also share your own details. Twitter has literally set the blogosphere on fire in very short time.

One of the exciting features about online services are the services created by fans that make them even better. Here are 10 twitter tools, courtesy of Quick Online Tips that will make twitter even better.

Twitter Badge – Official javascript codes that display badges showing what you are posting on Twitter.
The Twitter Updater – a wordpress plugin that automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post. You can specify the text for the updates, and also have the option to turn the auto update on/off for the different post actions in the admin panel.
TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.
Twitter Tools – This wordpress plugin creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.
Twitter WordPress Sidebar Widget – Customise the number of updates shown in your sidebar, individual links to each status update on Twitter, style your Twitterings using CSS, choose whether to display your Twitter name before each post and customise text between the post text and the relative time.
Twitter Feed – Posts your blog updates to your twitter account. Login to twitterfeed using your OpenID, provide the URL for your blog RSS feed, and how often to post to Twitter.
Twitt-Twoo – is a simple little plugin that will allow you to update your Twitter status right from your blog’s sidebar. It is AJAX powered and allows for quick and easy status updates.
SimpleTwitter – is a plug-in for WordPress which enables WordPress blog owners to easily add Twitter messages to their templates.
Twitter Sharts – ‘Shart’ your twitter status anywhere within your wordpress blog posts or pages.
RSS to Twitter – is a PHP script to feed RSS to Twitter.

Amazing Free Image & Photo Utilities

Tony Williams — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:16:01 +0000

If you’re looking for ways to spice up your online images or just your photos, then check out this list of free image tools. All of them are of course free, and could give your images that edge they need to make them stand out.

Amazing Free Image Utilities

Zamzar - Free Online File Conversion

Have you ever wanted to convert files without the need to download software? Then you need to visit Zamzar, which allows you to convert any file quickly online. All you have to do is upload your file, choose a format, enter your email address and it will be emailed back to you!

Paint.NET – Fast Photo And Image Editor

Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

Comeeko – Create Comic Strips

I discovered Comeeko via Tech-Buzz.net and it’s a lot of fun and it allows you to create comic strips out of your photos by adding bubbles, captions and text. They have a huge gallery of objects (or snippets) which could be dragged and dropped into the comic strip to make it a bit more interesting. Once you’re comic strip is done, it can be shared via email or of course posted to a website.

FastStone Image Viewer – Image Management

This neat tool allows you to manage and organize all of your images on your PC. FastStone Image Viewer allows a lot of effects to be added quickly to images, as well as all the usual resizing and cropping options. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more.

Picnik – Online Image Editor

Using images on your PC, or an any PC or even Flick, Picnik can perform various image manipulation functions like cropping, adding exposure, auto fix and remove eyes. A range of special effects like my favourite Sepia can be added quickly.

Tip Spotlight: Create Your Own Screensavers

Tony Williams — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:47:31 +0000

I created a new section on my site yesterday called ‘Tip Spotlight’. It’s for external advertisers, but the first advert that has appeared is so good I’m turning it into a post for free!

Any Logo Screensaver Creator is a tool that lets you create custom and branded Screensavers. If you do want to make your own screensavers for distribution they can be made into nice easy executables for easy installation.

Although it cost’s about $20, the free trial version will be good enough for most users as you will still get all the functionality – all you will have to contend with is a few nag messages to please purchase the full version.

More: Any Logo Screensaver Creator

Upgrading To Vista? Run The Upgrade Advisor First

Tony Williams — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 23:56:33 +0000

I still haven’t decided whether I’m upgrading to Vista or not. I’ve spent so long customizing my Windows XP Media Center PC, and it’s working so well, I don’t want to rock the boat. If it ain’t broke, then why fix it?If you have decided to upgrade to Vista, don’t forget to run the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor first. This free tool from Microsoft will access whether you have sufficient PC firepower to get the most out of Vista, and if not it will give helpful advice as to which bits or components you will need to upgrade.

This small software tool will scan your computer and create an easy-to-understand report of all known system, device, and program compatibility issues, and recommend ways to resolve them. Upgrade Advisor can also help you choose the edition of Windows Vista that best fits the way you want to use your computer.

If you purchased your PC in the last 2 years, you should be ok, but it’s worth checking just in case.
More: Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor

Reduce Your Bandwidth Bill

Tony Williams — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 20:52:36 +0000

If you’re one of those poor internet users who have to pay by the Megabyte, or have a capped allowance then techbuzz have 5 good tips (and 1 silly tip) for reducing your bandwidth usage, so that you can surf more. I’ve never come across these applications before, because I have an unlimited pipe which in some months downloads obscene amounts of data.

techbuzz’s five tips are:

Onspeed: Download this application to compress text and images before downloading.

FlashBlock Extension: Great firefox extension that will block these bandwidth heavy (and usually annoying) ads

Imglikeopera Extension: Another firefox extension. This one loads images from a cache

Adblock Extension: Blocks annoying ads

Use a email client rather than a webmail client as these can use up a lot of bandwidth

What was the silly tip, I hear you ask? Switch to an unlimited plan

More: techbuzz

ReadyBoost: Speedup Windows Vista With A Flash Drive

Tony Williams — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 23:02:30 +0000

I’ve been cleaning out my PC this weekend in preparation for installing Windows Vista, as well as implementing a new theme which I think might finally be the one I’ve been searching high and low for (please let me know if you see any bugs!).

I’m getting quite excited about getting my hands on a copy of Vista so that I can start experimenting and trying to find new tips to share. One simple one I have already is using a flash drive to speedup Windows Vista. As long as the USB drive has at least 256MB and no more than 4GB of RAM, plugging it in will give Vista a nice speedboost using ReadyBoost, which allows the additional memory to be used as an additional disk cache.

Accessing files on a flash cache should be 8-10 times faster than from a from a hard drive, which will give all machines a nice boost. All you have to do is click ‘Speed Up My System’ to enable the new cache.

For a device to be compatible it must conform to the following requirements:

The capacity of the USB device must be at least 256 MB and no larger than 4 GB
The USB device must support USB 2.0
The device must be capable of 3.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 kB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 2.5 MB/s write speeds for 512 kB random writes spread uniformly across the device
The device must have at least 64 MB of free space

If you’re not sure if that USB stick you’ve got lying around is compatible, then check out this chart that Grant Gibson has put together, which shows which USB drives are compatible with Vista ReadyBoost.

Who Needs Vista??!! Show Your PC Some Love This Christmas And Tune It Up

Tony Williams — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 00:01:26 +0000

Vista may be coming out next year, but if like me you can’t afford to upgrade to Vista then why not show your current PC some love this Christmas and give it a tune up?

I’ve just reinstalled Windows XP as I’ve treated my PC to a new motherboard for Christmas. Here are some of the tweaks I’ve done so far to make my machine faster, which I think are worth sharing.

Disable Last Access Update To Speed Up Access To Files

When XP opens folders it can waste a lot of time trying to update the last access time. To stop XP doing this requires a registry tweak:

Open Regedit by going to ‘Start’. Click on ‘Run’ and type ‘regedit’
Navigate to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetControlFileSystem’
Right-click and select ‘DWORD Value’
Enter ‘NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate’ as your new DWORD Value
Once you’ve created the DWORD value, right-click on the new DWORD and click ‘Modify’
Change the Value Data to ‘1′
Click ‘OK’

Disable Indexing Services

Disabling Indexing Services can provide a significant performance increase depending on how you use your computer. If you rarely search for files on your PC then you should turn it off, to stop XP wasting time keeping the search index up to date. It also take up large amounts of RAM and can make your PC sound noisy.

Here’s how to turn off indexing:

Go to ‘Start’
Click ‘Settings’ then click on ‘Control Panel’
Next, click on ‘Add/Remove Programs’
Click the ‘Add/Remove Window Components’
Uncheck the ‘Indexing services’
Click ‘Next’

Clean Up Your Hard Drive

Over time you’ll be amazed how much crap can accumulate on your PC taking up valuable space. The best and quickest way to cleanup your hard drive is to install and run CCleaner. CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It also can clean remove all traces of what you’ve been doing online.

Install CCleaner
Once it’s installed Right-click on your Recycle bin and click ‘Open CCleaner’
Click on ‘Cleaner’ in the left-hand navigation
Tick ‘Internet Explorer’ and ‘Windows Explorer’ and ‘System’
Untick ‘Cookies’, ‘History’, ‘Recently Typed URLs’ and ‘Last Download Location’ in the Internet Explorer Sub-menu if you don’t want to lose your internet history
Next click on the ‘Applications’ Tab at the top and tick the applications you want to clean
Then click on ‘Analyze’ in the bottom right hand corner and CCleaner will start its magic
Once CCleaner finishes analysing it will tell you how much space it can free up. If you like what you see, click ‘Run Cleaner’ and the files will be removed

Speedup Folder Browsing

On most PCs, everytime a folder is opened there will be slight delay, while XP searches for any network files or printers. Stopping XP doing this can make a big difference to folder browsing speeds:

Open My Computer and click open the ‘Tools’ menu
Select ‘folder options’ and then select the ‘view’ tab
Uncheck ‘Automatically search for network folders and printers’
Click ‘Apply’ and then click ‘Ok’
If you are prompted to reboot your pc then do so

Make Your PC Boot Faster

If you don’t regularly clean your temp and history folder then XP will waste time checking these folders everytime you boot your PC. To stop this, you can create a batch file that will clear the temp and history folders when you shutdown your PC, so that your PC won’t waste time checking these folders the next time it starts up:

Open Notepad and create a new file with the following entries:

RD /S /q “C:Documents and Settings”UserName without quotes”Local SettingsHistory”
RD /S /q “C:Documents and SettingsDefault UserLocal SettingsHistory”
RD /S /q “D:Temp” < –”Deletes temp folder, type in the location of your temp folder

Save the new file as ‘cleantemp.bat’ somewhere where you can find it easily
Now go to ‘Start’ and select ‘Run’
Type in‘gpedit.msc’ and click ‘Ok’
Click on ‘Computer Configuration’ then ‘Windows Settings’
Click on ‘Scripts’ and then on ‘Shutdown’
Click ‘Add’ and find the batch file that you created and then press ‘Ok’

That’s it. I’ll post some more ways to give your PC a treat later on in the week.