Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 04, 2006 by CyberNet.

I don’t use Meebo all of the time but it sure is useful when I do need it. They just keep making it better and better so much so that I want to use it more. Yesterday on their blog they announced a whole list of changes which includes a nice visual refresh. Here are all of the things that are new:

1. New visual design – Sandy and I were Photoshop newbies when we first designed meebo and we’ve been itching for an updated look. We’re thrilled to show off David’s latest work!
2. Pop outs – click on that little icon in your IM window to “pop” the window out of the main meebo browser (don’t forget to disable any pop-up blockers you have for meebo.com).
3. Drag and drop buddy list management – The ability to move buddies between groups has been our most popular feature request for a while. Enjoy!
4. Skinning – we understand a few of you might be attached to the meebo’s first look and feel. If you are feeling nostalgic, we’ve introduced the ability to switch back to the old skin – just go to the preference area and select the ‘Classic’ skin. Keep an eye out for more skins in the future.
5. Individual sign on and off – now you can manage your screen names one-by-one. Just click on the drop-down menu in the left-hand console area.
6. Localization – In addition to Bangla, Creole, Esperanto, Iloko, Jawa, Latin, Malagasy, Marathi, Mongolian, Nias, Swiss German, Thai, Uzbek support – we’ve also translated other parts of the UI such as buttons, menus, and links. The language updates dynamically based upon your location and preference too. Thai looks really good on the new front page!
7. Updated Chat Logs – Chatlogs just got a facelift. Power-users (like Sandy and Andreas) will appreciate the new design and speedier loading times.
8. AIM Profiles – This has been one of the top three requests for many weeks. AIM users, check out the ‘Set Profiles’ in the console area. Mark recently got engaged, guess what he announced in his profile this week! Congrats!
9. Optimization – We’re always trying to make meebo better and faster. Those of you with very large buddylists, like user rnbmelody, will appreciate the new performance enhancements.

That is a pretty long list of changes! The new visual refresh on the homepage is no doubt my favorite new feature. It really makes it look slick and professional, but you can still go back to the old system by using http://classic.meebo.com/ as the URL. Nice work Meebo team!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 10, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

For those of you who read the site regularly, you probably know by now that I have a Flickr Pro account. It’s just $25 per year, and offers unlimited photo storage and bandwidth. When I was looking around to find the perfect photo sharing site for my family and myself, Flickr was the one option that stood out to me.

The thing that convinced me to get a Flickr Pro account was not the amazing privacy features or the superb organizational tools, instead it was the development done by third parties. Flickr has a humongous list of apps and services that are created and managed by other people.

Looking through some of the programs that were available, I quickly became aware that if need be, I could redownload all of the full-size images on to my computer. Flickr essentially serves as a remote backup of my most important images, and I currently have thousands of images hosted on there to share with my friends and family.

On the articles where I’ve discussed using Flickr as a backup solution, it’s inevitable that someone will email me asking how I go about getting images off of my Flickr account in bulk. That’s what we’re going to show you today.

–Flickr Programs–

We’ve shown you all kinds of ways to get your photos on Flickr, including the new official Uploadr 3.0 that was just released, a one-way synchronization tool, and even Flickr support in the new Windows Live Gallery by Microsoft. Now the challenge is going the opposite way.

We’ve searched around to try and find some good tools for downloading Flickr photos, but there is one tool that we always keep coming back to. We’ll jump into some more details on that app in the next section of this article, but before we get into that we want to list off some of the alternatives:

• Flickr Downloader – This is a basic downloader that doesn’t offer too much extra fluff, and it doesn’t appear to offer the option to download private photos. Thanks for the tip on this one Radu!
• FlickrDown – One simple interface that should take no time at all to understand.
• Flickr Downloader – If you’re familiar with the Flickr website then this will be second nature for you.

And I’m sure there are a lot more tools out there. The one that has earned its way onto my hard drive is…

–Flickr Downloadr–

Flickr Downloadr is by far the most powerful Flickr download utility that I’ve come across. It requires absolutely no installation, and you’re able to pull in images according to tags, user, text, date, and more.

What’s more important is that Flickr Downloadr is able connect to a user’s account with the Flickr API. This is done by clicking Extras -> Authenticate, and the Flickr website will popup for you to approve access to the application. That way the program can access all of your private images without you actually having to supply your password.

And guess what else is located in the Extras menu. A complete backup option! If you start panicking because you’ve lost all of the images on your computer this is the solution for you. In one click you can have all of your photos downloaded from Flickr in all their high-resolution glory.

There are also some settings that you can configure with Flickr Downloadr, such as how you want it to assign filenames to the downloaded images. You can have it assign the image title or the Flickr ID as the filename.

I know that many of you also use Flickr, and I would love to hear what apps you use to download Flickr photos in bulk. Hit us up in the comments with your favorite Flickr apps and services!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 29, 2006 by CyberNet.

I actually can’t believe this but file sharing just got a lot better. The new website that I found (thanks to Gizmodo) is called DivShare and it allows you to upload your files without limitations and without registration. There are already several sites that do something similar, like FileHo, so why is DivShare special?

• Upload unlimited files
• Serve unlimited downloads
• Files stay online forever
• No pop-up ads or spam
• Incredibly fast, reliable servers
• Add a link and logo to your download page
• Easy image galleries and thumbnails
• Nearly every file extension supported

I typically like registering at the file sharing sites because they keep track of the files that I upload. The user control panel is the best that I have seen with any file sharing service and having the ability to create photo galleries is awesome. Not only that but they let you co-brand the download page which means people will know that the file is related to your website.

In order to demonstrate the co-branded download page I tried to upload the Firefox image from yesterday…but like the other photo services it still had a problem. It sounded perfect because there was no photo size limit and they do not scale down the images, but after a few minutes I just got a blank white screen. I could have tried it in another browser (I was using Firefox), but I decided to make a portable version of the latest Firefox 3 nightly (currently pre-Alpha 2) which might give you something to tinker around with in addition to seeing what the download page looks like.

The download link will also show you the number of downloads, download size, and the date the file was uploaded. I don’t think it can get much more perfect than this?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on November 05, 2009 by CyberNet.

I’m sure at one point or another you’ve wanted to share a link with a friend, but knew that when they went to visit the page that the content would change. Unfortunately you don’t have control over when services like the WayBack Machine make archives of a site, and often times the backups available there are at least a year old.

That’s where a service like BackupURL comes into play. With it you can create an on-demand backup of the current state of a website. You can then share the backup with anyone you want using a shortened URL that it will provide.

I tried the service on several different sites, and for the most part it was pretty fast at creating the backups. Most of the time I had a working URL in my hand within 10-seconds of clicking the “backup” button.

The one thing I don’t like is that, unlike the WayBack Machine, there’s no way to navigate past archives of sites. If you lose the URL you’re simply out of luck. I’d have to imagine that it would be simple for them to add some sort of interface to flip through the archives, but I’m guessing they have a reason for not providing this information to us yet. Hopefully that’s something that will come though.

This is another site that I’d recommend putting in the “may be useful someday” folder in your bookmarks.

BackupURL Homepage
Thanks Mark!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

As you may have noticed by now we’ve been trying to cover a variety of Greasemonkey scripts on the site with our Best Greasemonkey Scripts series, and today we’re going to put it into overdrive. Below we’ve taken five extremely popular sites that have dozens (or hundreds) of Greasemonkey scripts available, and grabbed only the ones we’ve found useful.

I’ve tested all of the scripts below in Firefox 2 running the latest version of Greasemonkey, and can verify that they work on the sites as of today (02/27/2008). Some of the scripts will likely get broken in the future as sites are redesigned, but then we just have to keep our fingers crossed that the developers will update them.

Alright, now on to the five sites: eBay, Gmail, YouTube, Flickr, and Digg:

–eBay–

• Show Only Negative Feedback – This adds two new tabs to the feedback screen for “complaints left” and “complaints received.” It might give you a better perspective on the person you’re buying from since you can see negative and neutral feedback without going through a mile long list.
• My eBay Autologin – If Firefox automatically fills in your username and password this script will submit the login form for you. This makes the “auto-logout after a day” feature eBay has much less annoying.
• eBay Search Pictures – Not every seller decides to pay for a gallery image, but they often still include images of the auction item within the post. When performing a search on eBay this script will go fetch images for the results that don’t have them, and then place them next to the listing as if they were a gallery image.
• Display Totals with Shipping – When comparing items on eBay do you have a hard time adding the selling cost + shipping to get the final total? With this script a new column is added which totals the two amounts together for you. Thank goodness because that 4th-grade math can really be killer!

–Gmail 2–

• Gmail Account Multi-Login (Review) – Provides a quick drop-down menu for switching between multiple Gmail accounts.
• Folders4Gmail (Review) – Lets you create expandable/collapsible labels for better organization.
• Gmail Sidebar Remover (Review) – Removes the ads in the sidebar so that you can read emails in the full-width of the screen.
• Gmail HTML Signatures – Setup a unique HTML signature to be inserted that is based upon which email address you are sending from.

–YouTube–

• Videoembed – You how it can be annoying when a site links to a video on Youtube without actually embedding it? No problem, this script will recognize those links and automatically embed the video after the link. It works with about 20 different sites including YouTube.
• Download YouTube Video – Does exactly what you think it would… lets you download a YouTube video to your computer.
• YouTube Cleaner – You can toggle the comments and related videos on or off, which cleans up the interface… especially when you have those videos with hundreds of pointless comments.
• YousableTubeFix – The best thing about this script is that it resizes the video to fill up your screen. Underneath the video you’ll find several links for dynamically resizing the video.
• YouTube Prevent Autoplay – When viewing videos on the YouTube site you won’t have to worry about them automatically playing. Thank goodness!

–Flickr–

• Flickr Photo Page Enhancer – Adds links underneath the “Additional Information” section in the sidebar which link directly to the different size photos, and also provides hyperlinking code.
• Flickr Link Original Images – Adds a small button to the upper-left corner of the images which links directly to the original image.
• Flickr Remove Spaceball – Removes the empty image that is sometimes placed over Flickr photos to prevent them from being saved to your computer.

–Digg–

• Add Mirrors – This is the most condensed way I’ve ever seen to add mirror links to each Digg article. The links are shown as four small icons immediately underneath each “Digg It” button.
• Old Comments – Makes the nested comments look way better.
• Digg Me Later – This is really clever, and a script that I’ve been using for quite some time now. Whenever you click on an external link on Digg a green bar will be placed at the very top with a “Digg It” link. That way you don’t have to return to the Digg site just to Digg the article after you’re done reading it.

–Overview–

We know that many of you use Greasemonkey scripts on a regular basis, and we would love to hear what your favorites are! Just post them in the comments below.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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