Sign up for a free account with Skinniyo and go on browsing challenges. Find challenges that you think will help you lose some weight and go ahead join them and face it. Some sample challenges are like “losing 100lbs within the next year” or “exercise 3 times a week”. You will also find some esay and quick tips on diets, exercises shared by other people. You will also earn badges as you go on completing challenges. If that’s not all, you will lose some weight for sure.

Thomas Alva Edison once remarked “One per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration”. Toiling for something is key to achieve it but we still need words of wisdom and motivation to get that extra push towards the end result. Many has the power to get self-motivated in the process of achieving a goal, while many need others for that. So if you are willing to be thinner for the next summer and need some free advice and words of encouragement, then Skinniyo is good place for you.

Skinniyo: Stay In Shape With A Little Motivation originally published on Ampercent

There are advanced server monitoring tools like Pingdom which immediately sends an email notification whenever your site gets down or is unavailable. But the sad part is that most of the server or website monitoring tools come under a premium plan and there are very few free site monitoring tools that require minimal setups.

If you use Google Chrome as your default browser and want to monitor the server status of a whole bunch of blogs, forums, websites or FTP servers, try the server monitor chrome extension

Once the extension is installed, you can add all your websites, blogs an FTP servers whom you want to monitor. The options panel allows you to check the server status after a predefined time interval (e.g 5 minutes).

That’s it, the extension goes to work on it’s own and continues monitoring your websites in the background. A green signal is returned when your website is up and running while a red one is returned when your site goes down. In addition to this, the Chrome extension also sends desktop notifications when your website or FTP server throws a time out error, connection error or an unexpected response.

Here is how the notification button looks in Google Chrome:

In addition to monitoring a top level domain, subdomains, you can individually monitor the status of any web URL directly from the browser. This is extremely useful, considering the fact that many bloggers have multiple sites, service and portfolio pages which needs to be monitored 24 /7 and what better way to monitor multiple sites and servers free of cost. Give this a try !

Server Monitor Chrome Extension Checks Uptime Status Of Multiple Sites And Servers Parallely originally published on Ampercent

We have earlier discussed different tools to measure the load time of a blog or website. This includes using Google Webmaster tools to measure the average load time of a website and load or stress testing a website for large traffic. Then there are different tools e.g Pingdom for measuring a website loading time but there is a serious disadvantage in all of them.

None of these tools can measure the loading time from different geographic locations or browsers. Well, you may want to find out how fast your site loads from a broadband connection in US and how fast your site loads from a generic dial up connection from any other country. All the load time monitoring tools provide an average report which might not be very effective or specific for different ISP’s across the globe.

This is where Loads.in proves to be handy – the site lets you find the loading time of any website from different countries and browsers.

Using the site is fairly simple, all you have to do is key in the address of the website, choose the countries and the browser. Then hit the “Go” button and the tool will fetch the loading time of your website for that specific country and browser combination. In addition, you will also be shown a thumbnail preview of your site’s design and how it looks on the client side, which is handy if you want to test your site’s design compatibility for different browsers and resolutions.

Supported browsers include Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.6, Google Chrome 8 and Safari 4 (No opera).  There is no support for IE6, though you can use Microsoft Superpreview to test your site’s design compatibility For Internet Explorer 6 and 7

There is more, loads.in will also perform a check on your site’s HTML code and throw in error reports when it finds one. You can click the waterfall chart to find the loading time of specific components and files e.g CSS, JS, Images and other HTML objects. This helps in figuring out what’s slowing down your website and which objects needs to be removed or optimized for better loading of your website’s pages.

Benchmarking Reports

You can perform the tests using different countries and browser combinations and use the report for benchmarking. This will help you find out the regions where your site takes ages to load, so you can decide on your site’s internal architecture and optimize the code for more faster performance.

We tested Loads.in with this tech blog and following were the results (testing was carried out using Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari)

[ via Snaphow.com ]

Related tip: Improve your site’s loading time by loading images on demand

Check Your Site’s Loading Time On Different Geographic Locations originally published on Ampercent

Do not have any HTML coding skills and neither you have any webserver, hosting space, domain name registered under your name ?

Have a Dropbox account ? Droppages let’s you create simple static websites from your computer without having to touch any codes, download any software, register on some other website or tweak anything. It will just take 2 minutes.

1. Download this demo site, extract it and change the folder name to somename.dropbox.com from demo.dropbox.com

2. Open the contents folder and edit the contents of the individual pages. You will need to open each of the notepad documents and enter your own page content in plain text, no HTML coding is required at all.

3. When you are done editing the page contents and have previewed your mini website locally, put the entire folder on your computers”My Dropbox” folder.

4. All done, share the folder with server1@droppages.com and wait for the approval to kick in.

When you’re approved, your mini website is live on the web. See example

We have already written on how you can create static websites with your Dropbox account [ also see this video tutorial]. This technique involves creating the local site first using any HTML editor like Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Frontpage , previewing it locally and then uploading the entire folder to your Dropbox account. Then you can copy the public link of your mini website’s folder and share it with anyone.

Droppages takes this very idea to the next level, allows novice users to use Dropbox as their free web hosting gear.

Don’t know any HTML code ? No problem, just dump all the content and images in the respective folders of the demo site and share the folder with server1@droppages.com. Your website should be live within a few minute.

Alternatively, you might also want to try Staticloud – a new web application which lets anyone create small mini websites just by uploading a local archived copy of the site to Staticloud’s servers. And the best thing regarding Staticloud is that you don’t need a Dropbox account and neither you need to register or give them their email address ( see example site)

Note: Droppages.com is in early beta and there are only limited invites available. The developer says that using a custom domain name will be a premium feature in the coming days.

DropPages Let’s You Create Static websites Using Your Dropbox Account, With Zero HTML Skills originally published on Ampercent

The ceremony which showcased the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, according to Rod Beckstom, CEO of ICANN, needs to be marked as one of the most essential days in the history of Internet or World Wide Web. Speaking about the same Beckstorm said, “It marks far more than the transition from one Internet protocol to another; it marks the amazingly successful growth of the Internet with people all over the world coming online. A pool of more than 4 billion Internet addresses has just been emptied this morning; completely depleted, there are no more“.

As stated earlier, the cost of this transition is quite elaborate. In the sense each player or actor who plays a role in the internet world needs to address the cost with respect to the kind of role he/ she plays. John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) said. “The fact of the matter is that we’ve known about this transition and there are a lot of parties that have actively deployed IPv6“. Curran also said that ARIN itself is using IPv6, and he also noted that the cost an organization incurs to deploy the latest IP version is not too much, except for a little configuration work to turn on IPv6.

Major content companies like Google and Facebook also have their IPv6 versioned websites and the deployment of the same has also happened for the sake of normal business of making content available. But they haven’t yet made these services available online and they will do so during June on the World IPv6 Day. Curran also suggested that online firms and any firm that has its presence online need to ensure that their projects that will be rolled out are both IPv4 and IPv6 compliant. This is done in order to make sure that there are no hiccups as far as accessing website on both versions of the Internet Protocol.

Now coming to the actual cost in terms of money in ensuring there is a worldwide IPv6 adoption. The estimate of moving IPv6 to an emerging country of about 50 million people is roughly a billion dollars and that probably includes upgrades they want to do to their network. Relative to the 2005 report which estimated the U.S. federal government shift to IPv6 to be $75 billion, a global transition would definitely cost billions of dollars.

IPv4 To IPv6 Transition – Is It A Costly Affair? originally published on Ampercent

Internet Search Is Broken

As far back as the inception of the Internet, the way we find and interact with information has been a one way street. Websites like Google, Yahoo, and even Bing have held us to the model of search where we input text and receive text in return. Video search brought us closer to something that could be universally accessible and available. However, the old style of Internet search is not perfect.

What is Qwiki?

Qwiki, a new search engine model backed by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, was launched in the fall of 2010 as an invitation only alpha test. The company opened the product to public testing on Monday, January 24, 2011.

The new service is described as providing information in “rich media narrative” form. This is a combination of videos, photos, and audio clips relating to the search topic. Much like Wikipedia, users can add to the wealth of knowledge on Qwiki, and even embed Qwiki’s on their own pages.

“We’ve all seen science fiction films (or read novels) where computers are able to collect data on behalf of humans, and present the most important details. This is our goal at Qwiki- to advance information technology to the point it acts human,” Qwiki explains in its About Us page.

In my experience with as an invited alpha tester for Qwiki, they accomplish this goal very well. It is not a tool for finding a vast amount of information in one shot, but more for helping you to better define a topic of interest.

How To Use Qwiki

Qwiki’s interface is actually very straight forward. Once you arrive at the home page, you simply type your desired topic into the search box. The Qwiki will load, and begin to play automatically. Here, I have searched for ‘Google’ on Qwiki.

Some of the best features in Qwiki come from the interaction the user can have with the result. At any point during the Qwiki, you can pause, rewind, or fast forward the Qwiki using the button and slider in the middle of the page. You can also click on any image or video, as well as text links, to see a larger version or to access more information.

At the end of a Qwiki, you are given a set of relevant Qwikis that you can choose to watch. Overall, I find that the end suggestions are both relevant and useful. On top of that, they help you with more information on your topic.

A Verdict on Qwiki

In my opinion, Qwiki is a great change to the way internet search works. I find the results helpful and rounded, as well as entertaining. I am incredibly excited to see where this company goes in the future. If they can find the funding and market penetration needed to make a dent in Wikipedia, they will be huge.

What are your thoughts on Qwiki? Do you think it is going to be successful? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Related:

1. AskKids.com: A Search Engine For Kids, From Ask.com
2. PDF Search Engine : Search For PDF Files on Google
3. Search Google By Speaking – Voice Search Extension For Google Chrome

Qwiki: A Full Media Immersion Search Engine With Better Relevance originally published on Ampercent

Wufoo is a service that makes creating and designing forms as easy as child’s play. It provides users with a drag-n-drop interface to create forms. The backend code is handled by Wufoo solely. This gives you the freedom to design with a flawless coding.

What I liked about Wufoo

• Paypal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net Integration
• File Upload option available
• SSL Protection
• Custom reports can be generated to diagnose form activities and entries.
• One Time Integration : This is the fun part. Once you are ready to embed a form into your website, grab the Javascript code and place it on the desired webpage. From the next time, if you need to change any attributes, fields in the form just do it in the Wufoo admin panel. The changes once saved will be reflected in the webpage you had embedded the form earlier.
• Multi-step form creation.

The service has several usage plans which are displayed below :

Wufoo : Create, Design, Embed Forms The Easy Way originally published on Ampercent

explore gravity social network

You can also connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts with your Gravity account. You can win badges after you had finished certain posting milestones. Users can comment on any topic of their interest and share views with other like minded people. The user interface is well structured and easy to navigate for anybody without getting lost midway. As the concept is about meeting new people its really easy to start with this service. Just signup for a free account, explore a bit and you will find “worlds” of your interest. “Orbit” around the worlds of your interest and you will find intelligent minds to share your ideas.

The service was launched on December, 2009 by Amit Kapur, Steve Pearman, and Jim Benedetto. Gravity promises to be a fresh new idea in the social networking buzz. I am definitely looking forward to meeting new people up there. Hope to find you there too.

Gravity : Find People Who Shares Your Interests originally published on Ampercent

In that case here are some online tools that will zip your files and let you download them in proper zip formats.

Use Gmail To Zip Files up to 25Mb

If you have images and documents that you would want to convert into a zip archive format – why not use Gmail.

1. Compose a new email message and upload the documents and images as an attachment.

2. Send the email to another email address you own and open the inbox of the later one.

3. While reading the email you sent, you will see a hyperlink to download all attachments as a zip file.

That’s it. You have just converted the documents and images into zip files. Now you can download these attachments or send the zipped files to anyone else via email.

Use Google Docs To Zip Word Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations

Suppose you have a large number of office documents that you want to send to your friend. You cannot attach the zipped file because Gmail has a limit of 25 mb per attachment. And manually uploading files as email attachment is certainly not an option as it will take hours to finish.

In that case, you can use Google docs to send zipped archives of up to 2 GB. Follow the steps mentioned below:

1. Upload all the documents in your Google account.

2. When you are finished uploading, go to the “All Documents” tab and select all the documents. Click the “More actions” button and select “Export”

3. Next, select the documents that you want to download as a zipped archive. If there are large number of documents to be converted into zipped format, you can request Gmail to email you the link when the zipping process is complete. After that, you can download all the documents as zipped archive from the download link which will be sent as a new email message.

Now, you can forward this email message to anyone as all the documents will be attached as a zip attachment. (also read: how to open excel spreadsheets without Microsoft office)

A much simpler solution is what follows next. Create a new folder in Google docs and move all the documents in that folder. Now share that folder with the recipients email address. Ask the recipient to log into his Google account and download the documents as zip archives using the method described above.

Online Utilities to Zip Files Online

There may be situations where you would want to use an online tool to zip files online, rather than just using Gmail.

NippyZip: NippyZip is a free online compression utility that can zip up to 10 files online to create an archive. You can email the zipped file to any email address and it works best when you are using a public computer and do not want to open your email account to do the job.

Nippyzip can compress files of size 5024 kb and you do not need to create an account or register with the site. When the compression is complete, you get an email which points you to a URL where you can download the zipped file.

Filetac.com: Similar service but useful if you are browsing the web from a mobile. Just browse to the website and upload your files (2mb per file). After the upload is complete, you can download the zipped archive in your computer.

If you are using a mobile to browse the web, just browse to the Filetac homepage and enter the code that you are given after the file upload.

Similar services: Online Zip.

3 Tools to Create Zip Files Online originally published on Ampercent

1. Go to Online functions website and type any string which you can easily remember (e.g your pet name or yahoo.com) in the input field.

2. Hit the “Calculate MD5” button and the website will generate a “MD5 hash key”.

3. Copy the first eight characters of that key and use it as your new secure password.

This password is secure and at the same time you don’t need to remember it. Whenever you forget the password, just visit this site again and input the same string. It will generate the same code as it generated earlier. Hence you can remember your secure password by just remembering an easy string.[ Thanks CNET ]

Alternative: If this one sounds too geeky, you can use Keepass to remember difficult passwords. If you don’t want to use a password manager, write it down in a notepad file and encrypt the document.

How to Remember a Difficult Password by Remembering an Easy Name originally published on Ampercent