Your Nerdy Best Friend

Because of horrible, malicious virus writers who spend their days trying to figure out clever ways to take over our computers, our bank accounts and the universe, we are warned again and again to never click on anything that we don’t recognize. I used to tell students in my computer courses, “Even if your grandmother sends you a link, be suspicious. Make sure you know where you’re going before you click.”

This is great advice, or it was until a couple of years ago, when Twitter’s 140-character limits meant that we would be 11 characters over just by pasting a link such as http://www.cheapskatefreelancer.com/2010/03/pdfescape-the-pdf-editor-ive-been-dreaming-ofe-online-pdf-reader-editor-form-filler-form-designer-solution/.

With Twitter and other services, brevity was imperative. So they started creating URL shortening services that let you convert a long URL into a teeny, tiny one.

Now back to the security issue. If your grandmother sends you a long link like the one above, you’d probably trust it. But what if the link she sends is http://z.pe/56lG? You may think your grandmother has become a hacker and try to block her.

Some people have an inherent (and justified) fear of shortened URLs since you can’t see what you’re clicking on. But I have good news. A 2010 study by Zscaler Inc., a company that sells security services, looked for malicious content in 1.3 million shortened links taken from Twitter over two weeks. Just 773 of those links – 0.06 percent – were malicious. The rest were just grandmothers and regular users like you and me sharing information and resources with others.

Here are just a few URL shorteners that I use:

• A.gd (http://a.gd): Cool options like password protection, link tagging and expiration dates, plus traffic tracking.
• Bit.ly (http://bit.ly): Twitter’s built-in shortener.
• BudURL (http://budurl.com): It’s a long link, but BudURL offers all kinds of tracking information to help with your marketing.
• Is.gd (http://is.gd): I love this little guy. It has no bells or whistles, but it stands for “is good.” That makes me happy.
• Threely (http://3.ly): Lets your viewers preview the link before they click (so you can verify your grandmother is still a good person), and allows custom URLs, such as http://3.ly/Cheapskate (goes to www.cheapskatefreelancer.com, of course).
• TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com): The first service I discovered that would shrink a long link into a short one. They’re still around, but now the URL seems impossibly long.
• Unhid (www.unhid.co.cc/): This site will convert a shortened URL to its actual link so you can take a peek before clicking.

(PS — this post is a preview excerpt from the Cheapskate Freelancer book, available in October!)

My new best friend, bestselling author Dan Pink, shared his favorite free tool, Readability, for the book (due out this fall!). (Well, perhaps he’s not my *best* friend, but he did write me back.)

Readability is a simple bookmarklet you add to your browser. When you want to read an article on a website with too much crapola (ads, banners, overwhelming pictures, etc), you simply click the button, and poof — the page is clean and easy to read.

Readability – An Arc90 Lab Experiment.

Oh, I love free stuff, and I love people who make it easier to download free stuff.

Visit the Ninite site, and check off the free applications you want on your computer, such as Firefox, Chrome, iTunes, Audacity, Skype, AVG, Adobe Reader, Gimp… The list is fantastic! (And it reminds me of all the great tools I still need to cover here on Cheapskate Freelancer.)

Once you choose your programs, click to install, and Ninite will manage your installation. This is great when you are doing a full upgrade to Windows 7.

Ninite Easy PC Setup and Multiple App Installer – Great For Win7 Upgrades.

After a recent upgrade of Firefox, one of my favorite plugins, LeechBlock, stopped working. So I went in search of a new control system that would help me think twice before I surfed my day away.

I’m now in love with K9 Web Protection, a free internet filtering service. Sure, it’s made for parents to protect their kids, but as a professional with a bad web habit, I appreciate its ability to keep me from wasting my precious time.

You set sites that you’d like to limit, and you can eliminate entire categories of sites. I am particularly bad when it comes to reading news articles. I can read article after article and waste an hour or two… Time just slips away. With K9, you can allow access for 15 minutes or a certain period of time. That way you can pop in to check on your friends in Facebook, but soon you’re back at work.

And it’s free. I love free.

K9 Web Protection – Free Internet Filtering and Parental Controls Software.

I first discovered chartbeat when Ashton Kutcher and CNN were competing to be the first Twitter account with one million followers. Chartbeat showed the race live, and I was hooked.

For about 10 bucks a month, you can monitor the traffic on up to 5 websites in real time. I mean really real. It shows how many people are visiting, whether they’re new or returning, what pages they are on, how long it took for their pages to load, who is talking about you on Twitter, where they live… everything you might want to know.

On sites with very moderate traffic (like mine thus far), it can be incredibly boring. But when I send out a newsletter or one of my tools goes viral for a few minutes on Twitter, I can monitor the “stickiness” of my site. Do they visit just one page or click around for a few? How long are they hanging out?

As I write this post, a new visitor to my site is checking out my entry about Wordle from a computer on the East Coast. Cool!

You can set up alerts so you get a text when a certain number of people visit your site at once, and the service sends you emails (or texts, your choice) when your site is down (which happens more than you know).

TRY IT! Keep Cheapskate Freelancer open and click here to see yourself on the site.

chartbeat – real-time website analytics and uptime monitoring.

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My good buddy Josh Cunningham from JoshCanHelp.com swears by this free tool. Honestly, its use is beyond my capabilities, but if Josh loves it, you may as well.

This is about the best free web development tool I’ve ever seen. Go to the CSS Sprite Generator, upload all the images referenced in your CSS file, pick a few options, and hit submit. The site will not only generate the sprite image but it gives you the new CSS values as well. Talk about a time saver!

CSS sprites help your page load much faster by only accessing a single image (like the Google one above) instead of many. This only works for non-repeating images called as a background in your CSS file. For more info, see this A List Apart article and this Smashing Magazine post.

Favicons are those tiny graphics in the tabs when you open a webpage. If you don’t have one for your site, you’ll get a little blank page graphic, and that’s no longer the cool thing to do.

Favicon.ico Generator will help you generate the tiny 16×16 pixel graphic — upload a graphic or paint your own.

Favicon.ico Generator

Need a quick button for your site? I love this free tool. Cool Text creates simple logos and buttons in a few minutes. I’m more fond of the buttons than I am the logos, but they’re both worth a few minutes of experimentation.

Sample Logo:

Sample Button:

Cool Text: Logo and Graphics Generator.

This post comes straight from a longtime reader. Thanks for the list, Mark!

A colleague just shared this list with me, and I thought this might be something to include on your list of free and low-cost tools. With so many ways to search the Internet now, you shouldn’t necessarily stop just because you don’t find what you’re looking for with the first search engine you first try!

www.goodsearch.com – when you use this one, they will donate money to a charity/cause of your choosing, or to the one they have chosen for the day – makes you feel good!

www.cuil.com (pronounced “cool”) – searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. It claims to have a larger index than any other search engine.

www.gapminder.org – you can view statistics in kind-of a 3-D bubble graph the moves as the data/facts/dates/ increase.

www.waybackmachine.com – you can find the original link for anything that has been online…the archived version.

www.bing.com – very similar to yahoo.com and google.com

www.searchme.com – Multimedia searches

www.blinkx.com – you can enter a word/phrase and any video that has this word/phrase in the text should appear – this one is fun!

Tinyurl, the original URL shortener,  has lots of competition these days. Thanks to Twitter, everyone’s trying to reduce long website addresses into short links that fit into 140 characters.

Tr.im is a free URL shortener that allows you to track statistics on your link: how many people have visited, when, etc. You can download a Firefox plugin to easily shorten a URL with a button push. You can also personalize your URL to make it easier to read.

tr.im your URLs.

Similar Tool: BudURL