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5 Cool Chrome Browser Extensions That Help You Visualize Your Browsing History

Saikat Basu — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:30:23 +0000

The importance of clearing your browsing history is often drilled into us. It is a question of privacy because a snooper can easily enter your history folder and see the sites you have visited. A hacker can so easily enter a site and compromise your account if you have setup a weak password.

But the reverse is also true to a certain extent. You need your browsing history to go back to an important website and retrieve some information. Sometimes, your browsing history also tells you a lot about the quantity and quality of time you spend on the internet.

Try out the following Chrome extensions that give you a visual picture of your browsing habits via your browser’s history.

History Trends

History Trends displays your browser history in the form of an interactive statistical chart. But you don’t have to be a statistic student to understand all the graphs and lines. You can click on the graphs and filter your history according to the criteria available. Trends display your top ten visited domains and their URLs; daily stats and the busiest days with the daily visit counts. Graphs also break down the data to day, week, and month (time series graphs). A useful stat is the ‘transition type’ which basically plots how the browser navigated to a particular URL on a particular visit.

Visual History

Visual History again is an extension for the ‘scientifically inclined’. Browsing history is displayed as an intersection of nodes and sub-nodes. The interactive graph displays your browsing behavior as inter-relationships. For instance, two pages are linked together if you browsed them consecutively in less time than 20 minutes. Nodes are also color coded – older pages are in blue, current ones are in yellow. The tool has a zoom feature and along with the mouse, you can play around the graphic.

History Analyzer

From interactive graphic tools, we go to a simple one. History Analyzer is a very simple Chrome extension which takes your browsing history and puts it on a pie chart. Each slice of the pie represents the percentage of hits for that domain. The color coded pie chart tells you at a glance the domain which has been getting the most attention from you.

Chrome History X

Chrome History X replaces the default history and gives you a few richer tools to work with. It displays two fields which helps you search and manage your browsing history by date and keyword. You can delete selected histories or take the usual route of clearing all your history data in one go. A single click lets you visualize your browsing history with the help of a bubble chart. Associations between websites are shown by intersecting bubbles.

HistoryStats

History Stats provides you with what may seem like a dull display of sites visited; but take a closer look. The Chrome browser extension breaks down your browsing history into sites and the total number of visits and most recent visits to those web sites. You can sort your browser history by ascending or descending order of visit counts and last time visited. You can also go for selective deletion of historical links.

Admittedly, we don’t really care about our browsing history. It seems on the face of it, something that should be deleted when our browsing session is done with. But dive into it once in a while. Browsing history gives us a few footprints to follow to enhance our productivity. For instance, a glance with the help of these visual Chrome extensions can tell you that you are spending a lot of time on Facebook and not elsewhere. Alternatively, you are reaching a specific website in two hops, which you can reach in one to save some time.

These 5 Chrome extensions help you visualize your browsing history. But do tell us if you find them productive enough once in a while.

Visually See The Contents Of A Folder Or Hard Drive With Baobab [Linux]

Danny Stieben — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:01:39 +0000

Checking to see the structure and amount of contents on your hard drive is a pretty important capability. In fact, I just recently featured a program that does such a task for Windows. But the same program cannot be used on Linux (or other operating systems for that matter).

However, we’ve been gifted with a Linux-native program that offers a simplified set of features that is, in my opinion, easier to use and more visually appealing. Even more so, it usually comes with distributions that offer GNOME as the desktop environment. What is it and what exactly does it do?

About Baobab

Baobab is often masked in distributions by the name ‘Disk Usage Analyzer” rather than Baobab, but once you open the program and click on “About“, the name will suddenly appear. The name is based off the Baobab (tree), which is apparently the first kind of tree the developers thought of when making the program because of the tree’s unique way in which its bigger branches go off into smaller and smaller branches.

Overall, the program is lightweight, is easy to use, and offers some interesting visuals.

Installation (If Necessary)

Like mentioned above, if you’re running GNOME then Baobab should already be installed. You can launch it via the terminal or Alt+F2 by typing in “baobab“, or by finding “Disk Usage Analyzer” in the menus. In case it’s not installed, there are a number of ways to install it. It isn’t likely that Baobab is in its own package, but check with your distribution first.

For example, in Ubuntu, you can install gnome-utils via Synaptic, the Ubuntu Software Center, or by the command sudo apt-get install gnome-utils.

User Interface

Buttons

Once you launch the program, you’ll see how easy it is to use. At the top, you’ll see various buttons of what you can scan. This includes your home folder (recommended), the filesystem, a custom folder, or a remote location. There is also a stop button in case a scan is taking longer than you’d like and a refresh button to start a new scan for any changes.

Folder List

On the left side, you’ll see a list of all folders scanned and some information about them, such as the percentage of space the folder uses out of the entire scanned area, the actual size, and how many items are inside that specific folder. There are also arrows to the side of each folder so you can go inside those folders and see information about anything that is inside.

Colorful Graphs

On the right side, you’ll see a visual representation of the information shown on the left side. On the graph you can hover over certain sections and see more information about what it is representing. There is a Rings Chart and a Treemap Chart, and I recommend you look at both to see which one you prefer. One doesn’t give any more information than the other, but organizes the information a bit differently.

Preferences

Finally, there aren’t many things to configure at all, considering it’s supposed to be simple to use. The only things you can configure under “Preferences” are any other optional locations whenever you choose to click on the Filesystem button.

Conclusion

Baobab is indeed very simple and gets you results that you can understand quickly. I find the graphical charts to be very helpful and keeps it from being boring to being useful. I like to use Baobab occasionally to see if there is an excess of space being used in any of the folders in my home folder, and sometimes I use it simply to see the interesting rings it generates. Either way, it’s a good tool that could tell you some things about the files you’re storing that you didn’t know before.

Do you think Baobab is useful? What other features would you like to see added in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Figure Out Folder Contents With Better Directory Analyzer

Danny Stieben — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:00:49 +0000

If you have a lot of files on your hard drive, you will probably at one point have wondered what’s in those folders you created a very long time ago. You might have some problems answering that question yourself, especially if the folder is full of millions of sub-folders and files.

Scanning through each sub-folder would take forever, and you could also skip over something that may be important to you. For cases like these, you need the right tool for the job. Thankfully, such a tool exists, and it packs some amazing features that will even make it fun to look through all those folders.

About Better Directory Analyzer

Better Directory Analyzer, which I will from now on call BDA, is a simple freeware program that scans through the contents of any selected folder and spits out more information about it than you thought was possible. All scanned files can be sorted in a handful of different ways, which helps you quickly find certain files that you may be looking for. So how is this helpful compared to Windows Search?

Although Windows XP‘s version of Windows Search actually packed more of a punch, Windows 7‘s version only lets you search by filename, file size, and date modified (without using hidden operators). Windows 7 users can find benefit the most by using BDA as there are many different parameters to search and select files.

Installation and Launch

To install, you’ll need to head over to this page and click on the download link. At the time of this article, there is only a version 1.0, which is fine. Once downloaded, double click on the file to start the installer. Go through all the steps, and you’re done. You should now have a nice shortcut for BDA on your desktop. When you first start, you’ll land in the Files tab. Here is where you can choose the folder you wish to scan for its contents.

Either drag and drop a folder into the empty box in the middle, or click on the “Select folder” button on the bottom and then choose the desired folder. It will then take a couple seconds (more if the folder is large) to scan for its contents, and when it completes you should see all the found files listed in the box in the middle.

Features

Great, you scanned for the files, but now what? Here is where the fun really begins. In the Files tab, you can also choose the minimum and maximum sizes for the files you would like to find, as well as a range for the date modified. If you move over to the File Types tab, you’ll find a list of all the different file types found in your selected folder.

A great feature of BDA is that it can visualize many of its results in pie charts, so you can adjust the number of specific file types that should be shown, choose whether it should count the number of files or the amount of space that each file type takes up, and then hit Visualize.

Under the Duplicate Files tab, you can easily spot duplicate files and delete extras where they are not needed. This tab is amazing if you know there are some duplicates and want to regain some wasted hard drive space. Here’s a simple tip: if you know that there are some files that are duplicated in two different folders, you can create a new folder and drag the other two into the new one. Then you can scan the new umbrella folder to include the files of the two other folders.

The Hidden Files tab is virtually the same as the tab for Duplicate Files, except that it shows hidden files. You can also select these and delete them as you wish. Finally, there is a Largest Files tab, where you can choose to view any number of the top files in terms of size. This helps find some clunkers that could be moved or deleted as needed. This tab also has a Visualize button.

The last tab in the program (besides Help) is the HTML Report tab. With this tab you can create a report (in HTML, I assume) that contains any of the selected bits of information over the scanned content of the selected folder. Use this tab if you need to transmit your results for whatever reason.

Conclusion

Better Directory Analyzer is a fantastic tool that I recently found and will be using extensively for a while to clean out some backup folders that I have sitting on my hard drive. In terms of tools that are aimed to be used for maintenance and similar tasks, this is one of the better programs that is actually a joy to use. There aren’t any complicated settings that need to be configured, so the experience is simply “install and go”. I definitely recommend this to anyone who could benefit from using it.

What techniques do you use to tame your files? What is your favorite feature about this program? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Test Your Computer For Security Misconfigurations With Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer

Tina Sieber — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:31:28 +0000

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) is a free tool, designed for IT professionals of small and medium-sized businesses. Given its clear graphical user interface however, it also serves as a great security tool for personal use. MBSA analyzes the security setup of local and networked Windows computers and can identify common security misconfigurations or missing updates.

You can download MBSA 2.2 from the Microsoft Download Center. It is available for 64-bit (x64) and 32-bit (x86) Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2. Moreover, it comes in four different languages: German (DE), English (EN), French (FR), and Japanese (JA).

Getting Started

The startup interface of MBSA is very simple and basically offers only three options: scan a computer, scan multiple computers, or view existing security scan reports. The sidebar also offers links to the program documentation and the Microsoft security website.

Note that you require Administrator rights for all machines that you wish to scan. You can scan a single or multiple systems based on the computer name or IP address. If you select to scan multiple computers, you need to enter a domain name or a range of IP addresses.

For this demonstration I went with scanning a single computer.

The scanning options are straightforward, although not necessarily clear for the inexperienced user. If you don’t understand what some of the options mean, click the > Scanning Options link at the bottom for detailed explanations. The information will load in a separate Internet Explorer window.

The scan merely takes a few seconds and returns an overview of issues found in different categories. Each item is scored and a summary of the result is provided, along with links to further information material.

Checks that were passed receive a green score, items that could not be checked are marked with a grey minus, room for improvements is highlighted by a blue score, a yellow score indicates a non-critical vulnerability and a red score alerts the user to a failed check and thus a critical security issue. Follow the respective links for detailed information about what was scanned or instructions on how an issue can be corrected.

All reports are saved and can be accessed at a later time for reference. You can also print or copy your report to the clipboard.

Conclusion

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer is a very good tool to quickly get an overview of security-related settings on your Windows machine. Instructions for correcting detected security misconfigurations are very clear and should therefore be easy to follow for the average user. Overall, the documentation is surprisingly detailed and well done, almost as if Microsoft expected non-IT folks to use this tool.

It must be said though that fixing most configurations does require some basic understanding of how Windows works. For example an issue with the file system is not necessarily security relevant and the instructions do not provide information on how to find the drive that doesn’t run NTFS. Moreover, some issues require advanced knowledge and should be left to the experts to be fixed, for example setting a password expiration.

For more information, also have a look at this article from Microsoft Patterns & Practices: How To Use the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer.

What is your opinion? Do you think this is a useful tool? Please share your thoughts!

Image credits: beboy

Analyze and Plot Local Wi-Fi Networks With inSSIDer

Ryan Dube — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 19:31:54 +0000

There are times when I’m in a public place and there are actually a multitude of Wi-Fi networks freely available. If you’ve ever been in that situation, and if you’re like most people, you just quickly grab the first network you see available.

The problem is that sometimes, even though the signal strength looks okay, the network quality isn’t actually that good at all. You end up dropping the connection and being forced to try a few others until you find one that really works.

Here at MUO, we’ve offered a number of good tools to analyze Wi-Fi networks. Jack wrote up a good description of HeatMapper, an app that shows you the Wi-Fi strength in different areas of your home. Guy showed you how to use Xirrus to troubleshoot network issues.

These are both valuable tools, but I recently discovered another amazing Wi-Fi analysis tool that just blew me away and I knew I had to share it with MUO readers. The tool has been reviewed at a number of other tech blogs, so many of you might have heard of it. For those of you that haven’t, I’d like to introduce you to inSSIDer 2.0.

Analyze WiFi networks With inSSIDer

I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of network analysis tools. I only recently became interested in Wi-Fi tools when I found myself spending a lot more time at public hotspots and struggling to locate a strong Internet access point. inSSIDer provides one of the clearest pictures of every Wi-Fi network within your range. It gives an amazing list of detailed information about each network. Best of all, it works with your regular Wi-Fi adapter, no special hardware required.

As you can see above, you get the Mac address of the device, the network name of the router, the signal strength, channel, the router manufacturer and privacy settings (if any). Beyond that, it’ll also show you the latest network activity, and even the GPS coordinates of the router if you’ve configured a GPS device on your PC.

Configuring the device to talk to the software is as simple as plugging in your PC-compatible GPS unit and configuring the serial port settings in inSSIDer to match the device.

A lot of other Wi-Fi analysis tools offer realtime graphs of signal strength over time, but the one offered by inSSIDer really does appear to be pretty accurate compared to others. You can view these for all channels or for select channels.

You can also see a graphical representation of current signal strength per device. This is a useful way to quickly get a glimpse of which device offers the strongest signal at your location. If you’re using a laptop, you could theoretically walk around and probably locate the device using this screen.

Another nice feature is the ability to filter out displayed devices by certain characteristics, like security type, vendor or a number of other parameters.

If you really don’t want to go through the process of creating a filter statement from scratch, there’s also the option to use the “Quick Filters” which let you select from a list of pre-programmed filters. This is the fastest approach if there’s only one parameter that you want use to filter.

If you are using inSSIDer as a quick method to constantly monitor local networks, and you don’t want to to take over the whole screen, you can click on “View” and switch into “mini” mode. This collapses the window to a much smaller form and combines the display and the tabs into a quick-access window that you can move to the corner of your screen.

You’ll notice, at the top of the screen there’s a link to “Start GPS.” Again, you’ll need a GPS device enabled on your PC or laptop, but if you do, you can actually log network activity and export the data out to a GPX file which shows the locations of all access points on any GPS device that can import GPX data. Or if you prefer to export the access point GPS coordinates to Google Earth or other tools that can read KML files, use the built-in GPX to KML converter.

There really is no easier way to map out multiple Wi-Fi networks or a mix of access points. Instead of using heat mapping software and manually trying to trace out the location of access points based on those maps, just enable GPS in inSSIDer and let the software do all of the mapping for you automatically.

Have you ever tried inSSIDer yourself? Please let us know what you think of the software or other ways to use it, or any features that we might have missed in the comments section below.

4 Awesome Free Tools to Visualize & Analyze Twitter

Ryan Dube — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 23:31:45 +0000

Ever since social networks became so widely adopted by such a large majority of the world, I’ve always wondered what Twitter networks look like.

The power of social networking analysis can not be understated. You can see how far your own influence stretches out, you can measure the scope of influence of some of the most famous people in Hollywood, and you can even identify potential business contacts within your particular niche. There are many possibilities when you start mapping out social networks.

There has been a huge influx of Twitter apps on the web. Here at MUO, we’ve covered many, such as Charnita’s list of apps that would help you grow your network, and Saikat’s list of cool apps that let you ask questions of the Twitter community. But what I’d like to cover are free Twitter tools I’ve come across that let you map or browse Twitter networks in a graphical way.

Twitter Friends Network Browser

The Twitter Network Browser is a pretty cool web app that lets you type in any Twitter user name as a starting point. From there, you can browse through their friends and travel through that social network one node at a time. Each node expands into a new set of friends.

It doesn’t show all friends – I believe it’s the latest 15 or 16 friends, but once you open up a few networks, it lets you click and drag the entire network map around so that you can open up and browse even further. It’s a pretty fun way to pass the time and follow connections between people you know (and many you don’t).

Explore The Strength Of Twitter Networks

Another impressive Twitter network mapping tool is MentionMaps. Just like with the Network Browser app above, MentionMaps doesn’t require a user account and you don’t have to log in using your Twitter ID. Just type in a Twitter name and you can see all of the strongest relationships that user maintains in an awesome dynamic map.

The nodes that show up are those with the largest number of mutual mentions. These are signified on the map by the thickness of the line connecting the nodes. It’s very cool to browse through your friends’ nodes and see who their top “mentioners” are as well. MentionMaps is very intuitive and fast to browse through, as the map moves smoothly any direction that you browse.

Build A Social Network Map On TwiAngulate

TwiAngulate is one of the coolest online tools that I’ve found, mostly because there isn’t just one analysis tool, there are actually six powerful tools you can use to trace through Twitter social networks. These include biggest followers, mutual followers, mutual friends, compare friends, obscure friends and keywords. Most of these are tools that let you compare the networks of two Twitter users, however the keyword tool is one that sifts through the entire Twitter network for the top Tweeters covering specific keywords.

To test the system, I compared Mark’s social network with mine to see how many mutual friends we have on Twitter – turns out we have five – MakeUseOf being one of them, of course!

The “Biggest Followers” tool sounded interesting to me, because I’ve always been curious at the size of some of my friends’ networks and who their followers are. I admit, I don’t spend a lot of time expanding my Twitter network, but along the way people who read my articles will sign up as a follower, so I have a nice tidy network of followers that I’m proud of.

I decided to compare my network to MUO’s own Steve Campbell, a social networking guru. I have to say there is nothing quite as humbling as seeing the size of our networks compared graphically in the form of two spheres. Mine is like a little moon next to Steve’s planet Jupiter – nice work Steve!

Of all of the Twitter tools, I’d have to say that I found TwiAngulate’s more useful by far. I’ve bookmarked the tool and plan to visit it often as I grow my Twitter network.

Target Your Network Based On TwitterVenn Keyword Analysis

The last visual tool that I’d like to cover isn’t so much a graphical representation of Twitter relationships, but instead keyword relationships. Twitter Venn is an app that provides you with a Venn diagram of how three search terms are used on Twitter. This particular Venn Diagram provides all relationships between each set of keywords that you input (up to three). For example, here I’ve entered seo, blogs and google.

The diagram shows that the majority of Tweets are about Google (not surprisingly), secondly about blogs and last about SEO. However, the more important part of the diagram is the center. Most relationship Tweets are about SEO and Google by far. A few are about Google and blogs, a little less are about SEO and blogs, and hardly any cover all three.

All of these free Twitter tools are useful for directing your own Tweets and your efforts in expanding your network into the most productive directions. Have you ever tried any of these Twitter visualizaton tools? Do you know of any more? Share your insight in the comments section below.

Traffic Travis – A Free SEO Management Tool To Check Your SEO Rank

Ryan Dube — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:31:59 +0000

In the process of my daily SEO work, the majority of the time I use my usual online SEO tools to conduct keyword research, which is 90 percent of the job for me. However, there are times when I need a useful, and preferably free SEO management tool that can provide some feedback as to the success or failure of my various SEO efforts.

For a long time, I simply gauged my efforts by typing in the search term that I was targeting and hoped against hope that I would at least be ranked within the top five pages (preferably the first). Then, I would go into Google Analytics and determine my top incoming links, top keywords and so on. While this approach isn’t overly complicated, it isn’t entirely intuitive for non-tech folks who are interested in sprucing up the search engine rank of their personal website.

Here at MUO, we strive to bring you the best tools to help with your SEO efforts. I recently listed 10 SEO mistakes you need to avoid – both Part 1 and Part 2. Dean listed some excellent SEO tips for Blogger blogs, and of course Karl hit on 3 excellent WordPress SEO plug-ins.

In looking for a standalone app that could help with overall SEO analytics, I was pleased to discover Traffic Travis. In the highly competitive world of SEO, not much is free. Most services will analyze your site or provide monthly Search Engine ranking stats for a high monthly fee. At best, you may find a 7 day free trial somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong, the premium version of Traffic Travis is fairly pricey commercial software – but the makers of this software figured out the secret to creating positive buzz for their product. That is, offer a truly free product that is useful and powerful.

Today I will review the free version of Traffic Travis and show you how you can use it to analyze your own website and significantly improve your search engine page rank.

A Feature Overview Of This Free SEO Management Tool

Once you download and install the app, you’ll discover an application that has a nice clean, easy to understand layout. The major navigational buttons are on the left and more details about each are on the right.

The general features the software offers includes:

Keyword Tools – To conduct your keyword research, and very limited in this free addition (see below).
Search Engine Tools – An extremely useful feature that shows you how your site ranks and where your top backlinks are coming from (very cool, and very useful).
PPC Analysis – Shows you where you should focus your PPC ad efforts based on top sites and top keywords.
Page Analysis – Lets you analyze the SEO effectiveness of individual pages on your site.
SEO Analysis – Specifically analyzes your site based on the keywords you’re trying to focus on with your blog or website.

The Keyword Tool research section is severely limited – no competition data. However, you can type in general keywords you want to target and the tool will show you what phrases draw the highest organic searches on three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN).

Using The Search Engine Tools Can Improve Your SEO

To show you how effective this tool can be in analyzing your own blog, no matter how small or new it is – I’m going to utilize the SEO analytics features on my own young blog Top Secret Writers. Now, on this blog I often just post content without spending any time at all on SEO efforts, and other times I do. Lately I’ve been wondering what I’d need to do to go back and fix those things that I did in such a rush at the beginning.

Under the Search Engine Tools, you can define a whole list of keywords that you consider as your website’s core focus. In my case I listed things like advanced technologies, top secret government projects, UFOs and things like that. These are all fairly popular search engine phrases, but as you can see so far my blog doesn’t even make it on the radar.

Don’t give up! For new blogs, you need to focus on the other tools for now, and eventually you’ll start appearing under the major keywords that are more competitive.

Instead, click on “Top sites for keywords,” and you’ll discover which major sites do rank highest for the keywords that you would like to rank highly. You’re going to find that these are sites that are much older than yours (but not always). Other sites are just very competitive under those keywords – they have a lot of content that search engines rank as high value.

Considering how important incoming links are from highly ranked sites like this – where do you think you should be spending your time posting, writing and otherwise fraternizing with like-minded individuals like yourself? The best thing you can do for the rank of your site is to spend quality time reading, commenting on, and participating at the websites of your top competitors (this is the irony of SEO), linking to your own site whenever and wherever they allow it (just don’t spam!).

Now you’ll see why I really love the Search Engine Tools section. Click on “Backlinks to site” and you’ll discover all of the sites that have linked to you the most. Even if you’re new – if you’ve been writing interesting and useful content to your site, in time you’ll get followers and linkers, it’s inevitable. Also, if you’ve been promoting your own site from other sites (as you should be), you’ll notice those here as well. These other sites that link to you are essentially your fans, so you should go down this list and visit their site. Participate, comment and have valuable exchanges with the people there – this is what the blogosphere is all about!

Very Detailed Targeted Keyword Analysis

Another thing that I feel Traffic Travis does very well is the level of detail that it provides in analyzing search engine trends and statistics for the specific keywords you want to target. Here’s another TopSecretWriters example – at one point I wanted to write an article about Gravionics, a very weird fringe science concept. So, I actually did SEO optimize that article as much as I could, considering that the blog is still very young.

If you take Traffic Travis, go into the Keyword Research area and type in “gravionics”. It then provides you with a breakdown of the current top sites that rank highly with that term.

Traffic Travis will show you the sites that rank the highest on the term that you’re writing about. I did pretty well (ranked 13) considering that it’s a very small blog that just started up – but the more important information is the list of sites that rank above you for that term. Once again – here is valuable information you can use to improve your own ranking for that particular keyword phrase.

In this case, I should go to Barnes and Noble, Amazon and BiggerBooks and comment on that page, linking back to my blog entry (if it’s allowed). I should go to Yahoo Answers and answer or comment on the question and link back to my blog entry. Basically, the information from Traffic Travis will help you target your social networking efforts to more effectively improve the specific keyword rankings that you’re shooting for. And if you’re a glutton for punishment, you can even let Traffic Travis grade the SEO level of your page.

Hey, a B – not bad! But trust me – plenty of other pages I analyzed with this software got an F! When you blog, it’s hard to take the time to do all of those SEO techniques that you know you should – but in the long run, it will result in a stronger growth rate and a much higher quality blog drawing in large volumes of organic traffic every single day.

Share your own opinion about the Traffic Travis free SEO management tool, or let us know what other free SEO tools you find effective in the comments section below.

3 Free Apps To Analyze & Inspect Your Hard Disk Space [Mac]

Jeffry Thurana — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:01:38 +0000

I once had a 20GB hard drive and it was always full. I thought that with bigger space – 40 or 80 Gigs – I could have some storage to spare. I couldn’t be more wrong.

My 160GB was filled in no time. Even the new 500GB external hard drive is already at the last quarter of it’s remaining space. I wonder what’s eating the free space out.

Where Has All The Free Space Gone?

I have found five alternative applications to analyze hard drive space and determine what occupies the storage space. Here they are in no particular order.

Finder: Every Mac user should be familiar with this app. Even though it’s designed as a general purpose file manager, Finder could be used to help you determine which ones are the biggest hogs of all. However, you need to do some modifications before you could use it for the hogs hunt. It’s because, by default, Finder will not reveal all the sizes.

Open the “View Options” window by using Command + J (or by clicking the Action Button and choosing “Show View Options“)

Tick the “Calculate all sizes” box.

By sorting the view by file size, you could see which ones are the biggest culprit.

This setting will only be applied to the folder that you are currently viewing. If you want to apply it to all the open Finder windows, press “Use as default“. But please remember, having to calculate all of the sizes will slow your machine down. Especially for older systems.
Omni Disk Sweeper: There’s a better and easier way to analyze hard drive space to determine which files are taking up the most space by using Omni Disk Sweeper. This app is specifically designed to do just that.The first time you open it, Omni Disk Sweeper will show you all the drives attached to your Mac.

Pick one and press the “Sweep the selected drive” button. The app will do the “sizing” process for a while. The time required for this process from start to finish will depend on the size of your drive and the speed of your machine.

You will have an easy-to-navigate Finder-like list of files and folders, automatically sorted by the size. The biggest one is at the top. A delete button is available in the lower part of the window so you can easily delete the ones that you don’t need.

Just be sure that you really want to eliminate the selected file.
Grand Perspective: This is another application specially designed to analyze hard drive space and give users a general picture of what is inside the hard disk. But this one take a different approach: visual. Upon opening Grand Perspective, it will ask you which disk you want to scan.

The app will then scan the chosen hard drive.

After the lenghty scanning process, you will see some kind of map, showing you the content of your hard drive. Every box represents a file.

There are two other alternatives suited to analyze hard drive space, they are: Disk Inventory X and WhatSize. The reason why Disk Inventory X didn’t make it to the list is because it’s been so long since the last updates (2005). While for WhatSize, it was kicked out of the list because it’s no longer freeware.

Do you know any other alternatives for troubleshooting your shrinking disk space? If so, please share using the comments below.

Count Words & Analyze A Document’s Readability With Word Counter [Mac]

Jeffry Thurana — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:01:47 +0000

If you’ve been a student, you must be familiar with writing assignments. I love writing but keeping up with deadlines and trying to meet the word count was always two of the ghosts that haunted my school years. I thought that after graduation I could finally kiss those nightmares goodbye.

But I ended up being a writer and I still have to shake hands with those smiling ghosts for the rest of my life. Talk about irony.

Personal tale aside, writing tools are an inseparable part of any writer’s life. I’ve just come across a free Mac application that falls into this category. This writing tool is called Word Counter.

The Power That Lies Within

At first glance, this app might look insignificant. Who needs another word counter? Almost any word processor comes with this feature built in. But there is more than meets the eye because this little app can do so much more.

The basic feature of this app is the word counter. Type, paste or drag and drop some text to the box in the main window, and the app will automatically count the words, characters and instances of the text.

Click the “Count Words” icon every time you want to refresh the statistic. There’s a setting in the Preferences window to automate this process.

“Instances” is a specific word or phrase from the text that you define in the instances Count window. This feature is useful for those who keep repeating a certain word or phrase in his/her writing.

You can open the Instances Count window from the “Window > Show Text Instances Window” menu or using Command + Option + I.

But if you want to know the frequency of all words within the text, use the Word Frequency window (“Window > Show Word Frequency Window” menu or Command + Option + F). You could make the searching either case-sensitive or case-insensitive. You could also sort the results by the word, frequency, or length.

If you are doing a writing project but separating the chapters into individual text files, you could do the general word count for all the files. Drag and drop those files (or Folders) to the main window and Word Counter will display the result for the individual files and also the summary.

Word Counter is also able to work with an external text editor. Mac OS X’s TextEdit is the default application. But you could easily change it with another editor from the Preferences window.

To start working with an external editor, click the editor icon in the main window. A new small “Word Counter” window will appear. You could write in the editor and Word Counter will observe from the background :

How Readable Is Your Writing?

There’s a saying which says if you want your writing to be understood easily, you have to set the difficulty level of your piece to two levels below your audience comprehension level.

While playing around with Word Counter, I discovered something that I never knew before: there are mathematical equations to estimate how readable a piece of writing is. In another word, you can actually calculate the difficulty level of your writing (a Windows equivalent is Bullfighter).

I’m still trying to understand the concept behind this science. There’s an explanation regarding this matter on the developer’s site. The process involves some heavy calculations with many variables to consider. But you don’t have to go through the numbers because Word Counter comes with this feature.

Put some text into Word Counter window and open the “Readability Statistics” window from “Window > Show Readability Statistics Window” menu or use Command + Option + R. The window will provide you with many numbers explaining how “readable” your text is.

I honestly don’t understand what most of the numbers mean. But there is an explanation using plain English that is very easy to understand.

Out of curiosity, I picked some random articles from MakeUseOf and tried them using The Readability Test. The verdict is that, in general, our articles fall into the area between easy and standard.

You could also try this feature and figure out why some sites felt difficult while others are easy.

Do you know any other alternatives to Word Counter? Please share using the comments below.

MUO Games – Analyze Your Computer For Game Compatibility

Simon Slangen — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:01:35 +0000

Some time ago (years ago, to be exact), I bought myself a copy of “The Chronicles of Riddick” for the PC. The game received positive reviews by Xbox owners, and although the PC review was a little less promising, I decided to try it out.

It was hell.

I don’t know how the gameplay was – I never got to that part. I was playing at about 60 seconds per frame and my flashlight wasn’t working. 50 Euros ($72) washed down the drain. If only I would’ve known!

If only people would’ve invented a way to compare the strength of your computer with game requirements and tell user whether his computer can play that game…Wait, they have! Meet ‘Can You Run it?‘, an online tool to check if your PC is up for the job.

‘ Can You Run it?’ uses System Requirements Lab, which weighs hardware specifications from the user’s computer against certain minimum and recommended values.

System Requirement Lab is used on many big websites, like nVidia, GameSpy, Activistion, EA, and others alike.

Can You Run it?

We’ll run you through an example of the CYRI test, using my PC and a copy of Crysis. I’ve already completed the game, so I know it runs perfectly fine, although I’m not able to maximize the video settings.

1. Select Your Game

Select your game from the drop-down menu on the main page. If you can’t find your game, your best option is to perform a Google search for the game’s specifications.

2. Installation

The title is misleading. You’ll have to give Java permission to run the program and upload your computer specs. Don’t worry, the nice people at ‘Can You Run it?’ promise absolute anonymity.

Hereafter, ‘Can You Run it?’ will analyze your data. Just give it a moment.

3. Interpretation

After analyzing, ‘Can You Run it?’ feeds you three things. First, an overall analysis, where it tells you in simple terms if you can or cannot run the game.

Please note that although my computer barely approaches the middle between the Minimum and Recommended marks, I was able to complete the game without any noticable framedrops and with stunning, although not maxed out graphics.

Next, two comparable pages. On the first page, ‘Can You Run it?’ compares your specifications to the minimum requirements, on the second one to the recommended requirements.

‘Can You Run it?’ looks at the following things:

CPU type and speed
System RAM
Operating System
Video Card and Driver
DirectX Version
Sound Card and Driver
Free Disk Space
DVD

These components all get rated on a six degree scale, and you’ll be provided with information and tips.

On the subjects where you score below the minimum or recommended specs, ‘Can You Run it?’ provides you with some improvement advice, such as what graphics card they advise you to get, or where you can get your driver updated. Basically, ‘Can You Run it?’ not only helps you summarize the problems at hand, but also points you in the right direction for fixing them.

If I had this site a few years ago, I wouldn’t have made the mistake of buying that game. Also, I wouldn’t have made the stupid mistake of buying a new video card that STILL didn’t support the game. God, that was embarrassing!