Category: Cool Tools


Virtual phone number

Filed Under: Business Nuts and Bolts, Cool Tools by Debbie — Leave a comment
September 11, 2009

I’ve been working on really cranking up the quality and service of my hosting reseller company in the past few weeks, and decided that I need a dedicated phone number. I’m already using Google Voice for Red Kite Creative (yes, I got an invite last year, nyahhh), but I need something that’s only for NOCO Hosting.

I poked around for awhile tonight and finally decided to try Vumber since they have a free 30-day trial and I could get a local number. I just signed up, my number’s already active so we’ll see how it goes.

Here are some of Vumber’s features:

  • Free voicemail box
  • You can call out on your Vumber too
  • Many area codes and localities available
  • No per-minute charges
  • Forwarding to the number of your choice
  • Voicemail sent to you as email
  • Easy call control (ring-through, voicemail, etc.)
  • Caller ID
  • Call blocking

Vumber is $9.95 per month. Seems like a good idea and I saw a few other positive reviews about their service, so I’m a little excited to see how it works out.

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Easy way to convert .csv to an HTML table

Filed Under: Cool Tools, Web Design by Debbie — Leave a comment
September 2, 2009

I’ve got a 112-row, 6-column spreadsheet that a client just sent me and I need to get the data into an HTML table. That’s a lot of copying and pasting so I went online to find a more efficient way – and found this awesome .csv converter site. This is just outstanding – now I just have to add my CSS styles.

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Browser testing services

Filed Under: Cool Tools, Web Design by Debbie — Leave a comment
March 15, 2009

I always test my sites in the latest crop of browsers – FF, IE, Safari (Mac and Win), Opera. I’m still supporting IE6, unfortunately, but once IE8 comes out I may put a stop to that. Mostly I don’t find it too horrible; a few conditional comments usually take care of whatever issues pop up.

I was invited into a Fundable group for an annual Browsercam account and just got word that I was one of the last two that made it in. I find Browsercam to be really convenient for Mac testing since I don’t, at this point, own a Mac. (When my Dell laptop finally dies, it will be replaced with a Mac).

I know there are some pretty good free browser testing sites out there now, but when I only have to pay $25 as part of a large group and I get remote access to live machines, I can’t really pass that by.

Here are a few of the free browser testing URL’s:

More info on cross browser testing from Smashing Magazine.

Speaking of Fundable, that’s a pretty neat site in itself. You can set up a webpage to collect funding for anything, from trips to medical bills to group purchases like our Browsercam page.

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New portfolio launched

Filed Under: Cool Tools, Graphics, Web Design by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 20, 2009

I’d used phpslideshow for my website’s portfolio a few years ago, but lately it had gotten unwieldy. Because of the layout of my site, I could only fit in three columns of thumbnails, and I’ve launched quite a few projects recently. The thumbnails were way below the actual content of the page, so I decided it was time for something new.

I really like SimpleViewer after using it for a client’s site, and that’s the one I started working with first, but I needed more control over the captions.

One of my tweeple pointed out how nicely Javascript-based Highslide allows you to style captions by showing my his own nicely-done portfolio, so I decided to try it. I liked that Highslide is a thumbnail viewer and not primarily a slideshow – that’s just what I needed. I also really liked the very nice caption styling options.

I downloaded a copy and found it extremely easy to work with – in about 30 minutes I had the first few thumbnails set up and working. This is a very nice script. It took me several hours to dump all 36+ projects into the page, but I’m very happy with the results in my new portfolio.

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Evernote

Filed Under: Cool Tools by Debbie — Leave a comment
February 4, 2009

I installed Evernote on my machines several months ago but had never really used it. However, when I had my laptop in the workshops at Web Directions North on Monday, I discovered that Evernote is actually quite convenient.

I can write or drag text into a note, or drag an image or web URL, and then tag the post so that I can search for it later. Pretty cool. I’ll probably start using it more; I can take notes about a project and tag it with the project name for easy recall. It’s kind of like a perpetual notepad.

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