Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

1TB free Flickr storage

Gigaom reports:

“We want to make Flickr awesome again,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said.

Flickr is getting three big updates. All users will get 1 terabyte of photo storage for free. The site’s s interface is also being redesigned to focus on full-resolution photos — both in photo browsing and in search — rather than words and links. Users will be able to share the full-resolution photos by email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr.

This sounds amazing!  Also:

Flickr Pro, which had allowed users to pay for more storage space, is going away. “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore,” Mayer said (though she acknowledged that there are “different skill levels”). There are still a couple of paid options: Users can pay $49.99 a year for an ad-free interface, and can add a second terabyte of data for $499.99 per year. It’s unclear what will happen with existing Flickr Pro memberships that users have already paid for.

I’ve been a paying customer of Flickr for years.  It was worth every penny.  But, at the same time, it was difficult to convince my friends to use it as there were some severe limitations for free accounts.  It’s nice to see them gone now.

The only weird bit of the blog post is this:

And, in addition to the iOS app Flickr launched last December, Yahoo is launching an Android app.

Flickr already has an Android app.  So I’m assuming they will just revamp that as well.

Actions in Gmail

gmail actions

I think this is the greatest innovation in web-based email since Gmail’s own release of large mailboxes (what was it? 1 GB?).   Web mail has all the benefits of a website, but offers greater contextual focus.   Adding specific actions to message has been a possible with extensions and plugins for a long time, but those were traditionally added by the recipient.  Giving such power to the sender is quite interesting.

Of course, there will be a variety of misuses – spam, phishing, etc – but, I’m sure there will be an even greater variety of useful functionality.  Like this “Send money with Gmail” example.  Here is more information on what’s possible.

Sendy – Amazon SES-based bulk email software

Sendy – Amazon SES-based bulk email software

Sendy is a self hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). This makes it possible for you to send authenticated bulk emails at an insanely low price without sacrificing deliverability.

Quinico web insights

Quinico web insights

Quinico is an open source web application designed to help you easily improve your website’s performance, reduce errors and optimize for search engines (SEO).  Quinico can constantly monitor your websites and alert you when there is a problem that requires attention.  Using Quinico, you can automate the continual tracking, reporting and alerting of the following:

  • Google search engine rankings of all of your important keywords (supports all google domains and languages)
  • Google Pagespeed metrics including suggestions for improvement (mobile and desktop strategies)
  • Page weight breakdown (mobile and desktop strategies)
  • SEO url metrics (utilizing SEOMoz)
  • Webpagetest performance metrics (including first and repeat views)
  • Google webmaster metrics (keyword impressions/clicks, crawl errors, top search queries)

Capsule – developer’s scratch pad

I’ve just learned about Capsule, and I think you should too.

capsule

 

It is based off WordPress, and does sound interesting.  But the two best things about it, I think, are that a developer can keep it private, and that a developer can connect his own Capsule to multiple Capsule servers.  That ought to be a killer feature, as the only two arguments that I’ve heard from developers trying to make them blog more were, if only I had a better way of organizing my private code snippets, and if only I could share them privately with project teammates.

P.S.: I am also a big fan of using P2 theme for WordPress, which works wonders for project teams.  But Capsule seems to be an even better tool for developer kinds.