Screenshot A Site

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: July 24th, 2009 | 0 Comments

When designing websites, being able to take a screenshot of how it looks is always very useful.  However trying to get the whole page in can prove fairly difficult. Usually you will have to take multiple screenshots and then crop them together.

There is a great site that will make a full page screenshot of any site and will then allow you to edit it online, add arrow indicators and also you can crop a certain section out if you want. Then when you are finished editing, even if you didn’t make any changes you can just save it to your computer.

So this is how easy it is to make a full page screenshot, any site you want to make a screenshot of you just add http://aviary.com/ before the url and then press go, and it will begin to generate a new page with a screenshot of that site you wanted.

For example, if you wanted to make a screenshot of my blog here, the URL is http:// leateds.com all you would have to do is add in the URL in bold above before it to look like this: http://aviary.com/http://leateds.com and it will make a great screenshot.

This tool could come in useful if you are making a website for a client, and in order to show something to them, you could make a quick screenshot and then e-mail it to them for their approval. Or if you had a portfolio of sites you made, you could use these images as large previews of previous projects.

So if a site you once owned is gone, you will always have the screenshot of it. Also if you are going to re-design a website you could take a screenshot before and after it to see how different the site was previously.

Also on the aviary site they offer a load of free programs for image editing. They are a free alternative to the likes of Photoshop and the great thing is that you can use them anywhere as they do not save to your computer; you just simply run them live online! They actually load really fast! :D .

I will definitely be using these tools more often now that I know about them; they will be usefully for some quick editing. I have bookmarked this site now for quick access :D .

Why Did My Analytics Break?

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: July 22nd, 2009 | 4 Comments

On this blog I use Google analytics to track how many visits I get to the site. I also use it on all my other sites that I have made. It is by far the best tool to get statistics on a website.

For some reason though, about 15 days ago, my Google analytics stopped recording data on my visitors! I now have 11 days of stats that are just 0, I do not mind that I cannot see how much traffic I got, the thing that I am wondering is how it stopped working!

I use a plugin in wordpress to add the code to the site, it makes it simple, less likely to break the source code of the site, but it is not very likely anybody could possibly break the source code of their site by adding the Google analytics code.

So for the few days that my analytics were down, I was trying loads of different plugins to try and get them working again, but I had no luck. Then suddenly one day it started to work again.

The graph above shows the traffic to this blog for the past few days, you can see the sudden dip in the graph; this is when the Google analytics tracking stopped working! It is strange that it suddenly begun to work again.

I know that other users of Google Analytics have experienced this before and as far as I know there is no known reason why it happens. If I were to make a suggestion to what might have happened, it would be that maybe there may have been maintenance occurring at Google, however I doubt it would affect tracking for more than a day or 2. Also maybe there might have been a huge increase in traffic to Google analytics.

The Way To See Tweets – VisibleTweets!

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: July 21st, 2009 | 1 Comments

Over the last week, I have really gotten back into the whole tweeting thing :D There were always tweets coming onto my twitter profile however they were just links that would direct people to my latest blog post!

I used to always use twitter when I was in college, however now that I am on my summer holidays, it has been getting neglected a bit :( . So now I have kind of become addicted to sending out tweet updates.

I have also started to follow more people now on twitter, to widen the information that I am receiving, I am trying my best to find more people from Ireland on twitter so I can follow them, and it is always useful to stay up to date with local info too!

Anyway that is kind of going off topic, one night when I received a link on one of the updates from twitter to a great websites that displays tweets in a kind of unique way.

The site is called VisibleTweets, you just type in a word you want to know about, or you can @ someone to just see their updates, so if you @leateds you will just see my updates! It displays in a really colourful way, the background changes every so often and the text kind of falls into place.

The transition from one tweet to another is done in a clever way, some of the letters that are in the current tweet that are in the next tweet stay while the other letters fade out, then the letters that stay behind are re-ordered and extra letters are added to make a new tweets message.

It really is an interesting way to see twitter updates.  There are many different methods to searching, any of the search operators that can be used on twitter can also be used on VisibleTweets.