Cranial Soup

Online HTML Editor

2007-10-11T14:19:00.004-04:00

Sometimes you have the need to create a quick page for a specific purpose. And it would seem a bit silly to purchase an expensive HTML editor for just the occasional page. And you really don't feel like downloading & installing an application that you won't get much use from.

That's where this nice little editor comes in. It's simple to use and packed with tons of nifty features that you would expect to find in a desktop application.

This is the best free online HTML editor I have found that wasn't associated with some sort of web hosting.

Features:

Page Properties:
Interface allows you specify page title, background color, foreground (text) color, upload a background image from your computer and apply a watermark to the image so that it doesn't scroll, and upload a background sound file.
Find & Replace:
Search your page for text, tags, and images and automatically replace all with something else.
Highlight
Use this tool to "highlight" (specify a background color for) selected text.
Hyperlinks
Click to easily convert text to a hyperlink and apply hyperlinks to images.
Insert Images
Browse to locate an image file on your computer and upload it to your page.
Table Wizard
Easily insert and customize your tables. Specify number of rows and columns, alignment, border size, cell padding, and cell spacing. Tables aid in the layout of your page.
Insert Bulleted Lists
Insert Numbered Lists
Insert Horizontal Lines
Form Wizard
Step-by-step wizard helps you to create and insert simple forms into your web page.
Insert Text Fields and Text Boxes
Easy Text Formatting
Format your text by selecting font face, size, color, bold, italic, and underlined via familiar word processor type buttons.
Paragraph Formatting
One click aligns all left, right, or center.
Button Wizard
Easily insert buttons anywhere on your page!
MORE

Whatever isn't covered by the features in this editor will most likely be covered by their other online tools, listed on the right side of their page.

So no more excuses...go make that web page you have been procrastinating about!

http://www.creatingonline.com/webmaster/html_generator.htm

Online Privacy Policy Generator

2007-10-11T13:41:00.002-04:00

Constructing a privacy policy for your website can be a complicated task, but it doesn't have to be any more.

With this generator it is as easy as checking off some boxes and filling in some blanks.

They give you the choice between generating an HTML page which you can just save, or emailing you an HTML or plain text copy.

http://www.the-dma.org/privacy/creating.shtml

reCaptcha: Stopping spam while digitizing books

2007-05-26T04:39:00.001-04:00

We have all seen captcha text...everywhere.

Carnegie Mellon University has come up with one with a bit of a twist that they call reCaptcha.

While helping to stop spam and ensuring that a human is actually submitting a response, it is also helping to digitize books. (currently helping Internet Archive)

Quote:

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

The service is free, and they even have one specifically for protecting your email address on a website.

http://recaptcha.net/

CodeIDE: the online IDE that works in your browser

2007-01-15T18:52:00.001-05:00

CodeIDE is an online IDE that works with BASIC, Pascal, C++, Perl, JavaScript, HTML, and LISP.

Registered users can chat online and save programs on the service.

There is also a wiki to help you learn programming, and a forum for discussions.

http://www.codeide.com

Is StumbleUpon the Search Engine of the Future?

2007-01-02T22:02:00.000-05:00

Let's face it...Google has serious flaws as a search engine. It is over-run with bogus pages of keyword lists, links to counterfeit sites, links to other inferior search pages, splogs, sites that try to hijack your browser and load your PC with spyware, and generally crappy unrelated results.

What you are looking for is burried in garbage. In order to find anything decent, related to what you are seeking, you have to set Google to show you 100 results per page instead of the default 10, and spend much more time scanning those results for what you are seeking.

What if there was a button on every page that let you vote whether the page was of quality or was crap?

And what if the quality pages moved up in rank as a result of your vote?

And what if the pages you labeled as crap fell in rank as a result of your vote?

And what if you could only vote for a page once, and only once? (you can always change your vote at some point in the future if the site became crap or became good)

And what if you came across a quality page that wasn't in your search engine's database and could add it yourself with just a click of a button?

And what if you could decide what keywords should be attached to pages?

What if StumbleUpon became a search engine?

It's not as far fetched as it might seem. At some point in the future, there will be enough SU members rating pages they come across and adding sites that they like to the database, that SU could actually make the jump from a simple amusement of random pages based on your interests, to a real search engine dishing out quality results based on rankings given by their userbase.

They could succeed where other search engines have failed.

I, for one, would love to see what would happen if SU did make the jump. It might be just the thing to replace Google as the top dog of search engines.

How to Share Your Pandora Music Stations

2006-12-17T07:59:00.000-05:00

At mouser's request, I wrote and posted a detailed tutorial giving 2 different methods of sharing individual stations from Pandora.com with others.

The first method is for those that have and use rss readers.

The second method is a bit more of a pain in the butt, but anybody can do it without an rss reader.

Complete with screenshots, a link to my Pandora rss feed, and a station of Christmas music that I just made.

http://www.donationcoder.com/blog/?item=756

Enjoy and post your Pandora links for the rest of us to listen to.

Answerbag Q&A

2006-09-11T04:29:00.000-04:00

Q: How many four letter words exist in the English language? (excluding curse words.)

A: I did not exclude curse words because that can differ based on region, era, and cultural background.

With 26 letters in the English alphabet, there are 45,6976 possible 4 letter combinations (26*26*26*26). Out of these, only 2746 are not words. That means the remaining 45,6976 are words.

List of non-words with 4 letters can be found here.

Question found on Answerbag.com. Answer is mine.

Got 15 minutes? Give Ruby a shot right now!

2006-08-15T05:12:00.000-04:00

You can try your hand at Ruby without having to download, install, or configure anything...in your browser!

http://tryruby.hobix.com/

This is a great interactive tester for the curious.

Demographics Predictions

2006-06-27T23:35:00.000-04:00

Microsoft is rolling out a demographics predictor you can use to see what gender and age group your website is most likely to appeal to.

The demographics for this blog, according to Microsoft, is males under age 18.

So my writing is more likely to appeal to teenage boys? I don't know how true that is.

Try it out on your own site/blog if you want. The results may surprise you.

http://adlab.microsoft.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx