Chaos Laboratory

DNSRank is an all new juvenile entrant in a jungle full of raging tigers. What I mean to say is that, they’ve decided to join the whole SEO bandwagon with almost no originality on their part – which might make it very difficult for them to survive for long.

The site definitely has that Web 2.0 jazz & sparkle to it and is very well laid out. They describe themselves as a “Domain Evaluation Tool” – but I’m sorry to say that they fall way short of expectations in this quarter. Eye-candy isn’t all !! Lets face the reality. There are plenty of age old predators in this field, starting from web-based services like SEOMoz & Xinu to awesome Firefox extensions like SeoQuake, SEOpen & SearchStatus. Most of these tools give far more comprehensive information and Search Engine Optimization tips than the barebone skeletal outline offered by DNSRank. While utilising their service, I couldn’t find a single tool that could spike my interest… except maybe for the section that displays sites which share the same IP as yours. Then again, there are plenty of other services on the net that cater to just this, as a simple Google Search reveals.

DNSRank is still in it’s infancy. Running their own tool on their own domain reveals that even the domain registration is just 29 days old (on the date of writing this review). Judging by it’s age, we can certainly cut some lax. If they have market domination (or at least gaining a large percentage) in mind, they’ve already lost out of the beginning battle. They totally failed to cash in on the element of surprise (by introducing new tools & tricks) – which is so common to any Web 2.0 startup these days. If they’re really out to set a mark on the wall, they need to strive much much harder than this.

Jun 13th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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There are plenty of services on the net which offer shiny ranking badges for your site. Rank Widget brings the more popular ones among these (Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, Technorati Blog Rank & Yahoo Search InLinks) under one roof and presents them in a plethora of colours and designs that’ll suit every conceivable taste.

The service is free and really simple to use. Just visit Rank Widget, enter your own site’s URL and select the type of ranking badge (among the above mentioned four) you want. Once you’ve hit the Get Rank button, the selected ranking appears on a multitude of badges (both static and animated) along with the code needed to embed each in your site.

If you’re one who likes to proudly show off your site’s ranking, this service is a must try for you.

Oct 11th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail – whichever email provider you may be using, the size of attachments is always capped to typically 10MB per file and to a total of around 20MB in a single email. Your only workaround is to keep the file sizes within the limit or tediously break up a large file into multiple parts and expect the recipient to join them back again. This can prove to be a productivity killer specially when you’ve to send in a bunch of files.

Driveway, an online file sharing service, now offers you a simple workaround for this. Parkit^TM is a new method of sending in up to 500MB of attachments with each of your mails – simply upload your file to Driveway and send in the Parkit link along with your email. Keep in mind that the 500MB cap is applicable for a single file only – there’s virtually no limit to the amount of data you can upload or download from this service.

Another USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for Driveway is their patent-pending Edit Widgets technology with which you can modify the uploaded documents directly from you computer without having to go through the modify-reupload-resend cycle every time you need to mail a change to everyone in your group. And you can do this directly from your Windows desktop. Currently editable formats are .doc, .xls and .ppt.

Driveway also lets you create embeddable web-widgets with which you can share your files directly through a web-page or a blog. The widgets can stream Flash & FLV movies, MP3 audios or simply display interactive slideshows of your photos (any standard picture format) directly on your site. No additional downloads are required.

If “Size really does matter” for you, without any doubts this is the service you’re looking for.

Incidentally, Driveway is brought to you by the excellent hands-free online backup system called IDrive-E.

Sep 03rd by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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A brief intro…

Past few weeks I’ve been extremely busy designing a Property Investment site for a client. The primary requirement was a custom CMS (Content Management System) – which I had to build from scratch. While it drove me over the edge at times overall it was a thoroughly enjoyable as well as an educational journey for me. Since this is a site that caters to foreign investors, one of the requirements was a Currency Conversion Calculator which could be embedded in any of the articles thus providing the visitors an opportunity to get an idea of the property prices in their native currencies, without having to leave the page. At first I sought the easy way out – i.e. I searched far & wide for a currency calculator service that’d allow me to convert between almost any of the world currencies. Unfortunately the free ones out there are really pathetic and the my client wasn’t willing to shell out any $$ for a paid service. That got me down to designing one on my own. I’ve been dabbling in AJAX for a while now and find the whole idea of RIA (Rich Internet Application) really attractive. So I decided to walk the AJAX way and came up with this cool-tool. Once done with the main project, I was so satisfied with the result that I thought it’d be a really good idea to convert it into a sidebar widget for WordPress. So here I am, with curreX – the Ajax based Currency Converter for WordPress.

Current Version

• 0.9

Features

• The widget is very simple and does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It accepts a currency value (integer or decimal) and a source & destination currency and gives you the converted rate once you hit the Convert button.
• It employs an AJAX back-end, i.e. the conversions are performed without having to refresh the whole page, making the tool really lightweight & fast. Looks cool too.
• Performs client-side validation of the amount entered – thus cutting out chances of entering an erroneous value and crashing the calc. midway while performing a conversion.

Requirements

• WordPress 2.x
• WordPress Sidebar Widgets Plugin in case you’re using WordPress 2.1.x or below. This is not required, if you’ve WordPress 2.2.x installed.

Download

curreX  (99.5 KiB, 5,951 downloads)

Installation

Installation couldn’t get any easier. Once downloaded, simply…

1. Unzip the archive.
2. Copy the extracted folder named curreX into your WordPress plug-ins folder.
3. Activate the plug-in from the Plug-in Manager in WordPress.
4. Visit the Sidebar Widgets page under Presentation menu to drag & drop the widget onto any sidebar you desire.

That’s it…

For those who’re using curreX with non-widget-enabled themes, you should insert the function
< ? show_currex( default_from, default_to, decimal_places, type, title ); ?>
in an appropriate place. For further details on this function & it’s parameters, refer to the FAQs section of the readme.txt bundled in the distribution.

Demonstration

A live demonstration of this can be found under the Coding section of my blog. Though the implementation of the demo is slightly different (it’s hard-coded into in a page), it should give you an idea on what the widget can do.

Showcase (the widget in action)

• GoBackpacking
• Hua-Hin Live – A customised version of the plug-in can be seen in action in the property list pages, once you’ve searched for properties

Subversion Repository

• curreX: SVN Check-out Link (Anonymous check-outs permitted)

Change Log

• Version 0.9 (2008-06-22)
  • Added Flash based Widget support. Now one has the option of choosing between the HTML/JavaScript version or the Flash version from the widget configuration panel of WordPress.
  • The structure of the show_currex() function (for non widget-enabled themes) has changed slightly too – to support embedding of the flash widget.
• Version 0.8 (2008-06-19)
  • While releasing version 0.7 I had made some changes in the path structure (reference to any additional files that were loaded in the background) – and I messed up a bit there. As a result, the core javascript module that fetched the conversion rates and performed the calculations wasn’t loading properly.
  • Fixed some minor CSS issues. Now the look & feel of the widget can be modified in its entirety through the accompanying CSS file.
• Version 0.7 (2008-05-16)
  • Added the functionality to display curreX in non-widget-enabled themes too (by popular demand). Till version 0.6, this plug-in could only be used in the form of a widget with widget-enabled themes.
• Version 0.6 (2008-05-11)
  • This is a complete port to jQuery. Decided to finalise on one ajax library and jQuery emerged the winner. No more Protoculous for me.
  • Split out the styling into a separate CSS file. Anyone with even a bit of CSS knowledge, can now easily alter the looks of the widget without having to touch the core code file(s).
  • Implemented BlockUI – a jQuery plugin that blocks the widget interface while performing a currency conversion routine (ajax based).
  • Included a HELP option, that leads directly to the Chaos-Lab Forums (curreX Subforum)
• Version 0.5 (2007-09-21)
  • Minor fix – but at the same time a major one from the perspective of functionality. The back-end URL for fetching conversion data from Yahoo! Finance had changed from finance.yahoo.com to download.finance.yahoo.com. This caused the plug-in to generate a message saying “Error contacting Yahoo! Finance” and not work at all. Thanks to Lia Johnston for pointing me to the correct URL.
• Version 0.4 (2007-03-15)
  • Fixed a minor bug that caused incorrect version reporting in WordPress plug-ins management panel.
• Version 0.3 (2007-03-15)
  • Bundled prototype.js library along with the distribution instead of relying on a theme to have it. This way the latest version of prototype can always be bundled along with.
  • Made some minor changes in the layout for smoother functionality & improvement of looks.
  • Renamed a bunch of plug-in related variables to avoid name collision with other plug-ins.
• Version 0.2 (2007-03-05)
  • Fine tuned the widget. Now the currency unit values are written off an array instead of the ungainly manual approach that was being used earlier on. This reduced the file-size of the main plug-in considerably despite adding new code.
  • Added the configuration section. One can now set the default currency units to be displayed when the widget loads (from & to).
  • Added a Decimal Place option, which defines the number of decimal places to show in the converted result.

Please Note

I offer support for my plug-ins via the Chaos Laboratory Support Forum only. I will NOT respond to support queries left in the comment section below and, in most cases, will also not publish them. Of course, if you’d like to say something nice or helpful, then feel free to leave a comment!

If you find this plug-in useful, please consider making a donation towards further development of this useful little utility.

Alternatively, you can help me by reviewing this post by clicking on the following link. Believe it or not, this will help us both earn some cash from PayPerPost.

Mar 01st by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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