Altitude on Small Business Tools

In case you wanted to record your voice online, and you wanted to share the recording

with friends, colleagues, or family.

I found this tool called vocaroo, it is a flash based audio recorder, that allows

to record your voice.

The best part about it, is that it is:

• free
• no software needed
• you can email the audio recording
• or embed the recording on your website

It is a great tool, and I think worth checking out..

Let me know, what you think….or if you are aware of any other tools,

that does the same thing…

We all fond of screen recording or screen capturing.

They are a great tools, that you can use to communicate with your prospects,

prepare tutorials, or show what you have on your computer screen in an

easy professional video format.

I am a very visual person, so I learn much faster if you show me…

In the past, I used camtasia, and many other tools, to create demos to my clients,

or show them, certain features, or products, in case I am not able to do it in person.

Today, I stumbled upon a new tool, that I think it will revolutionize how we do

screen recording..

It is a new awesome service called screenr. You can check it out, on screenr.com

What I liked about it, it is complete integration with twitter, and best of all, it is free

and no software installation is required..

Here are a list of features that I read on their website:

Instant screencast for twitter.

Now you can create screencasts for your followers, as easily as

you tweet. You will have a ready to tweet screencast in seconds.

• It is a web based recorder, so no software installation required
• Works on PC or MAC
• Plays everywhere on the web, even plays on your iPhone
• Best of all it is completely FREE

I have tried and it works fairly well.

The only limitation that I saw is that you are limited to 5min.

But overall I think it is a great tool, and I highly recommend it.

A suggested feature for me, will be, is that I wish the user had an option,

whether to make the screencasts public or private.. Right now,

all screencasts are public, which could be an issue sometimes..

Let me know, what you think…??

Did you ever wonder what’s the performance of your website?

Did you ever wanted to compare your website to others???

Whichloadsfaster is a fun way to spread the word that web performance matters.

It’s about friendly competition and about testing in everybody’s browser,

not just ones that have nice performance tools already.

Whichloadsfaster is open source, written in HTML and JavaScript and runs entirely on the client-side.

You can host the files on your own site and tweak them to suit your own nefarious plans.

You can download Whichloadfast on github.

Or you can do your perliminary testing on http://www.whichloadsfaster.com/

Give it a try…and let me know, what you think????

As we all know, one the challenges, we have in web development,

and design is how different browsers renders the page.

In some situations IE doesn’t render the pages correctly,

or FireFox, Chrome show the pages in totally different looks.

Stylesheets, Javascript especially are rendered differently on

different browsers.

Below are some tools that you could use to simulate different browsers:

1) Adobe BrowserLAB

Straight to the point, I really like it, and I tried it myself.

2) Browser Shots

Straight to the point, I really like it, and I tried it myself.

3) Litmus

Requires sign up.

4) Spoon Browser Sandbox

It is a firefox pluging

I looked at so many tools, but the above seems to do the job,

and the best part they cost nothing

0to255 is a simple tool that helps web designers find lighter and darker colors based on any color. 0to255 cures your color manipulation woes. It’s fun, simple, and a huge time-saver.

Simply pick the color that you want to start with and 0to255 gives you a range of colors from black to white using an interval optimized for web design. Then, just click the variation you want to use and the hex code is automatically copied to your clipboard.

Check it out here : http://0to255.com/

Also another website to see all these color codes,

all in one page, check it out here…

Courtesy of: http://www.webappers.com

In case if you don’t know what are the Favicon.

It is basically the image that you see on your browser,

something like this:

It gives a professional look for your website, especially when minimized.

It is very easy to do, and today, I am going to share with you few links for

some online tools to do that.

My favorite one is the following:

1) http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/

The reason I like it, because it is very easy to use.

And it generate an animated favicon, which is very nice.

And once you are done, it generates a zip file, with the

static and dynamic version altogether.

2) http://favikon.com/

It is a nice tool, and straight to the point.

3) http://genfavicon.com

It is a nice tool, and straight to the point.

Once you are done.. All you have to do,

is upload the .ico file to the root of the website,

or to the image folder.

And add the following HTML code to your web page, in between <head> and </head> tags:

Very easy to do…

Today I would like to talk about error reporting and logging.

We always like to know what’s going on with all your web applications, or our clients as soon as possible, not only know the error, but sometimes, if we are able to see the full exception stack, and may be see the screen the user saw when that error occured, so we can proactively seek solutions.

For that we use Elmah. Elmah is just an awesome pluggable Module, that easily be plugged to your asp.net website, quickly, without having to change any code.

It provides many reporting capabilities, and recently twitter was added as one of the reporting options, which I thought is very nice option to have.

Now I would like to thank Atif Aziz the project owner, for a great module and a great work..

It is totally free and open source.

Here are some other features:

I always configure the log files, to be reviewed with an admin role,

and emails to be sent when exceptions occured.

Here is a screenshot for elmah in action:

Please drop me a line if you need any help, with Elmah setup.

I have used it in many of our projects, and it is GREAT…

I have seen many tutorials but the following are the ones that I liked the most,

and I thought they were the most helpful:

Elmah on DotNetSlackers.

Elmah on Phil Haack blog.

Please post any comments or questions you might have in regards to elmah.

JESS3, a creative agency specializing in data visualization, has put together an amazing video which shows the current state of the Internet. We have highlighted some of the data below, but please also watch the video for yourself (it rivals the Social Media Revolution).

* Faceboook Serves 6 million Pages per Minute
* 1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide
* 90 Trillion Emails Sent in 2009
* 81% of Emails were Spam
* 126 Million Blogs on the Internet
* 27.3 Million Tweets Per Day
* Faceboook serves 6 million pages per minute
* 4 Billion photos hosted by Flickr
* 182 Videos watched on average per month (per user)

Very informative video below:

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Source: Web Analytics World