Tech and life

Most visited posts

Here’s a list of the most visited posts on this site throughout 2009. Site analytics are from Woopra. I’ve only included those posts with over 500 hits. As you can see I had a phenomenal response to my slow Firefox post. If you’re new to this site you should find some interesting older posts listed below. If these aren’t of interest, have a look around – there are about 90 posts to choose from at the moment.

Is Firefox slow for you? Here’s some tips to try which might speed it up – 11736 visits

Installing Easy Peasy Linux on my Acer Aspire One netbook – 2880 visits

Finding lost bookmarks in your info archive – 2037 visits

Send free SMS reminders to your mobile phone -1128 visits

Some Ubuntu resources for beginners – 776 visits

Uploading files to your website with Notepad++ – 649 visits

What is the best time to tweet? – 599 visits

Useful links: A to Z of search – 543 visits

Most retweeted posts

What is the best time to tweet? – 29 tweets

Is Firefox slow for you? Here’s some tips to try which might speed it up – 19 tweets

My top 15 useful bookmarklets – 13 tweets

Installing Easy Peasy Linux on my Acer Aspire One netbook – 9 tweets

Some Ubuntu resources for beginners – 5 tweets

Quick tip: Disable or remap the Caps Lock key in Windows and Linux – 5 tweets

Can I take this opportunity to thank everyone who has visited this blog throughout the year – hope you found your visit was worthwhile and thanks too to all who’ve taken the time to comment on the posts. Please subscribe to the RSS feed if you can – I blog in my spare time and it’s blog comments and rising subscriber numbers which are a great encouragement to keep blogging. Link back to any of the posts if you can and retweet any if you like them. And if there’s anything you’d like me to cover, or like to see more of, drop a comment below.

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2010!

Almost without thinking we all go straight to Google – which is great. I’ve been using it for years. But there’s a myriad of really great search tools out there.  I’ve grabbed all my bookmarks for search engines on Delicious and compiled them into an A to Z of search. It’s not possible to cover every search category so I’ve concentrated mainly on search in the tech and social networking fields. Have a look through this list. It might throw up some surprises – or serious omissions – let me know!

Search aggregators (meta search)

Collecta: search blogs, Twitter, Jaiku, Identica, photos from Flickr, yFrog, TwitPic and videos from YouTube, Ustream

searchmerge: search Google and social sites at the same time

iBoogie: sorts results into categories down left side

keyboardr: search Google, Google Blogs, Google Images, Wikipedia and YouTube at the same time

Heapr: search Google, Wolfram Alpha, Twitter, Flickr and Wikipedia

Sputtr: select whichever search engine you would like to use and it redirects you to that site’s engine automatically

Panabee: search multiple engines

Sperse: search multiple engines

whonu: search multiple engines

Search alerts

ByTagg: get alerts on new search results; free software download

Trackle

Alertpedia: email alerts

Search alternatives

dooblet: find alternatives to anything

Search for alternative software

AlternativeTo

Search Amazon

Amazanian: find Amazon.com products eligible for free shipping

Search anonymously

Ixquick Metasearch

Yauba

Search for answers

Yahoo! Answers

Mahalo Answers

Answerbag

Search Apple AppStore

uquery

Search Bing + twitter

BingTweets

Search blogs

Technorati

Twingly

BlogPulse

Google Blog Search

IceRocket

Search books

Google Books

Search for books

100 Awesome search engines for bibliophiles

Google Books

Search – case sensitive

http://case-sensitive-search.appspot.com/

Search colors

Google Image Search Color Filter

MultiColr Search Lab: search Flickr by colour

Search comments

BackType

Search comparison tools

Unified Search (Google, Bing, Wolfram, Wikipedia, Delicious and Stumbleupon; Firefox add-on)

Triplify (Google, Yahoo! and Live Search)

Google-Bing Search (Google and Bing)

Wolfram Alpha Google (Wolfram and Google; Firefox add-on)

Search: computational knowledge

Wolfram Alpha

Search conversations

WhosTalkin

Search Creative Commons

Creative Commons Search

Search for definitions

definr

Search Delicious

del.izzy

Search for direct download links

Download Any Stuff

Search documents (online pdf, doc, presentations, and spreadsheets)

Gdocu

Brupt

PDF Database

DocJax

DocMazy (PDFs, DOCs, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and text files)

WhereIsNow (latest versions of documents)

DocShare

Search for domain names

Domain Typer

Domainr

JustDropped (search recently released or deleted  domain names)

Wordoid

Search eBay

eBay Desktop (download; Adobe Air app)

Lastminute Auction

Typo Buddy

Search for eBooks

Gdocu

PDF Search Engine

ManyBooks

eBook Search Queen

Search faces

Facesaerch

Search FAQs

Snappyfingers

QueryCAT

Search for feeds

Feedmil

Search for files

File Snatcher

Search Hacker

Find that File

ShareMiner (search the web for software, video, music, ebooks, documents, games and archives)

FilesTube (searches files in various file sharing and uploading sites like RapidShare, megaupload and mediafire)

Search flickr

Compfight

Flickr Storm

PiciShare

Tag Galaxy

rgb80

Multicolr Search Lab (search Flickr by colour)

Flickr Related Tag Browser (search Flickr by tags)

Flair (download; Adobe Air app)

Search fonts

FFonts

Search Forums

BoardTracker

BoardReader

Omgili

Search for free photos

EveryStockPhoto

Search gadgets

gdgt

Search Google + bing

Askboth

Search Google + twitter

twootles

Twoogle

Search Google + Yahoo!

SearchBoth

Search health resources

OrganizedWisdom

Search: human powered

Mahalo

Search for icons

ICONLook

IconFinder

Iconlet

Search for images

Ginipic (on web and your desktop; download to use)

EveryStockPhoto

Compfight (Flickr search)

Google Image Search: advanced image search now has filtering by license

Stockvault

FreeFoto

Search for images – by sketching

retrievr

Search for images – by colour

Multicolr Search Lab

picitup

Etsy

Search image galleries

Kalooga

Search – International directory of search engines

Search Engine Colossus

Search for keyword trends

HotWords

Search for keyword suggestions

Wordtracker

Search libraries

WorldCat

Search Linux

Google – Linux

TuxFinder (search for packages and documentation; search distributions)

Search local area network (LAN)

LAN Search Pro (free download)

Search for lyrics

Lyrster

mp3zy

Search for manuals

The Manuals

Manuals Online

Search medical

TextMed

HealthBase

Search microblogs

Twingly Microblog Search

Search mp3s

Beemp3

mp3zy

SkreemR

seeqpod

Wuzam

SSMunch

Seekmp3

mp3realm

abMP3

Search multimedia

Searchme (search web pages, videos, images, music tracks, Twitter posts)

LeapFish

Search multiple social sites (simultaneously)

Popixy

Search music

Jogli

MixTurtle

vastfm

fizy

songza

playlist

Search music videos

Cleepr

YouTube

Search: news

Google News Timeline

Search: niche

Accredited Degrees: Here’s a collection of 50 niche search engines

UNData

Search for pdfs

PDF Search Engine

Data-Sheet

PDF Database

PDF Books

DocMazy (PDFs, DOCs, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and text files)

Pdfgeni

Search people

Pipl

123People

Yasni

snitch.name

ZabaSearch

ZoomInfo

Search periodically

Alertpedia (email alerts)

Search for personal information

eJustice Blog: Who knows what about you: 25 free tools to find out

Search phrases and acronyms

MetaGlossary

Search for plagiarism

Viper

Search Rapidshare

Rapidshare Search (Firefox add-on)

Rapidshare123

Search real time

Scoopler (twitter, flickr, digg, delicious, etc)

OneRiot

Feedmil

Search semantic (knowledge-based)

Yebol

hakia

True Knowledge

Search for similar images

TinEye

retrievr

picitup

Pixolu

Google Similar Images

Search for similar music

mufin (download player)

Search for similar websites

SimilarSites

Whoislike.it

Search social networking

Whoisi

SocialMention

snitch.name

spy

WhosTalkin

Identify (Firefox add-on)

Search social profiles

Folowen

Search for songs

Songerize

Midomi (search by humming song)

Search stock photographs

PicFindr

Search suggestions

Soovle (more search suggestions from your keywords)

Search for sounds

SoundBible

Search symbols

Symbols.com

Search tag cloud

Adds a tag cloud to Google and Yahoo! search results

Search Cloudlet (firefox extension)

Search torrents

TorrentFetcher (download)

Search for tutorials

TutSearch

Howto.fm

Search Twitter

Search Twitter

TweetDeck

Bing Twitter Search (only available in USA at the moment)

Twazzup

Collecta

Scoopler

MicroPlaza

Topsy

CrowdEye

Search Twitter images

TwiPho

Search for videos

MetaTube

VideoSurf (searches multiple video search engines)

Veoh

CastTV

blinkx

Truveo

LoomTV

Search visual

Viewzi

RedZ

searchme

Spezify

Veesual

oSkope

Vizzl (search and browse Amazon, Ebay and YouTube)

Search for website information

BuiltWith

Dataopedia

Website Grader

XinuReturns

Search a website

In your preferred search engine, use the following format:

site:domaintosearch.com your search terms

Search Wikipedia

Navify

Search wikis

Qwika

Search for words

WordWaldo (Scrabble, crossword puzzles, etc)

Search YouTube

Jogli

If I’ve missed any important categories or missed a search engine you find really useful, please let me know in the comments and I”ll add it to the list. Hope you discover something useful from this post. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s becoming increasing difficult to cut through the noise in Twitter to get to the information you want – particularly as you may typically be following  hundreds or thousands of people now.

I came across a great video tutorial last week by Jesse Newhart and featured on TwiTip on how to use TweetDeck more effectively to keep track of the people you are following. It’s worth having a look at.

But it struck me that one of the simple search principles shown there could equally be applied to the twittersphere as a whole not just who you are following, particularly if you’re looking for interesting links on a particular subject. This in turn may help you to find new people to follow.

So just choose the keywords you want to track and combine these with the keyword http. For example, to see what is currently being posted with the keyword ubuntu, just open a Twitter search client. You could use Twitter search but I’ve chosen TweetGrid as you can simultaneously track a number of search terms with this. Enter your search query like this:

ubuntu AND http

This will bring up all the tweets with the word ubuntu and which also contain a link to a website. In the example, I’ve also had it track tweets with the keyword wordpress and which have web links:

I know it’s really simple but I hope you might find it useful if you’ve been wondering how to search for content or new people to follow on Twitter.

If you have any other quick tips on searching the twittersphere, please drop a comment and if you’ve found this tip useful, please Stumble, Dig, tweet or save on Delicious. The links are below. Thanks.