Google Adwords Editor
Adwords Editor is a free Google application (for Mac or Windows operating systems) that allows you to manage your ad campaigns from your desktop without a browser. Work offline, upload your changes, download your account(s) and update your campaigns with powerful editing tools. One of the best things about this software is that you can make bulk changes (such as updating bids or adding keywords) in just a few steps, which came in very handy for me recently as I needed to change from “broad matching” to “phrase matching”, which would have been a long process but thanks to Adwords Editor I didn’t have to go and change each keyword phrase one by one.
Filed Under Software
StatPress Reloaded
StatPress Reloaded displays real time statistics about your Wordpress blog, collecting information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, operating systems, browsers and more. You can see visitor actions while they’re browsing your site or check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories. Statistics can be viewed in detail or summarized, and you can also display stats in the sidebar via a widget.
In my little world statistics are extremely important, and using StatPress just makes it way to easy to see how my blogs are performing all in the comfort of the dashboard. Another thing I like about this plugin is that it only keeps track of whats happening on my Wordpress powered websites, so I don’t have to sort through log files separating stats from non Wordpress sections, saving loads of precious time (precious to me that is).
Filed Under Blogging
Google May Change Page Titles
Google “reserves the right” to change the titles of your pages in search results. Google’s Matt Cutts has released a video discussing why and how they go about doing this. Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. “For example, suppose the title of your page is ‘Untitled’ or if there is no title. If that’s the case, we try to show a relevant, useful title.” “We reserve the right to try to figure out what’s a better title, what’s a more descriptive title to show”. [WebProNews]
I can see why Google want to do this and when you think about it, it makes total sense by providing the user with a better search experience, but it doesn’t mean I like it. Now I’m not one those anti-Microsoft guys, and I’m not one of those guys who think Google is going to turn into a giant Microsoft like corporation that wants to rule the Internet with an iron fist … yet, but if I was I’d be thinking hmmm, first changing titles, what next, changing content, removing websites from the web, hot killer robots from the future?
Its pretty easy to come to those conclusion (minus the hot killer robots from the future), sane and level headed minds would probably (and logically) say those scenarios are ludicrous, but you never know. Google is a behemoth of a company, an influential behemoth that evolves on a regular basis at that, with the potential to set web search standards at will. Like Batman says, with great power comes great responsibility, or was that Wolverine?
Filed Under News
Blender 3D Software
Blender is a powerful and free 3D graphics application that can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing and creating interactive 3D applications. It runs on a wide range range of operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows, along with FreeBSD, IRIX, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris.
Other than the fact that the software is free (thank you open source), something that caught my eye was the low minimum requirements and download size. Whatever platform you’re using, you won’t be downloading over 20 megabytes, and your hardware won’t need to exceed 300 MHz/128MB RAM/20MB disk space so this app should run nice and smooth on your current setup (I’m sure you’re not in the dark ages).
Features are numerous (how this is free I don’t know) and documentation/community support is abundant. Compared to extreme high end 3D software Blender is not in the same class, but as a free mid range application you can hone your skills and create work suitable for pretty much any medium, and thanks to the price, low specs and file size its not like you’ll be wasting time and resources, so give it a try.
Filed Under Software
