Useful web tools (part 2)

Here’s another round-up of a few useful web tools and links which I’ve come across and had the occasion to use. Hopefully you might find some of them useful too. All of them are free, although some have paying versions with more features.

For translators

• Webwordcount is an online tool to count the number of words on a website. Website word counting can be tricky (if you need to draw up a price estimate for a client for example), and with this tool you just enter the page address and it goes to work. It’s free for up to 100 pages and 5 different websites per day, which is pretty generous; if you do need to analyse more than that prices are very reasonable.
• I came across Inquiry Wizard in a Translation Times blog post. It’s a web-based application that allows you to track the number of inquiries you receive and the number of projects that are actually confirmed from those inquiries. It also lets you see which customer contact medium (e-mail, phone, etc.) brings in the most inquiries.

Insanity Streak by Tony Lopes

Twitter:

• Thanks to Al Navas I discovered Chirpstory which is a nifty little tool for creating and sharing stories from Twitter. It automatically loads the latest Tweets (from a specific user, keyword, hashtag or list) from your Twitter stream .
• Whathashtag: have you ever wanted to tweet about a topic but didn’t know the best hashtag to use? WhatHashtag is an application that lets you find the most used Twitter hashtags for a given keyword.
• I’ve just come across Twitlonger thanks to Paul Edgar. Its tag line is “for when you talk too much for Twitter” and effectively it’s a way to let you post Tweets when 140 characters just isn’t enough. So you write what you need and a link is automatically posted to your Twitter account.
• Untweeps is a method for unfollowing Twitter users who don’t tweet often enough! ManageFlitter and JustUnFollow do a similar job but also show you who’s following you that you aren’t following back. You can then choose whether to not to follow such users.

Social Media 

• Although social media is not that old, we may still have trouble remembering some of our past posts. Memolane brings together past posts from different social media services. I find it useful if, for whatever reason, I’m trying to remember or find an old tweet that I posted – I can easily do a search on the timeline. It’s available in English and Japanese.
• If you have a professional page or personal profile on Facebook, Trickedout Timeline is a little tool that can create some effects for your cover photo, for example merging your profile and cover photo, or zooming your profile photo. (See mine here).  Talking about Facebook pages, did you know you can add extra tabs? I currently have 11 instead of the standard three. (Tabs are those boxes containing links just below your cover photo and to the right of your profile photo).

If you have your own website 

• Alexa – you’ve probably already heard of Alexa, but if you haven’t it provides traffic data, global rankings and other information on websites. It can be a good idea to register your website(s) on it to see how it (they) rank.
• Favicon.cc lets you create a personalised favicon for your website (Favicons are those small icons associated with a web page that you see next to the web page address). I have to admit I’ve got favicons for my two blogs, but I haven’t got round to doing one for my website yet …

• PRCheckerInfo is a tool for measuring your site’s Google Page Rank. It does this by measuring the number of sites that link to your particular web page. The page rank is displayed as a number between 0 and 10.

A-Z of favicons

Books

Just for pleasure here are a few book-related sites I like:

• Librarything is a web application to catalogue your books. It’s free for up to 200 books. You can organise your books into “want to read” “read but unowned” and “currently reading” collections, amongst others. It can give you recommendations based on the books you’ve entered into the database, lets you write or read reviews, and gives you statistics on the books and authors you’ve read, including the male:female ratio and nationality breakdown of authors!
• Bookmooch is one of a number of book swap site for exchanging used books.  It lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want by means of a points system. I still use it now that I’ve moved back to Reunion Island, but to be honest it worked out a lot cheaper when I lived in South Korea where postal costs are very reasonable!
• Book depository – if, like me, you live in a place where Amazon doesn’t offer free delivery then you’ll like this book ordering web site. It gives you free worldwide delivery on all its books, and book prices are fairly similar to those on Amazon, sometimes even cheaper.

Finally, a web tool that I haven’t yet tried myself but looks promising: LogMeIn gives you free secure remote access to your computer from over the web. It means you can stay connected no matter where you are.  I’ll probably try it out while I’m travelling in July & August.

Please don’t hesitate to let me know your comments on any of the above, or tell me about web tools you’ve used and enjoyed!