Teimlo

Cool Stuff #48 Formspring.me

Cool Stuff is Teimlo's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

This is one of our favourite tools for using with social media, as it allows anyone to ask you a question directly, then display the question and the answer in an easy to read format for others to see.

Formspring .me allows you to set up a simple profile including a picture and bio section. You can also edit background colours and images to suit the current colours your organisation uses. You are then able to direct people from nearly all of your social networks to your profile to ask a question. You can then set up an automated service which will update your social networks with a link to the question and your answer.

A user can ask a question either anonymously or leave their details, so therefore they can feel free to ask anything, no matter how trivial they feel it is.

A great feature of Formspring.me is that you can also add the ‘ask a question’ box into your website or blog. All you need to do is copy and paste the supplied HTML code into your website and the box will appear. For an example of this integration, take a look at the top right hand side of our blog.

At Teimlo we use this tool to offer the opportunity to our audience to ask us anything about mobile. This makes our blog, Facebook fan page and Twitter account more interactive. It also provides a means of assisting any potential customers with any questions they have, whilst reinforcing their view of the knowledge you have in your field.

To start using Formspring.me visit http://formspring.me

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring Formspring.me in this series. If Formspring.me is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #47 FriendFeed

Cool Stuff is Teimlo's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

With social media reaching the height of popularity and with so many different ways to reach people it is hard to keep track of all things at once. This is why FriendFeed is such a great tool, especially for businesses.

FriendFeed is a social media platform which benefits both followers and users. The real time streaming of updates allows a follower to keep track of any updates across several social media platforms made by a user. This is a great way of ensuring you don’t miss any updates! This is not only great for individuals but for businesses too.

For example a business may have a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook account and a YouTube channel. If you have followers interested in your business then the task of constantly monitoring all the content you update on each of these sites is very time consuming, this is where FriendFeed helps. For a business, this is a great way of bringing all your content together and ensuring that your followers are kept up to date with all the latest content.

With the ability to also feed in Delicious, Stumble Upon, Digg and Mashable too, there is an enormous benefit to having FriendFeed. You are able to comment or like any update that comes through as you would on Facebook, so a great interactive tool as well.

The feed automatically updates and the information cascades down in a central column making viewing the content easy. You can also pause the feed at any time in order to view any content more closely.

So why not try FriendFeed and keep track of the content that is important to you or make sure that your followers can view all you’re content in one easy to read format.

Teimlo are currently on FriendFeed, and through following us you will be able to keep up with all aspects of our social media. Add us at http://friendfeed.com/teimlo1 or leave us a comment with your username and we will follow you.

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring FriendFeed in this series. If FriendFeed is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #46 - Hootsuite

Cool Stuff is Teimlo's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

Hootsuite is a great free tool aimed at helping you manage multiple social networking activities all from one location. This software lets you manage your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pingfm and Wordpress activities at the same time. It also allows you to update several statuses with just one click.

The one aspect of Hootsuite that we at Teimlo found incredibly useful is the ability to schedule in tweets or status updates for any time in the future. This is a great time saving device as it reduces the need for constant monitoring of your social networks, it gives a user the ability to program all their tweets in for the day or for the week ahead without having to manually update them at each interval.

Hootsuite also allows a user to have several search columns so that any keywords can be monitored with ease. The site will refresh at intervals that will suit you and can be manually refreshed too. Hootsuite also comes with a Hootlet, a function that sits on your explorer bar, and when a quick update is required, just click the Hootlet, enter your update (it will also shorten the URL of the current page that you are on for ease when using Twitter), then click update and it will be updates instantly. An app for the iPhone is also available.

The best bit about this software is that it is free of charge, and there is no donwload needed (apart from the iPhone app) as it is all managed from a browser window.

To start using this great tool, visit www.hootsuite.com and start managing all your social networks with ease!

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring Hootsuite in this series. If Hootsuite is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #45 PhotoScape

Cool Stuff is Teimlo's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

Yet another great image manipulation piece of software that has been of great use to Teimlo. PhotoScape is a free piece of software with a suite of image manipulation tools from batch conversion to screen capture. But two of the tools we found really interesting were the ‘AniGif’ tool and the ‘Combine’ tool.

The ‘AniGif’ tool allows you to easily create an animated .gif without the need to use Photoshop. This is the ideal tool for anyone who needs to create a simple animation using several images, without requiring the more advanced tools in Photoshop. All you have to do is drag and drop the images into the animator, then use the set of simple tools to adjust rotation and transition effects. This is simple to use and easy to understand, ideal for knocking something up quickly using existing images.

The ‘Combine’ tool is also useful as it allows you to drag and drop images in any order to make one large image. You are then able to tweak dimensions as you see fit. Again this is ideal if you need to make something quickly without the need for extensive tweaking.

Therefore our recommendation here at Teimlo is that if you work with images on a large scale, or with web content management, this tool would be ideal to keep handy for ease of use with animations and combining images.

To get this product to free, and to view all its capabilities, go to www.photoscape.org

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring PhotoScape in this series. If PhotoScape is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #44 FastStone Image Viewer

Cool Stuff is Teimlo's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

If you’re looking for a tool to make image conversion or image resizing on a large scale easy, then FastStone’s Image Viewer can help. As digital cameras are improving the resolution of images are also improving, resulting in larger file sizes. A problem we found here at Teimlo was that if you have say 200 images you need to upload to a website, the current file size/resolution would be too large and result in a lengthy process to correct each individual image. Through using FastStone Image Viewer we found that you can alter these factors quickly and easily, for as many images as you wish, which is much easier than manually re-sizing each one!

With this tool you can also reduce the file size to a percentage that would be suitable for a web upload, and also to the format needed.

Please be aware that the batch convert tool is only one of FastStone’s many features. Other features include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, colour adjustments, musical slideshows and much more.

In summary, this is a great time-saving tool which is easy to use and can be a great addition to the arsenal of tools for any web content manager. And of course, saving the best till last, this software is totally free to download, so enjoy!

Download it from www.faststone.org

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring FastStone Image Viewer in this series. If FastStone Image Viewer is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #43 File Renamer

Cool Stuff is Teimlo's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

File Renamer is a program that allows you adjust several file names at once. This is a useful tool as it can enable the adjustment of certain characteristics of file names with one easy universal change. For example, you can select an entire folder of files to edit, or using a tick box method select as many as you like within a certain folder for editing. Some of the changes you can make are finding and replacing characters or words within file names, changing the case of the file names and adding a prefix or suffix. You are also even able to edit ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. All these functions are available on the basic version of the software, which is free to download. The software is simple to use and avoids the time consuming task of manually adjusting each file name individually.

The software is available in 3 packages, the Basic (free), Regular ($10) or Deluxe ($19.95). The Deluxe package enables you to use functions such as ‘undo rename’ and the ‘drag and drop’ functionality. But please be sure to check the terms and conditions before paying. The software is available from www.sherrodcomputers.com.

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring File Renamer in this series. If File Renamer is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #42 Media Converter

Cool Stuff is Teimlo's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

Mediaconverter.org is a great site allowing a user to upload any file or link from YouTube and have it converted to any format they in order to download it to their desktop. This functionality allows a user to paste the URL of their favorite YouTube video straight into the converter, and in a matter of minutes it can be converted into both mp3 and mp4 formats (along with other formats)ready to download. This means that those remixes or rare tracks that can’t be found anywhere else are available to all. There is a maximum of five files that can be converted for free each day, if you want any more then it comes at a premium. Be sure to read the terms before paying.

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring mediaconverter.org in this series. If mediaconverter.org is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #41 Mobyko

Cool Stuff is Teimlo's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

Mobyko.com is a handy site that allows you to sync your mobile phone directly with your desktop PC, and in doing so, any photos, contacts and calendar entries are backed up online for you. This site also allows a user to send texts directly from their desktop to any contacts, and if you lose your phone, Mobyko.com allows you to sync all data with your new phone in only a few clicks! It's all done without the need for downloads, software or wires.

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring Mobyko.com in this series. If Mobyko.com is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff #40 ColorCombos

Cool Stuff is Teimlo's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

colorcombos.com is an excellent design resource that allows you to use either predefined colour combinations or to enter a colour as a name or hex and have it match up from the combos available. The site has other really useful features such as the service to input a url and have the colours from that site matched for you. We really rate this as a tremendous tool for website & html colour work.

 

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring colorcombo.com.com in this series. If colorcombo.com is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.

Cool Stuff # 39 SpyOnWeb

Cool Stuff is Teimlo's blog series is to help you out by telling you about useful websites and applications that can help you and your business.

 SpyOnWeb.com is a quick and simple free research tool for those who wish to find out owners of a website. This tool gathers information from IP addresses to Analytics ID to Google Adsense information and presents them together disclosing websites with similar IP's. 

Teimlo derives no financial benefit from featuring SpyOnWeb.com in this series. If SpyOnWeb.com is useful to you please comment and/or share this entry.