Resources of the Week: Useful! 10 Tools I Love
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
Everyone loves lists. Everyone loves useful stuff. You will surely find at least a couple things to love right here, right now.
+ Online conversion tools for Adobe PDF documents: Convert PDF files to text or html. If the file is online, you provide a URL. If the file is on your hard drive, you e-mail it. In the day job, I often run into situations where I have to send PDFs to someone who is on a mobile device that can't accommodate these. Copy-and-paste is OK if you're only dealing with a small amount of text, but can become a formatting nightmare if a large document is involved. So...here is an alternative.
+ CPI Inflation Calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: There are plenty of these scattered around the internets, but this one is simple, elegant and "right from the horse's mouth." Goes back to 1913. (In 1913, $100 had the same buying power as $2,175.26 in 2009. Wow.)
+ Sized Up: I'm not wild about brick-and-mortar shopping, and I have limited free time anyhow...so I do a lot of online shopping. It's useful when the dimensions of a product are included in its online description, but it can be difficult to visualize its actual size, particularly if you are not spatially-oriented. Here, you enter the product dimensions and compare it to a list of "presets" -- objects everyone is familiar with, such as a credit card, a soda can, a sheet of paper, a door... Since the site has been around awhile, it has accumulated a ginormous database of user-generated product size comparisons; for example, here is Macbook versus Asus.
Tweet Blocker is a free resource for Twitter users and application developers. Using highly advanced filtering, we catalog and rank the top spammers on Twitter, allowing users to quickly and easily find spammers.
Twitter does its own clean-ups periodically, but this is a dynamic effort "across the Twitterverse." You can drag and drop a "Report Spammer" bookmarklet to your browser bar. It's not perfect, but it's definitely worthwhile if you are a heavy Twitter user. Read more about it on Mashable and ReadWriteWeb.
The Home Energy Saver calculator quickly computes a home's energy use on-line based on methods developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Users can estimate how much energy and money can be saved and how much emissions can be reduced by implementing energy-efficiency improvements. All end uses (heating, cooling, major appliances, lighting, and miscellaneous uses) are included. A detailed description of underlaying calculation methods and data is provided a comprehensive report (PDF 6.2 MB). Documentation of how the site handles electricity tariffs is provided here (PDF; 974 KB).
Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
ResourceShelf, we were pleased to learn, received a grade of 99/100 -- which means our site scored higher (in terms of marketing effectiveness) -- than 99 percent of the 1,221,867 sites that had previously been "graded" here at the time we ran our evaluation. The site report includes such interesting data as readability level (we are "graduate school"), Google page rank, number of Google pages indexed, last Google crawl date, traffic rank, number of inbound links, blog ranking (via Technorati), and number of pages saved as del.icio.us bookmarks.
+ How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website: This is not a "tool," per se, but it's Useful! It's a comprehensive collection of instructions, with appropriate links, on how to embed RSS feeds, videos, mp3s, slideshows, Google Calendar events, MS Office files...and much more into web pages, including blogs. You'll want to bookmark this one.
+ allofcraigs.com: For most people, Craigslist is at its most useful on a local level. You want to sell a couch or are looking for a house to rent. But what if you're a serious collector of...say, Matchbox cars. Location doesn't really matter. You can easily buy something small like this from someone across the country, who can ship it to you without a great deal of difficulty. But who the heck wants to hop from one local Craigslist to another, running the same search repeatedly? Come here instead, and search all craigslists at the same time. A dropdown menu allows you to pinpoint a category to search, and you can also limit by dollar amount and how long ago ads were posted.
+ Open Car Price: What are people really paying? Shopping for a new car? Here you can see "1000s of actual transaction prices and real quotes that people have received from dealers," -- and geographic location is noted -- which helps you come up with a reasonable target price. You can register, submit quotes you've gotten from dealers, and get buying advice from the "community." I spotted some quotes for late model used cars as well, so it's worth checking here even if you're buying pre-owned.
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