For me, there arises a need to track comments that I have made on other blogs for several reasons.

• It may be the first time I visit that blog and I would want to track the conversations on an interesting debate.
• It is a contest on a blog, which I may like to keep track and check to see if anything new has come up.
• It would be better to track the comments and reply when necessary instead of visiting the post and scrolling through dozens of comments.

For these reasons, I find comment tracking services very useful. Here, I am making a list of three sites to track post comments and one other way to do it, which most of you may be familiar with.

1. Bloppy

Bloppy is the latest of the the blog comment tracking services. You have to enter the post location and your email address and the service automatically sends emails whenever a new comment is posted. Another interesting feature is that the tracking can be done for a specific time. That is, you can choose to be updated about new comments for, say, 1 hour, 1 week or 1 month etc. After that time frame, the updates are stopped.

But the downside is that only email updates are offered and nothing else. One can very well use the plugin for this. Also, a bookmarklet for firefox and a widget for Mac OSX is available as well to add posts for tracking. Currently only posts from wordpress, blogger.com, blog.com and sapo blogs are supported but more support is expected.

2. Commentful

For using commentful, you need to register at Blogflux. After registering, you should head to your watchlist page. Here you add the posts that you want to track. Once you’ve added a post, the list auto updates to give you the current status of comments on the post. The other ways of adding a post to track include installing the Commentful Firefox Extension or using the Commentful Bookmarklet.

The bookmarklet seems the easiest way to add posts without much clutter like the Firefox extension. For tracking the comments, or for getting notified about new comments, you can simply use the extension which will place a bulb status bar that indicates new comments. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed of your watchlist to get updates. You are also able to subscribe to daily email updates about the comments.

However the disadvantage seems to be that (more…)

Favicons are basically the small image that appears next to the website’s address in the address bar of browsers. They help in adding a nice touch to the site’s design and create a unique identity for the website. Designing a favicon may be an arduous task for an amateur web designer. So, Favicon.ico generator is a service that helps you to create your own favicons.

Using the Favicon.ico you are able to design your own favicons in a few minutes. The service provides you with a 16×16 square grid as shown below.

• You are then provided with a marker like tool using which you can select the color you want.
• After this, use the marker to fill up the squares according to the pattern you wish
• You can check the “transparent” checkbox and use the marker tool to erase the boxes that you have filled.

• You are also provided with a live preview tool that updates automatically as soon as you stop using the marker. Thus you can see exactly how your favicon will look on the browsers.

• As soon as you are done designing the favicon, you can download it directly as a .ico file, which is the standard format for favicons.
• You can also publish the favicon for public use by using the Creative Commons license. However for this feature alone, you need to register.
• A tag cloud is provided for access to the most popularly used tags for favicons.
• You can also check out the Top Rated Icons at the site

Do tell me if you found this service useful. Please drop in your comments about the service. Thanks for reading!

On a side note, Brian Aldrich from The Prize Blog is having a 6-day blog competition at his blog, and is giving away mp3 players, blog links, directory listings, cash prizes and more. Entries are free and open till the 22nd of July.

Also, Abdalla from sweethacks is concluding his 7 day, 7 prizes contest with the last one that can get you an xBox 360, 3 games, a wireless controller, a free review and a featured linkback. Just comment on the post to participate.

PopUri is a simple service that enables you to check up on quite a lot of information regarding your site with a single stop. Thus, this will save you the time to visit different sites to get the rankings, ratings, no. of backlinks and so on.

The various details you can check up using Popuri include the following:

• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rank
• Compete Rank
• Quantcast Rank
• Google BackLinks
• Yahoo BackLink
• Live Search BackLinks
• Technorati Links
• del.icio.us Bookmarks
• Bloglines subscribers
• WHOIS
• DNS Report

All the details that are presented are done live and the results obtained instantly. So, only the latest information is available here. Also, the various results are produced using AJAX, so there is no reloading of the page. It is essential that you enter the site’s name with the http:// . Otherwise the service works just about fine.

One other thing was that, the service did not show the Quantcast rank for my site, while it did show for others. I wonder why that was so. And yes, my site does have a Quantcast rank. It did show the rank as 0 for sites with no rank at Quantcast as well.

Widgets:

Popuri offers two widgets that can be used on your site to display a few vital stats. They include the Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank and backlinks from Yahoo! and Technorati. The only difference between the 2 widgets is the color. No extra functionality or additional details can be added to the widgets. But they do look good enough to put on your site and it functions pretty well.

Here are the samples:

Do tell me your opinions on the service and if you found it useful. Send in your comments about the post. Thanks for reading!

Subtitles, for those who do not know, are lines of printed text on the screen that are direct representations of spoken or signed text in a programme.

Why Subtitles?

Most of us do have a fair share of movies from VCDs and other formats with us. Sometimes, the dialogues in certain movies may be heavily accented that may prevent us from understanding them properly. In other cases, people who do not understand the language of the film need subtitles for the translation.

In these cases, the use of subtitles becomes essential in order to understand the movie better. So here I am putting up a list of 8 sites offering free download of subtitles for various movies.

1. OpenSubtitles

This site, by far has the cleanest interface and has easy to find subtitles. The subtitles are neatly organised. Also, on registering you can search for subtitles in different languages and also receive RSS updates on new subtitles.

2. Subscene

Subscene is one site, which is my personal favorite because of the simple fact I find almost all subtitles I want here. It has quite a few data about the subtitle files and is a no-nonsense site, meaning it has the essentials and nothing fancy.

3. Subtitles.images.02.cz

This site has probably, the biggest database of all the subtitle sites I mentioned, but also the most cluttered and disorganized one. Searching here is a hassle and finding one you want is a bigger hassle. But undoubtedly, it will have what you are looking for.

4. Subtitle Database

Subtitle database also has a wide range of subtitles available numbering around 100,000 and the search and find process is pretty simple. You are also easily able to find the subtitle of your requirements by simply scanning through the results.

5. DivX Subtitles

DivX Subtitles requires a compulsory registration and login before downloading any files. The files are listed with all the necessary characteristics and there is a substantial amount of subtitles available in a variety of languages

6. Subtitles Box

Of all the sites, this has been the most disappointing atleast in my opinion since most movies listed do not have a subtitle. I wonder what the point is, listing only the names of the movies. The search feature is no good as well. Also, a login is required to download the files.

7. 7Nights

As much as I despise the gaudy interface of the site coupled with the terrible navigation, I should appreciate the quantity of the subs available here. The database is pretty good with all the necessary details for you to download your subtitles without problems.

8. AnySubs

Anysubs I assume, is a relatively new and less frequented service and hence the number of subtitles available here is quite less compared to the other sites. But if you do run out of options, you always would have something to rely on.

I hope you enjoyed the post. Do leave your comments about the post and about the sites in general. If you have found this post useful, do share it

Many a time, we would have come across situations where we would have found it difficult to correlate between sizes of objects. Let us take an example. Suppose you come across a certain product on the internet, say a flash drive. The image on the manufacturer’s site would probably not show the accurate size of the flash drive. So, when you are looking at different options to see which one would be compact to use, it will be difficult to tell the difference unless you physically see the products.

This may not be possible due to a variety of reasons. In order to overcome such problems, there exists a service called Sizeasy.

What is Sizeasy?

Sizeasy is an online service that helps you to compare objects and their sizes by displaying them in 3 dimension. By doing this, you are able to get a realistic idea of the difference in size between two objects. All you need to use sizeasy are the dimensions of the object you need to compare. The dimensions of the flash drive in the above example would be available at the manufacturer’s site.

3-D View:

How do I start? (more…)