Technology and Money

Make Screencast Videos In Firefox with Capture Fox

Capture Fox is a nice little add-on that turns your Firefox browser into a one-click screen video recorder. The extension is available for Windows XP as well Vista.

Capture Fox can record all your activity inside a Firefox window or even the entire desktop screen and will save it as a video file. The program can also capture audio from your microphone.

Record Firefox Screen as a Video file

After installing Capture Fox, you’ll find a button in the Firefox status bar that serves both as the Start and Stop button. And while the recording session is on, you can check the duration of the screencast from the status bar itself.

While this is no replacement of Camtasia or other standalone screen recorders, it is still a good option for recording quick videos of your Firefox screen without firing an external program.

Related: Screen Capture Web Page in Firefox

 

Make Screencast Videos In Firefox with Capture Fox - Digital Inspiration

The Best Website Monitoring Services for Tracking Your Site’s Uptime

I recently did a small experiment to evaluate the reliability and response time of various website monitoring services available on the Internet.

In case you are new, these services continuously monitor your website(s) for downtime and send email alerts as soon as your web server goes down or becomes slow and inaccessible. You get another alert when the site is up again.

For this test, I configured my site with Uptime Party, Pingdom, Watch Mouse, Site Uptime and Zoho’s Site 24×7. They are all commercial site monitoring services but also offer a trial version which is good for around 30 days.

Now as you would know, the site went down last week for a couple of hours due to some issues with the file server of the web hosting company but this was a good opportunity to test how quick and reliable these site monitoring services are.

Here’s a snapshot of email alerts that came from all the above services along with the exact time when these alerts were received.

As you may have noticed, Pingdom was able catch the downtime within seconds while Watch Mouse and Site Uptime were late by 5-10 minutes. Uptime party sent a notification almost 30 minutes after the site went down.

When the site was up and running again, Pingdom and WatchMouse were the first one to send an uptime email alert while the rest two were late by 10-15 minutes.

The problem resurfaced yesterday night when the site went down and here’s a snapshot of email alerts from the second instance. Pingdom response time impressed again.

I was not too sure why there were no email alerts from Site24×7 and it later turned out that site monitoring was disabled in the control panel. Have no clue why that happened so can’t really comment on Zoho’s service.

Finally, here’s a quick chart comparing the price of various website monitoring services for bloggers and small web publishers.

Site Monitoring Services	Free Service	Monitoring Interval	Number of Allowed Sites	Cost per month
Uptime Party	Yes	30 minutes	1	$0
Site Uptime Free	Yes	30 minutes	1	$0
Site Uptime Premium	No	5 minutes	3	$5
Pingdom	No / 30 Day Trial	1 minute	5	$10
Watch Mouse Free	Yes	60 minutes	1	$0
Watch Mouse Premium	No / 30 Day Trial	5 minutes	1	$36
Site 24×7 Free	Yes	60 minutes	2	$0
Site 24×7 Premium	No / 15 Day Trial	5-30 minutes	Unlimited	$1-4 per URL

The Best Website Monitoring Services for Tracking Your Site’s Uptime - Digital Inspiration

Make iPhone Ringtones from MP3 Songs Using iTunes - Video Tutorial

This easy-to-follow video tutorial from CNET explains how to create iPhone ringtones using just the iTunes software – the steps stay the same for both Mac and Windows computers.

You may use iTunes to convert any MP3 song into an iPhone ringtone provided the song file is not protected by DRM. This means the technique won’t work with iTunes store music but is perfect for creating ringtones from songs that you purchased from Amazon store or ripped from a CD.

Related: Make MP3 Ringtones Online with MyBytes

Make iPhone Ringtones from MP3 Songs Using iTunes - Video Tutorial - Digital Inspiration

The Unnecessary Complex Design of Google Blogs Search

A somewhat disappointing fact about Google Blogs is that the site has been written purely in JavaScript so all you’ll see is a blank page if you try opening Google Blogs Search in a browser that doesn’t support JavaScript (like screen readers) or a browser that has JavaScript disabled - something that’s quite common on mobile phones.

No Google Blogs Search for non-JavaScript browsers

Maybe Google decided to go with a JavaScript-only site to prevent screen scraping or is it anything to do with Google Chrome that is known to render JavaScript faster than other browsers.

Another issue, as I mentioned before, is the amount of spam content in Google Blog Search. For instance, the following story is from a blog that is republishing content from TechCrunch.

Spam Content in Google Blogs Search

Surprisingly, that spam blog made its way into a news cluster on Google Blog Search but the original story from TechCrunch can nowhere be found. This I think is an important issue that Matt didn’t touch up in his article comparing Google Blogs with Techmeme.

Personally, I don’t feel that Techmeme has anything to worry about yet.

The Unnecessary Complex Design of Google Blogs Search - Digital Inspiration

Google Blogs Search Gets Charts and News Clustering

Google today released a new version of Google Blogs Search that displays the most important stories of the day in a cluster similar to what you have in Google News.

Link: blogsearch.google.com 

The site is a slight mix of Techmeme and Technorati in the sense that you can get an idea of the all the hot stories from the home page itself and each cluster has a Technorati style chart showing how may blogs are talking about that story.

News clustering in Google Blogs Search

Charts in Google Blogs Search

While this is a great development, I will probably stick with the old and trusted Techmeme as the amount of spam content indexed by Google Blogs Search is way too high. Techmeme indexes only limited sources like Google News and is therefore very clean.

Related: Difference Between Blog Search and Web Search

Google Blogs Search Gets Charts and News Clustering - Digital Inspiration