The ePro » Productivity

Use your own domain for OpenID

James Docherty — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 13:08:02 +0000

Creating accounts and remembering passwords for every site you visit has always been a major pain. A simple way around this issue is OpenID. This technology allows you to use a single account to control access to lots of sites in a secure way.

You probably already have an OpenID account but just didn’t know about it.

Examples of OpenID providers are Google and Yahoo! (if you have one of these accounts you already have an OpenID). This is great but if you want the flexibility to use your own, easy to remember domain you don’t have to set up your site to be an OpenID provider. You can simply choose a 3rd party you’re already using for other things.

This approach means you’re in complete control of your online identity and can easily see who has access to your credentials. If you’re no longer happy with them, you can simply revoke access…easy! Watch this all in action in the video below.

The code you’ll need to embed in your site’s homepage is:

So, if you’re a website owner and thinking about authentication, reducing the friction created by the sign up process is very important. Implement OpenID and as you can see in the video, your users will find it very easy to log in and start using your service.

Free file sharing service

James Docherty — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:55:00 +0000

If you want to share large files with your suppliers (videos, photos, artwork etc), the best service I’ve found is drop.io. There are lots of file sharing services out there but what’s so great about this one is that it is totally free (up to 100MB per file), its quick and doesn’t require registration or other annoying shenanigans. If your data is particularly sensitive you can password protect it at no extra cost. The premium versions of the service allow much larger data storage and shorter url’s (not that the 7 characters of the free version are too long). Quite simply there’s not much more you could want from an online file sharing service. If you think there’s something better please let me know.

Free professional website planning tool

James Docherty — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:24:00 +0000

If you’re planning a new website or an update to an existing site, its a good idea to think through what sections are going to be included and how the website’s going to grow over time. This used to be done with PostIt notes and a pen but the sparkly free service over at WriteMaps is so much easier and you don’t loose your afternoon’s work when the wind blows through the window!

Of course in this web 2.0 world its a free service, allows you to work collaboratively with your team and the interface is simple. Perfect!

Linkorama: WriteMaps

Online image editing

James Docherty — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:59:00 +0000

I’ve just been looking for a decent web based image editor for cropping and scaling images without having to buy desktop software. Well I found Picnik and what a beauty she is! It allows you to do all the basic features of Photoshop with some of the more advanced stuff like filters thrown in for good measure. If you need to scale some images for your website look no further than this excellent free app.

Use Blogger as a news article editor

James Docherty — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:17:00 +0000

I had to find a solution for a client who wanted to be able to upload news articles to their otherwise static website. Having looked at options like Adobe Contribute and not really seen the benefit, I thought Blogger’s FTP publishing setting must be worth a look. Sure enough, you can customise the template to simply output a list of news articles without all the usual blogger stuff on the page. So you’re really just using Blogger’s interface and article management tools…which as you’d expect from Google are very user friendly. Once you’ve FTP’d the finished pages to your server, you can then either include these lightweight pages in a news page by using a server-side script language like php or asp. If you don’t have access to a scripting language on your server, you can simply use an iframe to embed the content. Slick, free and very quick to set up – winner!

Google helps you cook

James Docherty — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 23:03:00 +0000

We all know Google is the best search engine available. However, it is an awful lot more too – it even helped me make dinner!

I was cooking the other day (actually I was just preparing the ingredients for Liz to do the cooking!) and I had a recipe which was written in pounds & ounces. All my ingredients were in metric measurements so I did a quick search for a conversion tool…I didn’t need to look far!

Type this into Google: 1lb2oz to g

Amazingly, at the top of the screen you’ll get:
1 pound 2 oz = 510.291416 grams

Pretty amazing huh?!

You can also try it with all sorts of conversions (distances etc) but its also a really powerful calculator too. Just type this into Google:
100/8

Obviously firing up your PC to do some simple maths is pretty silly but if the PC’s on it could be pretty handy, esp if you need to concentrate on the cooking!