Digital Soak

Windows Movie Makers - A free video editor

Window Movie Makers available in Windows XP operating system is a powerful software in editing videos and making movies. In despite of its capability, people often don't care about its present in their computer. I used this software a week ago and I find it so interesting and helpful. I have some pictures from my girlfriend and I want to surprise her by making a video clip. I use Window Movie Makers to work on. The result is great!

Window Movie Makers have many functions available for your choice. In Window Movie Makers you can capture video from video devices, import a video clip to edit, import pictures to make a clip, and you can import audio or music to add it to your movie.

Using Window Movie Makers you can add many pretty video effects to your video clip. You can make the video's title and credit only in a few simple steps. This software provides many video transitions to include to your movie too. I think this is a good software Microsoft gives us free. I love it!

Displaying your website's icon in the browser's address bar

When you surf the web, you often see a small icon appear in the browser's address bar. It is displayed in front of the website's URL which you visit. And you can see one when visit my blog Digital Soak, too. Let's look at the address bar in your browser, do you see it? Is that interesting? I'm using Firefox and it work fine.I will try to find out how to make Internet Explorer can display it. If you want your blog to display your blog's icon, you can simply include the code below into your blog's template:

xxx is the URL of your icon such as http://minhnhut.le.googlepages.com/ds.ico. The code should be placed in the <head> tag in your blog template.Your blog can become more attractive with small details. Try it now and tell me what you think.

Add your site to search engines

One of the best ways to increase your website's traffic is to submit your website to search engines such as Google.com ,Msn.com ,Yahoo.com ...By this way, people can find your website when they search for a specific keyword. To enable search engines index your site, you must place some meta tags in your site's source code. META Tags are HTML tags which provide information that describes the content of the webpages a user will be viewing. Search engines have recognized that website owners and administrators can use this resource to control their positioning and descriptions in search engine results. There are many relative meta tags you should include to your blog's template. In this article, I only talk about the most five popular meta tags: keywords, description, author, revisit-after, and robots.

Author META Tag
The author META tag defines the name of the author of the document being read. This tag is not widely supported but is recognized as part of the META Tag standard. The most common format is to insert the name of the person or organization and a contact email address.

Keywords META Tag
Search engines that support META tags will often use the keywords found on your pages as a means to categorize your website based on the search engines indexing algorithms (proprietary algorithms which index your website in search engine databases).

Description META Tag
Search engines that support META tags will often display the Description META tag along with your title in their results. Search engines will often capture the entire META tag of your description field, but webmasters should bear in mind that when a search engine displays the results to a user, the space is limited, usually under 20 words which you can use to grab the attention of a user. For this reason, when creating your META tags, webmasters should make the first sentence of their description field to capture the attention of a user and use the rest of the description tag to elaborate further.

Robots META Tag
Robots, also known as spiders, are automated mechanisms that spider your site, or search your site on how to categorize the information you submitted to the search engine. Typically, a website owner would submit the main page and the robots would visit your site and collect all subpages and related links from your main page. Using the robots tag, you can define which pages to follow,
which to index and which to ignore completely.

Revisit META Tag
The Revisit META tag defines how often a search engine or spider should come to your website for re-indexing. Often this tag is used for websites that change their content often and on a regular basis. This tag can also be beneficial in boosting your rankings if search engines display results based on the most recent submissions.

Remember to add your META Tag between the <head> tag:

<head>

</head>

Finally, submit your website to search engines:Google.com ,Msn.com ,Yahoo.com ...

Change MP3 songs' volume with MP3Gain

I write this page to share with you a powerful software that I like very much. I love music. I think I can't live any more if one day my life don't have music. And I think you love music too. When you listen to mp3 songs,do you feel uncomfortable with the different volume of them? I used to be crazy with that, but now I can enjoy my mp3s comfortably. I found a sotware on the internet that can solve our problem perfectly. That is MP3Gain. It is absolutely free, but powerful. That's a good news. I love free software.

MP3Gain is easy to use with the friendly interface. Just click the Add File(s) button if you want to change the volume of a single file, or click the Add Folder button to change the volume of a list of mp3 songs in a specific folder.Then click Track Analysis button to analyze the volume level of your songs.Finally, click Track Gain to gain the volume.

The default volume is 89.0 dB.You can change it higher or lower. But I recommend you should only change the volume frequency from 85.0dB to 95.0dB, otherwise your mp3s' quality will be dropped down.After downloading,extract the zip file and double click the MP3GainGUI.exe to run directly. Installation will not be required to run it.After using MP3Gain, tell me if you like it.
Enjoy!
Download MP3Gain

Google free proxy

Access restricted web sites using Google language tools service as a proxy.

A little tutorial found on the italian site www.manuali.net inspired me for this hack. That tutorial suggests to translate a webpage, using Google translator, to access it even if restricted.It worked fine but something else was needed... why translate?!

Ok, let's start from the beginning. We all know that Google is more than a search engine; we do use it as provider for email, mapping, news and many other services. Google is now also a free proxy service. Proxy is a device that stands between a PC and the internet, providing all the connections to the world wide web. What a proxy does is to receive all data from a requested site, so when you access web pages all data come from proxy.

What's the purpose for Google as a proxy? We often use office/school/university connections, usually those services are set to provide more safety, blocking the access to undesidered web sites (the "black list"). What you can do now is use Google translator service (language tools) as a proxy to bypass the restrictions set for our connection!

You just need to type the following URL:

http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=enen&u=www.forbiddensite.com
(www.forbiddensite.com stands for the URL you need to go to...)

What you'll get is the translation (english to english!) of the page you want to see... your connection is directed to a google.com page so this page won't be blocked (would be blocked only with google.com on the black list), no matter what's the content.

Notice that the URL has been a little hacked because the parameter "langpair" is set to "enen" (english/english) so the page is processed by Google but you can keep the original language of the page (no need to translate!). If you need another language (e.g. french) you just need to set the parameter langpair to "frfr" and you'll be able to read french pages in french!

A couple of examples:

english... http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=enen&u=hacks.oreilly.com

italian ... http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=itit&u=www.bigthistle.altervista.org

Last but not least: if you use this trick, you're not sure to protect your privacy, this kind of connection lets you see blacklisted pages but doesn't hide your IP address. Just go to http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=enen&u=www.whatismyip.com to see your IP is not hidden...