10 sites to make Pie on line
You may not have the necessary tools to create a pie chart on your computer. why not doing it online with one of these ten simple tools you can find online.
widgenie.com
Pic Color
Chartpart
Geek247
Maptool
NCES Kids Zone
Yellowpipe
Chartgizmo
Mathcracker.com
Popacular : To find the latest hightech gossip on internet
I find delicious.com a much better tool than google when looking for good and recent information. If you go to the popular section of delicious you can really find some very updated information. If you are looking for a special tag like photo, you add photo just after popular :
http://delicious.com/popular/photo
This is very handy when you want to do some research for your blog or when you are looking for a topic you want to blog upon.
Then I recently found popacular.com. Based on delicious bookmarks. This site delivers what has been most bookmarked in the latest hour, 8 hours, a day, a week, a month, and since the dawn of time!
I discovered that flickr is the most bookmarked site with 58,132 bookmarks behind youtube 54,629 bookmarks then comes Pandora and Google is only at the 19th place.
Regarding the last hour we can the Google Trends Flu in third position, which I recently quote in my French blog. I dit get the information from popacular in fact. At the time you are reading this post, the google flu trends bookmark should have disappeared.
There is also the same for the last twitts, but at the time I tried it did not work.
You can also subscribe to RSS feeds
14 reasons blog about a topic you do not know
Do not Blog on a topic you do not know! Another bad tip given by the old bloggers and pro bloggers. One should always consider an advice somehow suspicious (mines first!!), think about it, measure it, test it and then approve it or not
You have the right to blog about all thes subjects and even those you do not know. At the beginning you obviously will not get lots of visitors or earn a fortune, since those who will read you, will see that you do not know much about your topic. In this post I give you 14 good reason to blog on a topic you do not know.
- You find a new passion, you want to do some research on a subject then make part of this new passion through a blog. In addition to your new research, you will also develop a research approach, new technical skills to find information, so you can also blog about it.
- You are self made man, you have already learned many things in life and you know that if you put all your passion you will the level of other blogs talking about the same topic.
- You have good diplomas so this is the proof that you’ve learned how to learn, this should help you to write an interesting blog.
- Blogging helps you to structure your thoughts in writing. You become a blogger when you blog. (c’est en forgeant qu’on devient forgeron = it makes perfect)
- Be humble, say you are not an expert in your new area, you’ll be the laughing stock of specialists and you will lose your credibility for later. Say that you are a newbie, but you learn quickly. The tetra experts were also newbies like you and if some experts begins to criticize your blog this will be the first signs that your blog is a new voice, that you start catching the interest of others. This will encourage you to write more about your topic. You will see that they will even plagiarize you at some point and this is a victory for your blog. One does not copy the crap
- It is a great way to make new friends, bloggers are friendly people and blogging is made to share, help others and are not miserly advice.
- The eye of a beginner is a fresh eye. You can attract few readers and even some experts because you bring a new perspective, new blood. This is also very useful nowadays, especially in new technologies. I sometimes want to build a green eco blog, I do not know anything, it is only something that I like.
- Are you really a beginner in the field? If you start blogging on a topic, it is that you already have your say. You have not lifted one morning and say, I would like blogging about the reproduction of locusts in the Amazon! Unless you’re a little crazy!
- Measure Yourself. Make a flash back on your progress. Review your first posts and it will do you good to see the tremendous progress you have achieved in so short a time. Knowledge is for me as important as good health.
- Laugh at your first posts which are completely void and make fun of yourself on the subject and make mea culpa, it will make you credible. Rewrite them in case.
- After all, you can even blog for your pleasure and you may not want to to have an audience. It is the democratic principle of the blog. You do what you want, you are in the purest democracy, you have the right to correct spelling, you have the right to shout, to declare your are lazy, you are entitled to almost everything apart from the things forbidden by law.
- If you realize after a certain time that your blog topic is not your cup of tea anymore then kill your blog! You’re the only master in the world, you can decide to kill your blog whenever you want. You’ll just frustrate a few readers who began to love your writing.
- Blogging can be a good therapy, even a way to get out of a large problem in life, blogging on death, illness, blogging about your child who is on drugs, blogging about your nervous breakdown, blogging about you silly boss is a very good therapy. At first it is not necessarily a specialist of problems that happens in your live (almost) but you can put all the chances on your side to get away with your problems. Blogging can cure.
- Blogging on a topic you do not know, will make you discover another world. You will have to be a webmaster, a statisticians, in diplomat to manage your comments, a business man to get a little money out of your blog, be a marketer…
Having writtern that I think you are convinced to start a blog on any topic. Anyway make sure that your blog is written with passion. Without passion, writing a blog is just painful.
Passion is the engine on any entrepreneurship, knwoledge comes after.
Where to find good blogger templates like 3 columns templates
Although this blog is based on the wordpress platform, I still use blogger for simple blogs like my family blog, If you are using blogger, I’m sure you noticed that the template offer is very scarce and poor.
This is a selection of five sites where you can find free templates for your blogger blog like 3 columns template.
Templates-blogger.com
This site offers around 200 templates where you can find for example 3 columns templates and other variations.
Btemplates.com
This site is as good as the first one, you can surely find what you really want for your blog
Ourblogtemplates.com
Another good site to find very good templates among other tips for blogger
bloggerbuster.com
In addition to templates, blogerbuster offers a host of tutorials to improve your blog
Mashable.com
Mashable presents a selection of 70 templates in this post.
I’m sure that with this selection of site you have more than enough, if you have other good site for blogger templates, please drop me a line.
original text in French : Roget.biz
10 sites to create your free online avatar
Faceyourmanga.com
You will be able to nearly reach your physical appearance on this Avatar Creator. The options are numerous so you can play a lot with colours and outfits, so to be able to create a quite unique Avatar.
Simpson Avatar
Create a Simpson Avatar online is just very easy as most of the online avatar creation. You choose the person you want to look alike, then choose the necessary features (hair, colour, mouth) and some outfits to finish your avatar. This one doesn’t really reach you real appearance.
Lego
This one is also very funny. The only missing outfit is the hat, otherwise you would not be able to look as a lego. Anyway I tried my best to look alike in real life and the result is not to bad.
Illustmaker.abi-station.com
On this site you car reach an avatar which is very similar to your real face. Ok, you’ll look a little bit Asian . This site is the richest in terms of option and if you spend a time playing with your avatar, you’ll be able to have a nice result, although I didn’t find the right color form my hat!
Buildyourwildself
This one is wild, fun and ultra rapid. The result is unique, but you won’t really look like in your real life.
Osoq.com
Osoq gives you the animated gif feature and if you don’t mind puting a little bit on weight on your avatar.
Quickflashgames.com
This site gives you an avatar in less that 10 seconds. This avatar maker is mainly used to create avatar for online games
befunky.com
On this site , you’ll be able to create you avatar from you own picture, this is the fun of it.
sp-studio.de
Another style quite complete as well with very friendly user interface
doppelme.com
This one also will give you a body avatar, not very complete in terms of features. I didn’t find my glasses.
I hope you’ll find the avatar of your dream with this selection. If you use other avatar online creators, please drop me a line.
Filter anything you want with twitter and pipe.yahoo
I am not very fan of twitter yet. But I’ve had a thorough look at it recently and made a few (but not new) discoveries.
search.twitter.com engine
First you can start searching for twitts search.twitter.com engine
twemes.com
Twemes makes you find twitts with hastags. What is a hashtag? It is just a convention between twitting people who wants to enhance on particular word in their twitt, hence putting the # before each word they want to insist upon. Like #obama. Check the site http://www.hashtags.org/ which gives you the real time trends for words. This is very clever.
tweetscan.com
Tweetscan is the same as search.twitter but getting the twitts from another microblogging plateform http://identi.ca une
With these 3 search engines you will get the most of the world twitts. But the best would be to bundle them up in a single RSS feed and make sure that you filter any type of word you want without the need to do it thrice!
So I created for my own use an RSS feed from pipe.yahoo to do the job. You only have to type the word you want to scan and that’s it. It is called twittermonitor?. You can clone it and change it according to your needs and communicate it to your friends. You can also add other twits platform to be sure you don’t miss your keyword.
Pipe Yahoo : How to find the right information through the internet maze
If you are looking for information about microblogging, you can easily type this word in google web search, and will get a massive flow off information about microblogging. However, if you want to be updated in real time this is not the right way to proceed.
In this article, I give you a way to perform technological scanning through the tags you can fin on blogs and then get them bundled together through a real time RSS flow.
Let us check the RSS structure of a few diggs and portals offering RSS feed on tags. (you may change microblogging to you favorite tag)
- delicious: http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/microblogging
- technorati (français) : http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/microblogging?authority=a4&language=fr
- technorati anglais : http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/microblogging?authority=a4&language=en
- Digg : http://digg.com/rss_search?search=microblogging&area=&type=&age=
- Google : http://news.google.com/news?q=microblogging&ie=UTF-8&output=rss
- Mybloglog : http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/topics/microblogging/rss.xml
- wikio: http://rss.wikio.fr/blogs/rss/a_la_une/search/microblogging
- blogsearch.google : http://blogsearch.google.fr/blogsearch_feeds?hl=fr&q=microblogging&lr=&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=atom
- Yahoo : http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=microblogging&adult_ok=1
- Furl : http://rss.furl.net/items.rss?topic=microblogging
Ok, you can look for other RSS feeds of your choice and proceed the same way. I’ve already listed 10 of them this would be just enough for the time being.
You could past those feed into you RSS reader, but it is the awkward way to do it. Why not make it automatic! To that purpose you ave to go to pipes.yahoo.com create an account and then select the create a pipe function
First you have to create a form. On the left you have a menu with different options choose “User input”, then “Url input“. drag and drop it on the main board.
Let us continue with our example. Put “microblogging” in the text input window. Check the figure below. In the prompt you may type “tag to search” or what ever phrase you can think of.
Let us check the first RSS structure with delicious.com
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/microblogging
the common structure http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/ and then our search tag microblogging
This time you shall add the “url builder” into the main board (figure below)
In the base copy paste http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/ “text” just below the path element must be linked to the above module.
Just after this second module (url builder) drag and drop the third module (fetch feed) and link it to the url builder as it is described in the figure below. Then link the “output” module to the “fetch feed” module.
At this stage of this tutorial we have just created a tag informaton structure for delicious.com. Just to better understand what has been said the result is available here http://pipes.yahoo.com/thierryroget/veilletechno01
You may repeat the same process with other RSS found on the net, but sometimes the RSS structure is different. let us have a look at the next example.
let’s have a look at the Technorati RSS structure
http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/microblogging?authority=a4&language=fr
This time microblogging is right inside the RSS feed. You will have to change the “url builder” structure to fit this new rss feed. adding “authority=A4” puis ”language=fr” in the query parameters. In the example “fr” is the language (french) you may change it in any other language like “en” for english.
Now you are able to understand the main principle of this tutorial, so you may repeat this process to all you rss tags and then aggregate them into a single RSS feed. To be short, the result is already available here http://pipes.yahoo.com/thierryroget/veilletechno2
You can play with other words and forget about miccroblogging and put you favorite tag. You can duplicate this pipe for your own purpose change whatever you like and start being the big shot in what ever you enjoy in life.
You may find this tutorial a little bit complicated, but I assure you that once you get used to Pipe.Yahoo you’ll be able to get the right information you need. I advise you to digg into this tutorial and make your own findings.
10 free on-line services where you can edit your picture
In my nomadic life, anything that can be made online fits me. Editing pictures is one thing I do on line most of the time. This is a selection of sites that offer free photo editing services that will perform , II hope , 99% of your needs.
Pixlr.com
Pixlr look like photoshop off-line so one will feel at home if already familiar with photoshop. Most of the useful tools are available.
Photoshop
Photoshop on line is off cource less comprehensive than the traditionnal photoshop, but is is free. You have to create an account to use the service. Once the account is created, you have access to other services such as the photo albums and you can import photos from our favorite accounts ( Flickr, Picassa …) among other interesting goodies
Picnik.com
Picnik can offer a comprehensive photo editing online service, which will fill up most of your needs and more the interface is very pleasant . You can also add objects, text and frames … To use without restraint.
Fotoflexer.com
Fotoflexer is also a service that is worth a glance and allows you to add objects, text and objects that blink, and a geek section to morph picture. This service is also very comprehensive, with a stripped interface but with more than the essentials.
Pixenate.com
Pixenate is a basic photo editing service for a quick and dirty job (red eyes …) it also allows you to add some custom effects (Warhol, adding component: hat, mustache, teeth bleaching provided that the portrait is well in the axis. In addition we can save your work on flick.
Pixer.us
Ultra fast editing, including a preview edits before application. Some special effects that apply on the whole image. Simple but fast.
Splashup.
This service is in Beta. You have most of the necessary tools. Pitty that the clone stamp is not available. You can import photos from your photo hosting accounts like facebook, Flickr and Picassa). You cans save your picture on your computer if you want, or just save it on your splashup account.
Sumo Paint
Paint Sumot would be more focused on drawing rather than photo editing , thus the drawings attributes are more abundant with Sumo paint. It is therefore quite a complementary tool, which surely will delight budding artists like me
The software offer all the elements of a classic drawing software with the management layer, the color palette, special effects … For those familiar with other similar tools, dealing with Sumo will be therefore ultra easy. That is my achievement made in seconds.
A.viary.com
May be the best of the tool, the photo editing section is called Phoenix. You also have some very interesting tutorial available t here.
Fanstudio.ru
This site is made in Russia, if you want to edit a picture, you can only do it on the whole picture. If you want to do a quick job this site will really give you all what you need. It is very simple to use it and you don’t need to know a lot about photo editing.
If you have other free online photo editing services, please leave a comment.
bigthink : an intelligent youtube
Today we can not say that we lack of information. However good information is more difficult to find when you want to learn something out of the internet jungle. Always looking for nuggets I discovered today a sort of intelligent youtube: bigthink. I just watched a few very short videos of Bernard-Henri Levy. The site is in beta version, but I guess we will have more videos in the future that will be exciting to watch.
It is also possible to throw ideas and this seems to be the main point of the site. I rushed to the blogger aeraa just to cheks what topics are debated :
- Life in the blogopshere
- Are blogs competition
- Are bloggers dangerous
- Are bloggers journalists
- What makes a goog blog
- Starting a blog
Subjects that we love in the blogosphere. Ididn’t check
I dont’ knwow how one can be selected to appear on the videos, I think one need to be as good as Bernard-Henri Levy. So that would be a good challenge!