PicTreat - Best Way to Retouch your Pics

PicTreat.com

Liven up your profile pictures by having them retouched by Pictreat. The Website automatically applies red eye correction, removes skin flaws like blemishes and spots, auto-correct colours and contrast to make sure you look perfect on all the social networking sites. Users can log in with their Facebook or Myspace ID, and also import albums from Facebook, Flickr or other URL’s. Moreover, you can download the retouched picture/photo on your computer or upload it to your social networking site’s profile. Registered user can also create their separate album and save it on the website itself. I have used this website and found the results quite impressive. The only downside is that the high resolution pictures when edited/retouched are converted to smaller size if you don’t have any free credit on the site.

QuizBox – Personality Test, Love Tests, Riddles & Fun Quizzes

QuizBox.com has a very good collection of love tests, personality tests, compatibility tests, riddles, puzzles, horoscopes, jokes and fun quizzes for your personal enjoyment and intellectual stimulation. There are a whole lot of personality tests like ‘Get to know yourself better’, ‘What’s on your mind?’, ‘What is your working style?’ and many more. Here you can also get to know the hidden meaning in Names, Birth & your personality, sun sign & your personality etc. Moreover, here you can build your own quiz for your blog or website in just three steps with no programming skills required. It’s very easy and absolutely free!

Gazup! Uploads your File to multiple file hosts

Gazup! is the leading website for social file mirroring online. By using this service you'll be able to upload files to multiple file hosts in one go thus saving you time and bandwidth. Simply upload a file and this site will rapidly mirror your file to 8 hosts, including RapidShare, MegaUpload, FileFactory, zShare and many more. They have unique features for both video and normal file formats, for example if you upload a video to our service they will automatically generate screenshots of the videos frames and display a presentation next to the download links. Their system is quite advanced as they have link checking, allow uploaders to "cure" dead mirrors and allow uploaders to customize mirror pages and much more.

Gazup!

Gazup! also pays you to upload. That's right, upload files and you'll get rewarded pure cash each month. You could easily make hundreds of dollars of side income each month. They have an awesome member service which is 100% free. Keep track of existing uploads (edit, reup, delete, etc). Get alerts when a mirror goes down, if someone comments on your file or when a mirror has finished uploading. View your rewards history and see how much cash you have made and much more.

AddThis – A Bookmarking & Sharing Tool for Bloggers and Website Owners

AddThis is a very popular bookmarking and sharing tool on the Internet. It helps website publishers and bloggers spread their content across the web, by making it easy for visitors to bookmark and share content to their favorite social destinations. AddThis buttons can be found on hundreds of thousands of websites, and are currently viewed over 20 billion times a month by users all over the world, in over 20 languages.

You must have seen the following Addthis button on various websites and blogs:

What can you share with AddThis?

AddThis can be used to share just about anything, including:

• Websites
• Blogs (Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Tumblr)
• Email newsletters
• MySpace profiles
• Microsoft Office Live workspaces
• Embedded content, such as videos

AddThis offers several different ways to share your content and lots of ways to customize, so you can get the sharing tool that's right for you.

How to Add a custom favicon to your Blogger blog

While browsing the net I came across a very informative blog post. I thought it would be a handy resource for the bloggers. The following is the excerpt from the blog post written by Amanda fazani from Blogger Buster:

When you publish a blog with Blogger, the default favicon which appears in your browser navigation bar is Blogger’s favicon (the unmistakable orange and white logo).

Many Blogger users choose to display their own favicon instead of Bloggers, in order to “brand” their blog with memorable icons in keeping with their blog’s design. It is actually quite easy to add our own favicon to our Blogger blogs, and instantly adds a sense of professionality to your overall design.

In this post, I’ll explain how easy it is to add a favicon to your Blogger blog, along with resources for designing your own favicon and where you can host this for free.

What is a favicon?

The word “favicon” is short for “favourites icon”, and is a 16×16px square icon which is associated with a website (or blog). Browsers which support favicons will usually display a website’s favicon in the address bar (to the left of the URL), and next to the page’s name in a list of bookmarks. Browsers which support tabbed navigation (such as Firefox and IE8) will also display the favicon next to the page title on each tab.

Favicons are usually found on the root of a domain, and use the .ico extension. For example, the favicon for Blogging Tips can be found here: http://www.bloggingtips.com/favicon.ico

Blogger users do not have access to the root of their blog hosting. This means that unless an alternate favicon is specified, Blogger’s favicon will display in browsers accessing Blogger powered sites.

In order to add a custom favicon to be displayed in the browser of sites accessing a Blogger powered blog, we need to:

1. Create our own favicon
2. Upload this to an image host
3. Edit the Blogger template to reference this alternative favicon.

Let’s go through these steps in order.

How to create your own favicon for Blogger

A favicon is a small image, measuring 16×16 pixels. Favicons are usually made with the .ico extension, though it’s also possible to use .GIF and .PNG files to reference a favicon.

If you are a budding ‘Photoshopper’, you can create your own favicon from scratch. Don’t forget to use a canvas measuring 16 pixels square (or create a square image which can be reduced to this size) and save as a .GIF or .PNG image.

Those who already use a recognised icon for their site/blog logo can easily generate a favicon using one of these free services:

• Favicon Generator (Blogger Buster)
• FaviconGenerator.com (right click image and choose “Save image as”)
• HTML-Kit favicon generator (download as favicon package) – Enables you to create a static or animated favicon; you can even create a favicon quickly using your Twitter username!

Alternatively you can download a “ready made” favicon from these sites:

• Favicons R Us
• FreeFavicon.com
• Iconlet.com (use the 16 px square version of your favourite icon)

Upload your favicon to the web

While Blogger does not offer hosting for files we use in our blogs (eg: JavaScript, documents and HTML files), we can upload images for use in our blog posts which are hosted by Picasa.

After uploading an image to our blog post (even if this post is not published) we can extract the URL of the image and reference this in our Blogger template code. Surprisingly, we can upload .ico files to our blog posts with Blogger (as well as any .PNG or .GIF favicons you may have created too).

To upload your favicon to Picasa through your blog, simply create a new blog post and choose to insert an image in your post. Choose the favicon you have created/generated/downloaded and upload this to your post.

Then either preview your post or view in the rich text editor so your favicon image can be seen on the screen. Right click this favicon and choose to copy the location of the image. Save this to your clipboard or paste into a text file for easy reference.

If you prefer to use a different host for your favicon, here are a few free hosts which support .ico files:

• MerryPic
• HostAnyImage
• ImageBoo

As before, copy the location of your icon file to yoru clipboard or paste in a text file for easy reference.

Add the reference for your favicon to your Blogger template

The final step to creating a custom favicon for Blogger is referencing the favicon in your Blogger template code.

To do this, go to Layout>Edit HTML in your Blogger template. You do not need to check the “Expand widget templates” box.

Search for the closing

________________________________________________________________

tag in your template using your browser’s search function.

Immediately before this line, paste the following section of code, substituting YOUR-FAVICON-URL for the URL where your favicon is hosted:

________________________________________________________________

href='YOUR-FAVICON-URL' rel='shortcut icon'/>

href='YOUR-FAVICON-URL' rel='icon'/>

Then save your template. Now when you view your blog in your browser, you should see your favicon appear beside the web address and in the bookmarks folder (if you have bookmarked your site).

Note: it is very important that you paste the favicon tags just before the closing tag, not earlier in the template code. This is because Blogger generates favicon tags when your blog pages are generated which would otherwise override your custom favicon references.

Important information when using custom favicons for Blogger blogs

If you use Internet Explorer 6 or older, the favicon will not appear unless you have bookmarked your blog and refreshed your browser.

Also, any services which automatically extract the favicon for a site (such as Blogger’s “Feed” and “Blog List” gadgets) will still reference the Blogger favicon rather than our own custom favicons. This is because such auto-discovery scripts reference the favicon hosted on the same server as the website, rather than the favicon which is referenced in the HTML code of the page. As yet, there is no way to present our custom favicons to services which automatically discover the favicon for a site.

Source: (Written by Amanda Fazani from Blogger Buster )

Add Stylish Signature to your blog or E-mail

Using signatures is a simple and effective way to make e-mail messages, blogs and websites more stylish, underline their individuality and get the author's energy across. So, what can you say about animated signatures that give the real impression that the author is signing right in front the reader's eyes?

MyLiveSignature offers you everything necessary to create both static and animated signatures and add them to your email messages, to blogs, to your posts on forums and on websites.

There are three ways to get your signature on the site.

1. Imitate your signature yourself using step-by-step signature creation wizard.

2. Imitate your signature yourself using the on screen signature draw widget.

3. Write your signature with a pencil, pen or a felt-tip pen on a sheet of paper, scan the sheet and let the designers create the signature by sending the scanned image via a special form.

Outbrain – Rating & Recommendation Widget

The outbrain widget is a simple yet powerful ratings & recommendations tool that blends seamlessly into any blog design, inheriting your own look and feel. The widget includes an interactive 5-star rater, and personalized recommended links from your blog as well as others.

User ratings are one of the best ways to get instant feedback from your readers. A simple click of the mouse and Voila! - their opinion is counted. The widget also displays the average rating and number of users who rated the post.

The widget works with a personalization algorithm, which tries to compute a unique Personalized Relevancy Score for each reader, and for every item that is viewed. If the widget has enough data, the reader will see a message indicating how relevant this post may be. The algorithm is mostly based on a reader's rating history so... the more ratings that are cast, the more content can be personalized for each reader.

Installation takes minimal effort and does not require any registration. A few clicks and you are done. The widget supports TypePad, Blogger, Wordpress (installed), Drupal, and custom Javascript for your site.

Widget features -

• Blends into your blog design - It's your blog, and your content ratings, and there is no reason for it to look any different. All outbrain blog widgets inherit the hosting site's styling properties.
  Here are two examples:
• No marketing crap - You won't see an outbrain logo or marketing language such as "Powered by outbrain" on the widget itself.