Posts Tagged ‘websites’

The other day I was looking online for something and stumbled across a great little website called MyLiveSignature. You can use the site to create an image file of your name or signature. Why might you want to do this? Well, if you want to show your name at the end of your blog posts (see mine if you are looking at the main page of this blog post) or in your e-mail signature, you can use regular text, BUT, it will only look the same way if the viewer or recipient has the same font installed on their machine.

You can create animated signatures if your heart desires it, but I just used it to create an image of my name. It is so simple to use, I am not going to walk through each step, but here is the basic premise. First you enter in the name you want to use. Then, the next screen shows you how your name will look in over 100 different fonts. Click through to view and then select the font that you want.

Next pick the size of the font. Then the color. If you want to use the image on a website or anywhere with a colored background, set the background to be transparent. For my purpose, I went with purple text. You can also set the gradient of the text so it looks more like a signature.

Finally, your signature will be displayed to you. You can right click on the image and save it to your computer.

You can then use this image file in your e-mail signature or add it to your blog posts! Quick, simple and easy to use. Have fun!

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Found a new site today which I wanted to share. When posting an article to your blog it’s great if you get some reader participation with comments at the bottom. However, there may be times when you wish to encourage readers to share links of a specific type. For example, I may be interested in knowing the blogs of my readers (which I am!). In this case, it would be better to have all links compiled together in one place for me, and other readers to see, rather than scrolling all the way to the end of the post. This is where Simply Linked can help! Really really easy, and free to set up.

Go to their site and sign up for a free account. It’s a Beta site (still in testing) so there could be a cost introduced in the future, but hopefully that would come along with additional features. Once you are signed in, click the link to create a new list:

Enter in the name of your list. There is the option to select from either a standard type, or from a recurring theme. There are no instructions so I take the theme to be a way to group lists together and categorize them. You can either select from one you have already created, or create a new one easily.

Once your list is created, you will see the code displayed for your list. Copy it and then you can paste that into a web page or blog post:

When someone visits your site or blog post, they can easily add a link to the list. See the example below in this post. Once links are added, you will be able to review them from your Simply Linked account. Could be useful for follow up and review on your topic.

So, feel free! Give me the link to your blog, I would love to pay you a visit, and maybe others will too! I started the list going, so join in.

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Google Alerts is a great functionality that allows you to track keywords, phrases and information that is being posted out on the internet. You can use your current Google account (perhaps you have AdWords, AdSense or Google Analytics already?) or create a new one. Then, go out to: http://www.google.com/alerts/

You will see the following screen. Type in what you wish to monitor. In the example below, Newcastle is my home town in England. I would be quite interested to see if there are news stories or content posted online with this in the text. I can set it up and would like one e-mail a day, if there is any new content out there that Google has found for me. You can determine how many results, and also will add an e-mail address you want this sent to.

Direct from Google Alerts – they currently offer 6 variations of alerts – ‘News’, ‘Web’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Comprehensive’, ‘Video’ and ‘Groups’.

• A ‘News’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
• A ‘Web’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
• A ‘Blogs’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
• A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
• A ‘Video’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
• A ‘Groups’ alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

You can see below, some of the searches I have set up. I am interested if my name is mentioned, my business name and several other items. This will also help if you want to see how quickly a blog post is indexed by Google. Once you receive an e-mail that mentions your blog post, you know Google has indexed it. Pretty cool!

Have questions? Let me know below!

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