I stumbled on this the other day looking over a web forum and thought it was a pretty neat ‘gadget’. I don’t know how useful it is but I’m all for cool.

Using snap.com’s Snap Preview feature and the wordpress plug-in snap preview anywhere.

You’ll see a little icon:

If you mouse over the link or the icon next to one of my links a little popup thumbnail of the website linked to will come up, then of course you can click on the link or the thumbnail to redirect to the website.

Useful? you ask.  I don’t know.  But cool, oh yeah!

Do you know how to write blog articles in Japanese? I do!

Do you know how to write blog articles in Chinese? I do!

How about Arabic? Can you write in Arabic? I can!

Okay so maybe I don’t really know how to write in all these different language. In fact, if you’ve read my blog at all you know I can hardly write in english. Last night while doing the great blog makeover of 2007, I stumbled upon a translation script, that’s free.  Previously I contemplated purchasing one that did this slightly better, but you can’t beat FREE! FREE! FREE!

Translate is a wordpress widget plugin written by 18 yr old Trevor Creech of Canada.  Canada, eh?

To add this tool. I simply uploaded the widgets, activated the plugin and dragged and dropped the translate option to the widget sidebar. Done deal! 

You now have a cool little graphics array of flags:

and you just click on the country flag to change languages.  I have to say this is fantastic. I often find plugins or source code for projects where the authors native language is not english and his english is actually worse than mine (though you have to give them credit, they speak more languages than me).  Sure these automatic translation tools are hit or miss sometimes replacing words like hoster with waiter and such but still it gets the general idea across a little better usually.

This wordpress plugin is well worth taking the time to check it out.

Blogsvertise.com is a pretty interesting concept. You pay bloggers to write permanent blog articles about a page/product on your site. These articles get distributed, spidered and links all over and you get instant link love. What’s this mean? Hrm how about Increased PageRank, Trust, Brand Recognition and oh yes LINK LOVE BABY!

Let’s face it blogs are here to express personal opinions, provide a means of sharing your views, experiences and knowledge and ofcourse getting search engine placement for your websites and products.  I’ve been testing out blogsvertise this weekend and I have to admit “I’m loving it”. The articles written so far are creative and very nicely done (not like the crap you find on my blog). 

What’s the cost? Just $20!  Yeap for 20 bucks you can head over to the link-love pimps and get some luvin’ Give it a try: www.blogsvertise.com

This is a test post from within Windows Live Editor. Windows Live Editor is Microsoft’s new swiss army knife of blog editors. It’s actually really impressive. It supports several different types of blogs including Community Server and Wordpress, as well as the popular blogging services. Really won’t go into that because there’s plenty of posts on the internet already related to this.

One of the nice things is that it ties directly into IE6 and provides a pretty comprehensive toolbar within IE6, including such features as

• tabbed browsing
• Search the web search box (live.com ofcourse but also provides the ability to search RSS feeds, news, the current website) lots of cool stuff.
• I really can’t go into everything but it’s a very impressive toolset of features and searches.

It also provides a “blog on this page” feature that allows you to blog an article related to the webpage you’re currently on. This is probably the coolest time saver of all (unfortunately, I’m using FireFox these days so it doesn’t save alot of time for me..)

What I like the most is that I can blog from within a nice WYSIWYG editor without mucking up my wordpress plug-ins that aren’t compatible with WYSIWYG editors.

For more details on Windows Live Editor check it out at:

http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

I’ll want to add that the view in the editor is identical to the view in your browser as posted to the blog. This is true for both community server and wordpress as I tested this prior to switching out of community server and into wordpress. It’s dead on in fact, even better than the WYSIWYG editors in wordpress.

It also supports uploading and scaling images to your blog making it easier to publish images in your blog entries so one of my next posts will hopefully be all cool and stuff with images like kewl guys and grrls..

One downside though, it seems to add some serious overhead to IE6 and atleast for me crashes the crap out of it.

 Okay one more addition. The past couple paragraphs were added after the post was added to the blog. I realized I wanted to see what would happen if I edited the posting and added more information after the post was posted and it just let me add it without any problems. Now that’s damn cool.

SDN has a a new thing they've been doing for the past couple months called Source Force. Promoting a series of *FREE*, have you noticed I really like free, this blog should be renamed to "Jess's list of free and cool tools", Anyway a series of Free Virtual Labs on the MSDN site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/virtuallabs/. What's better than getting free training? Free toys! If you do a couple labs and submit evaluations you'll get a free limited edition action figure (I suspect there's some office in Redmond right now with a thousand of these little guys all lined up battling).So I can highly recommend the Training labs from Fritz Onion. I picked up one of Fritz's books on ASP.net and C# a couple years ago and find it one of my best most targetted and straight to the point books. His training is quite good and he really follows through with it including follow up items on his blog. Just one thing on the free toys, they're only available for the Months of Jan, Feb, Mar and Apr so better hurry while you can.