This handy Google Labs tool will allow you to see your website as seen by users with different screen resolutions. One of the major challenges while designing a website template is to design the template so that user can read the relevant information at the very first glance itself. Sadly this depends on the visitors screen resolution. This tool from Google Labs will overlay a transparent ruler like layout to the web address you give it, thus enabling you to see how your web site looks at  screen resolutions other than yours.

Screen Shot of Simple Informations on browser Size by Google Labs

The tool allows basic settings such as transparency adjustment of the ruler. You can use Google Analytics to know what resolution is used by most number of your visitors. Then you can head over to Browser size and see what all portions of your website is viewable at that resolution. This will allow you to make your web site more accessible and improve the “page views/visit” as well as “bounce rate”.

The following is a screen shot of my Google Analytics page showing the details of this blogs visitors and their screen resolution.

Statisctics of visitors to this site by resolution - Google Analytics

Link : Browser Size | Google Labs | Google Analytics

Disk Usage Analyser(DUA) is a GNome ustility available for Linux. As the name indicates DUA scans the filesystem and finds out how much space is occupied by each directory and file. It then shows the usage along side a folder tree as a bar graph.When you click on a directory name, memory usage by each subfolder and files can be seen as an arc diagram on the right pane.

Left side shows a tree structure and bar graphs while the right pane shows the selected directories memory usage and its contents.

The Disk Usage Analyzer can be used to find out which directory or file uses how much space. It can be very helpful if you are trying to clean-up some Hard Disk Space from your PC. A similar tool for Windows is WinDIrStat at Sourceforge.net. but this one is a little less visaully attractive one. For KDE users KDirStat might be a solution.

All the web sites having a chat facility has now got an instant messenger client. So a messenger that can handle multiple services was one I was waiting for a long time. I think this would be the case for most of you. But which client would support multiple services as well as run on both Windows and Linux? The answer is Pidgin a free and is distributed under GPL.

Pidgin is an instant messaging program for Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unixs. You can talk to your friends using AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr.

Pidgin is the default IM client that comes with Linux(well some distros only – as Saman pointed out in the comments). Almost all of the features of other IM clients are available in pidgin also. But there is no support for video and audio chat. Although file transfer is integrated, most of the time it won’t work (at least when I tried).For pidgin to work properly t\you may need GTK. You can find a version of GTK along with pidgin itself. If not goto GTK for Windows.

One of the main advantages of pidgin is that it can sign in to multiple usernames at once. You can sign in to you GTalk, ICQ, Yahoo… messenger accounts at once. So you don’t need to manage multiples Windows which is a great feature.

PidGin can be downloaded here : Pidgin for Windows, PidGin is available by default in Linux – or install by sudo apt-get install pidgin.

Snippy is the most efficient screen capture software I have seen till date : its free, it’s light at only 88Kb and needs no installation. When snippy is run it is hidden in the notification area , but when you click on it a “capture pointer” appears which lets you draw the required area. Or you can press shift to draw a rectangle. It supports up to 5 image formats for saving. In contrast to other applications all communication with snippy can be done through and only through the right click on notification area icon. Snippy is really a great piece of software with an appropriate name and a matching icon. Try it out today itself.

Pros :
really lite (88Kb) and requires no installation, Not system hungry, Supports five image formats, no irritating window, Hot Key allowed – F11 (changeable), border width and color changeable. Snippy ’s captured files are not lost even if you forget to save, they are automatically saved as JPEG to user temp folder which is “C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temp” with filenames Snippyxxx.jpg

Cons :
No timer functions, the border drawn is also included in captured image which can be irritating, No video capture. (Actually you cant blame Snippy. After all it is really lite and easy to use, it keeps all the promises to you)

Specifications :

File formats supported

Price : Free

Download Snippy executable for Windows

A Contact form is an essential form for any website. But if you are on blogger or a free host you wont be able to create one on yourself even if you know PHP. Although if you are running WP you can get plugin’s specific for that application. I use cForms for my contact forms.

So if you just need a frills free contact form you can place on your website you may try Contactify . It offers free contact forms as well as spam protection (word verification) for the service. You just need to copy paste the JavaScript they provide after you register.

Here is my sample contact form : Contact me

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Foxit software corporation is the makers of Foxit PDF tools. It includes PDF readers and editors both for the PC and mobile platforms. Although it is a payed product a free trial version can be obtained from Foxit. The trial version is as good as a full version except that in the trial version a water mark is added to the files you write.

Foxit PDF reader is one of the best available PDF readers. It is much lighter that Acrobat reader and also very much faster. You can download Foxit PDF reader here. To try the free PDF editor from Foxit go to the PDF editor Download page. If you want a full fledged PDF creator (not editor) you can try these methods

1. How to print and save as PDF files.

2. Save web pages as PDF files.

3. Free Online Files converter.