I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about how I do my thing online, so here’s a couple of free online tools and web-resources that I use (both for the website and personally).

Take a quick breeze through…I think you’ll find most of these to be really helpful.

The website mentioned below for stock photograpy, “images.com” switched the game up recently (I think you need to come out of pocket for the quality stuff now), but I looked out for you. Click here to see what I got from them while they were still free…

(note: Words in green are links; all images can be clicked to zoom out and see additional commentary.)

Youtube to MP3:
This lets you strip the audio content from youtube videos and download to your computer instantly. It works best as a firefox add-on, but if you use a different browser, you can do the same thing straight from the main website here.

Keepvid.com:
This one lets you download entire videos themselves. From places like Youtube, Metacafe, Daily Motion and almost anywhere else, you can use this website to save the entire video to your computer or flashdrive to watch anytime later or edit into your own production…

AdBlock Plus:
This is a firefox add-on that ELIMINATES ALL ADS. Whenever I use Facebook, Yahoo Email or almost anything else, the ads just aren’t there, and it’s at the point now where I forget they even exist…

Social Oomph:
This is a free online service that automates your twitter posts. There’s actually a lot more that it does too, but I use it to schedule all of my “tweets” in one sitting and then go on with the rest of my day…

Crystal XP:
Just a cool site with tons of cool free software, wallpapers and other things that’ll help make your XP look better than a Mac. In fact, thanks to their “Brico-Packs,” when most people use my laptop now they don’t believe that it’s actually running XP.

DeviantArt.com:
This is the site where I get most of my cool images from. Think of it like a Google image search for the type of quality artwork that belongs in comic books and anime (see samples below). Great wallpapers here too…

Images.com
And this is the site where I get most of my realistic images from. It has what’s referred to as “stock photography”: images of people working, playing, and doing other real-life activities so that web designers, internet marketers and others can more easily paint pictures in their viewers mind. Here’s a few samples:

The Gimp:
GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program (GNU is a free operating system similar to Unix), and you can think of it like a free version of Adobe Photoshop. Of course, there’s a bit of a learning curve here, but if you’re willing to take the time (and check out some youtube video tutorials), you’ll definitely learn some impressive skills pretty fast.

This program is what lets me do the “More Science” images at the end of each post. Here’s a couple examples of what I’ve been able to put together with minimal training, persistence and a bit of common sense:

And here’s one of those tutorial videos I mentioned:

Animoto.com:
FIRE. This website makes amazing, high-quality slideshows from your images AUTOMATICALLY. All you have to do is upload the images, video clips and subtitles you want and Animoto does the rest.

Here’s an example. Peep how I used images from DeviantArt, videos downloaded with Keepvid, etc. (it’s all about synthesizing the skills):

Hope all this helps. Get at me with any questions…

Peace,
+B





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