Categories
Articles

Print MP3 List

One of the many functions of STG FolderPrint Plus is to print mp3 lists, or export music lists.

It allows you to choose a number of fields, such as title,  artist, album, etc and include them when you print, export or view your file list.

You can also do batch Move/Copy of MP3 List- for example, if you decide that you want your music on a USB Drive in a folder with the Artist Name, then the Album name, you can do it in a few clicks.

You can also rename automatically using the MP3 Tags, which is very useful if your MP3 Player just displays a part of the file name.

One thing that all current books about web design reinforce is that different users should get specific landing pages. That is why the link above is to the new page specific to MP3 and Music. It's still very much a work in progress, but I have to say that I really liked how it looks with a 400 pixel wide screenshot image. The site was originally made (by me, using a purchased template) back in 2003, when the average resolution was 800×600, and 640×480 was still common.

On current resolutions, the screenshots look tiny!

I guess the next step is revising all product pages, and using STGThumb's Lytebox Album to show multiple screenshots using the same space.

Categories
Software Release

STGThumb 2.95 released

STGThumb 2.95 is a new release, and has improved pagination (when using Multiple pages).

This is how it used to look:

And this is the new look:
New Pagination for STGThumb 2.95

I've also fixed a bug when launching the page in the browser with multiple pages (and Classic or Lytebox albums).

It's available from the regular page, as usual.

Categories
Articles

Improved WordPress performance with WP-Minify

I just installed WP-Minify and I just had to comment on it. Looking at my site speed graphs (which are now a factor for Google), I noticed that some of the worst performance comes in the blog section. Reading Web Performant WordPress I read about WP-Minify and decided to try it. The performance improvement is absurd. Testing on YSlow, it gets from a Grade F (41 HTTP Requests, 412K) to Grade A (4 HTTP Requests, 107K)! That's pretty impressive for a simple plugin install. Very recommended to anyone using WordPress.

5 out of 5 stars
Update: 26/Apr/2011
The current version of WP-Minify is 1.1.3. According to many reports, this version no longer compress JS files, and the latest that works properly is 1.04. What I have noticed here is even worse – if I try either version with the latest WordPress 3.1.1, I have to turn off CSS Minify on WP-Minify configuration page, or the blog gets completely messed up…


WPMU DEV - The WordPress Experts

Categories
Articles

New E-mail Newsletter

Some time ago, I decided to move the e-mail newsletter from PHPList – which is nice but very limited in features, as well as by my server – to Mailchimp.

I did stall it a lot, but this friday I finally sent the new newsletter .

Overall, MailChimp's system is pretty neat. They have nice templates, and it's easy to add Facebook's Like Buttons (and many other social sites), archives, and track links. Their reports are pretty cool, and not only show your Open/Click/Unsubscribe/Bounce rates, but also have click maps of what links were most clicked, as well as a per country map of where your e-mails were opened. There are many other features, most of which I didn't use yet.

However, the tracking system doesn't work well with how my extra domains (Folderprint.com and STGThumb.com) are set up. So both of these (which add to 87% of the clicks) failed. 🙁

I was able to fix this for the STGThumb link, but not for the FolderPrint link, yet. So, to any customers that got the newsletter, I apologize for the inconvenience!

Categories
Software Release

STGThumb 2.94 released

I just got a report of a bug in slide show generation (i.e.: it just didn't work). So I immediately fixed and posted a new release, 2.94.

It's available from the regular page, as usual.

Categories
Software Release

STG FolderPrint Plus 3.79 released

STG FolderPrint Plus 3.79 is now available at http://www.stgsys.net/folderprint.exe.

Changes in 3.79 (12/Jan/2010)
Fixed Bug with Show Root not turning off on CD Cover Report
Clicking Open/Open Containing Folder for internal Compressed files opens Compressed file or its folder.

Changes in 3.78 (13/Sep/2010)
Fixed Bug with AV on Preview Fixed Preview for GIF
Added Explorer Registration for Windows Vista and Windows 7

Categories
Book Review

Pragmatic Programmer’s Automatic Kindle e-book delivery

I've bought many e-books over the years at the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

One neat feature I haven't noticed till today is that now they can deliver your e-books to your Kindle with wi-fi.

It's a small touch, but downloading the e-book (not only the first time, but on every update), getting your Kindle, connecting it, finding the file and moving it to the proper folder and ejecting it from the computer is a lot more work than you have when buying from Amazon (i.e.: click on the link and wait a few seconds for the download).

With this, it's exactly the same process after the purchase (it's still much easier to buy in Amazon).

Given their great selection, it's well worth checking them out!

Categories
Articles

Link Building Evaluation

Wordtracker posted an interesting article about evaluating sites for link building.

Link Building is the process of getting links to your page to improving your rankings in search engines. It is quite important for SEO these days.

Factors discussed in the article include relevancy to your own site, fresh content, current link numbers, and standing on search engines such as Google and Alexa.

What I consider the easiest way to do a link building campaign is using Link Assistant. It has a lot of tools for finding the best link sources for your relevant keywords, and can show several of these factors for you. It also manages your link pages for reciprocal link exchanges, as well as checking if links pointing to you still work – including generating and uploading your link page.

Well worth checking out.

Wordtracker has their own tool for this, but Link Assistant beats it on price by quite a bit.

Categories
Articles

GameInternals – Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior

GameInternals – Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior – a very interesting article about the mechanics of the enemies (Ghosts) in Pac-Man.

Categories
Articles

A/B Testing Video and Slide

Alwin Hoogerdijk, president of Collectorz.com, posted on his blog an interesting video and slides of his presentation on ESWC on how he does A/B Split Testing.