This Week’s Favourites – 5th June 2009 – UK Web Hosting – Uk Web Design Blog

This Week’s Favourites – 5th June 2009

Posted by: Toby H. // // June 5th, 2009 // Web Development

In the first of a new series of posts about our favourite finds from around the web over the last week, I will be looking at useful but little known web applications that might just make your life a little easier!

The Awesome Highlighter

We start with ‘The Awesome Highlighter‘ — this application makes it easy to show your friends, co-workers, or that annoying person on the message board the important parts of any web page. By highlighting text, you help the reader focus on what you want them to see. Once your web page of choice is all highlighted up, all you have to do is click the big yellow DONE button and it generates a handy short URL for you to link your highlighted page to whomever you choose!

Evernote

My second favourite find of the week is Evernote – Just 11 months after leaving a private invite only beta, Evernote reached it’s 1 millionth user yesterday. This awesome bit of software allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, be that your PC, Mac, iPhone, BlackBerry… you get the idea. Oh, I forgot to mention — it’s FREE!

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Are My Sites Up?

Now I know we bang on about it all the time, but site monitoring is important, especially for business websites. To that end, I’ve found you a free monitoring tool called ‘Are My Sites Up?’ The free plan will check up to five sites at least 25 times per day, and you even get unlimited email and SMS notifications… it’ll even send you a twitter DM if your site goes down!

eKey

My next useful web app is ‘eKey‘. We’ve all seen the URL shortening sites like TinyURL, but this one has something a little bit special. You know that friend that will never open shortened links because you sent them a rickroll via shortened link in the past? Well, eKey is the solution to that problem. You just create your shortened address and your friend is free to go to eKey and ‘uncompress’ the link back to the full URL so they know exactly what they are getting, before they load it!

Stripemania

My fifth find might be really useful for some of you web and graphic designers. 45 degree scan lines were very hard to make perfectly until Stripemania came to the rescue with their stripe generator — what a great time-saving idea!