10 Search Engines You Might Want To Bookmark

Posted by | Posted in search engines | Posted on 27-10-2008

We all know about Google, MSN, Yahoo, but what about those other search engines ? The ones which you might never have known existed.

I put together a list of 10 Search Engines that might enhance your time online.

Science Hack Search Engine

Science Hack, A Search Engine dedicated to Science Videos. Allows you to easily find videos related to various Science Subjects. These include :

  • Psychology
  • Physics
  • Biology
  • Robotics
  • Chemistry

Most of the Videos I looked at appear to be hosted on YouTube, at first I though this was just a YouTube search aggregator but apparently every Science Video list is reviewed by an expert in the subject to determine its accuracy.

Addict-o-matic, A search Aggregator / Mashup. Allows you to pull content based on your keyword from a whole range of sites and mash them together on one page and then Bookmark that page. It grabs the latest content from providers such as:

  • YouTube
  • Google Blog Search
  • Digg
  • Twitter
  • Live.com
  • Wordpress
  • Wikio

And many more. Here’s the bookmark I created .. Addict-o-matic

Tag Galaxy

TagGalaxy, A beautiful 3D Animated Tag site, Which Grabs Images from Flickr and renders them on a 3D Sphere, This one really has too be seen.

Tip: When you want to view the photos for your tags, click the Sphere in the middle!!

Wikio is another information portal, grabbing you the latest news from a range of sources including blogs, have voting similar to Digg. Follow all the latest news for the subjects that interest you.

Scour feels like the usual type of search engine, Will search Yahoo, Google blogs, Has an Image search for Flickr, They also have a video search. Which is what I use it for the most. A toolbar is also available for your web browser . But I haven’t taken the time to try it out yet.

FindSounds is a Search Engine for those that are musically inclined. Find Sounds will search for mp3, wave Au, AIFF files, has a range of options including sample rates and file size. This site is more targeted towards those that work on music projects and are looking for new sound bits.

SearchMe.com, This one i really like. I stumbled across this one via StumbleUpon. This is the typical search engine with a difference. As you can see from my snapshot your results show up in what they call a Stack, The stack is animated and shows a full image shot of each website.

You can save your stacks, they also now have a toolbar. Overall this if anything is a fun way of searching. At Least I think so.

PDF Search Engine is as it sounds, A search engine dedicated to searching for PDF files, With this engine you can find allsorts of useful information, search for ebooks, How to, Manuals etc.. Worth a look..

Sputtr Search is a multi-search site. Allowing you to search a whole range of website as seen from the screenshot above, those big web 2.0 like buttons allows you to search for your content on those site. Sites include:

  • YouTube
  • Google
  • StumbleUpon
  • Amazon
  • Ebay

And many more, I quite like the design of the site also its fast so that’s always a plus.

ClipBlast Easy search though multiple content providers for your favorite video clips. Having multiple content providers makes searching for your videos alot easier. Go check it out and see for yourself.

This finishes up the 10 Search Engines You Might Want To Bookmark, Of course this is only 10 Search Engines. There is indeed alot more out there.

Happy Searching.

ZenPhoto A Simple Web Gallery

Posted by | Posted in Zenphoto | Posted on 25-10-2008

ZenPhoto, An open Source Web Gallery that’s both simple & fully featured..



ZenPhoto, describes itself as a simple and useful web gallery for your website that’s fully featured. Their philosophy is “Simple is better”.  I couldn’t agree more with this, having used many different web gallery’s over the years I can finally say that Ive found a web gallery that does exactly what it says it does.

Although ZenPhoto is simple its still fully featured. With support for Cruft Free URLs, Multi Admin Rights,  Tags, Search, Themes and Plug-ins, while still remaining very friendly and easy to use. A full list of of features can be found on ZenPhoto

To my surprise ZenPhoto doesn’t just support the Standard Image file formats, it also support a range of video formats! Yes you can add video files to your gallery With support for .FLV, .MP4, .MOV and .3GP not only that it will also support  MP3 format too!

One of the features that I really like is the ability to navigate your gallery and edit the Title’s and Description’s directly from the page. I find doing this allot easier as I don’t have to look at rows and rows of tables.

Installing ZenPhoto is a breeze.

  1. Download ZenPhoto
  2. Upload Zenphoto to Your Website
  3. Configure your Database

You can download the Latest Version of ZenPhoto from their website http://www.zenphoto.org at the time of writing this their latest version is 1.2.  Once you have Downloaded it, You need to re-upload it to your website, you can do this with FTP software. If your using FireFox you could try out FireFTP, a free extension for FireFox.

After Uploading ZenPhoto point your web browser to:

www.yoursite.org/zenphoto/zp-core/setup.php

File out the Setup form with your database and site information, if you haven’t already setup a database for this you can do so via your web host cpanel or phpmyadmin or of course what ever else your host supports.

You can now login and configure your web gallery, under the Options Tab you will find the Gallery Configuration. Here you can setup the Title & Description and URL of your Gallery, Change RSS settings, Set your Dates and many other options. Have a look through them they really aren’t that hard to understand. One option I recommend enabling is Mod-Rewrite option, This will enable the Cruft Free URLs. Gives you URLs that are both pretty and search engine friendly.

The themes tab will allow you to choose a theme for your new gallery, there is a few there by default but if you want more check out some of the themes on ZenPhoto.

Installing a theme is easy, just download the theme you want and upload to the themes directory on your site. Then go back to the Themes tab on your admin panel and choose your theme. Its that easy. Am sure there are other themes out there on the web.

You can now go ahead and upload your Images either with the Upload tab or FTP them to your Albums folder.

You can check out my ZenPhoto Gallery <<< And leave some comments and let me know what you think.

Have fun with your new web gallery.

Anonymous URL Generator

Posted by | Posted in Projects | Posted on 21-10-2008

Anonymous URL Generator can take any URL and anonymize it..

If you own a website you can use our tool to prevent your site from appearing in server logs as the referrer. Why would you want to do this ?

For Example, My Friend runs a Photo Site containing all his Photography work, He doesn’t mind people posting those images on their own website provided they first get permission and also provide a link back, for this reason he didn’t want to disable hot linking to his images. If he wants to find out if any sites are linking to his pictures without permission he just looks at his server referrer logs.

But however as I pointed out to him this isn’t really a sure fire way of knowing if someone is linking to his photos without permission, I said they could just use my URL Anonymizer Generator.
After Generating a link to one of his photos I posted it on one of my sites and clicked it.

My Friend then checked his server logs to see if my site would appear.. and guess what ? It didn’t. The only site that appeared was http://anon.projectarchive.net from that he can’t determine who it is that’s really linking to his site.

Of course there is am sure a few other nice reason to be using this.. but ill leave that how you use this tool up to you.

Oh and sorry for the long story :)

Anonymous URL Generator

TempBox A Temporary Email For Free

Posted by | Posted in Projects | Posted on 21-10-2008

Ofter when you want to sign-up to a new service they will ask you for your email address so that they can send you a conformation link in order to verify your account or email address..

As you may know giving out your email address to every service you sign up to will often result in your account being targeted by spammer..

So I created TempBox. Over at TempBox you can get a free Temporary email address. Either one you choose or one you create.  This address will only remain active for a certain period of time. At the time of writing this its set at 30 Min’s ..

But that’s OK you can request another 30 Min’s with the click of the button or grab yourself another TempBox email.

You can now post this address anywhere you want receive the needed email and or even reply to it and then dump the box and never have to worry that your real email address is going to get spammed.

Head over and try it out for your self.

TempBox

XProxy - Surf The Web Anonymously

Posted by | Posted in Projects | Posted on 21-10-2008

Have you ever been at Work, School, The Library or an Internet Cafe and went to log onto one of your favourite sites only to find that its being blocked by a local security policy or Firewall ?

Maybe you live in one of those country’s that have an active nationwide censorship policy blocking access to website like

  • Google.com
  • YouTube.com
  • Myspace.com
  • Bebo.com

Or you are simply concerned about leaving behind your IP Address on various webservers then XProxy is for you. XProxy is a little project ive been working on.  Its Free and easy to use, no need to download software or even configure you web browser.

With XProxy you can bypass company security policies, Firewalls, Filtering Software and even get around cencorship software. If you can access XProxy then you can Surf the Web Anonymously. Best of all Its Free..

The site is currently online and Live and working, So go check it out and let me know what you think and if you find this free service to be of any value.