Monday, August 28, 2006

Cool service: Sendmefile.com

So you have a huge file to send to someone. Say it's a 20 or 30 mb file.

Most email services won't let you send that as an attachment. Gmail does but then, the recipient better have gmail too.

If you don't have your own ftp service you're stuck, right?

Nope.

Check out free upload sites like Sendmefile.com

It lets you upload your file to its server (upto 50 mb per file) and send the download link to whoever needs it. Unlimited storage, no need to register.

The free service is pretty slow (1 hour to upload a 25 mb file) but hey, you need to send that file across for free? Use a service like Sendmefile.

Drawbacks:

User level (free, no registration) doesn't allow me to delete the file after the intended recipient downloads it. So no sensitive data, folks

The free, no registration level doesn't tell me if the file will be made available for general download. Security threat here. No one is probably going to be searching for your file by name but it's up there for anyone to find.

Conclusion:

A great service for non-sensitive files that need to be sent across quickly with no investment. For a more secure way, try a hosted ftp. That's where you rent the server space and bandwidth and sending / receving a large file quickly is just a matter of knowing the login name and password.

Deepak

Friday, August 18, 2006

Even more cool: Video!

Yep, there's a way cool and easy way to add video to your blog / website. ifilm.com offers you free videos that you can embed in your blog post / web page. Check the one I embedded:



Just go over to ifilm.com, select the video you like and copy the embed code. To copy the embed code, make sure you go hit the back button on your browser till you see the "embed" button on the section about the video you've selected. Then hit the button, click anywhere within the pointy brackets and hit Ctrl+C to copy the code. Then go over to your blog post editor and paste the code in a new blog post.

You're done.

Ain't technology cool?

Deepak

More cool things for your blog / website: Chat Room!

If you're the kind who likes to chat and are willing to spend a couple of hours a day interacting in real time with visitors and customers, you might like to add a chat room to your site.

For those not in the know, a chat room is a "virtual room", something like the tag-board window you see on this blog. The difference is, messages must be in "real time", meaning, you and the person you're chatting with must be online and at the "chat room" at the same time. Messages aren't usually saved in chatrooms so you can't leave a message for someone the way you can with a tag-board.

However, nothing beats a chat room for interacting one-on-one or one-to-many or many-to-many in real time.

Sigmachat is a really cool piece of software that allows you to add a java-enabled chat room to your site / blog. You don't need administrator privileges or even a blog or website to have your own chat room! Sigmachat has a free, hosted version where it will host the chat room for you. Several chat room features, such as "ignore" (valuable when some ass is creating trouble in the chat room) and "private chat" (go one-on-one with a valued customer to solve a problem) are available even in the free version. The paid version gives better administrative control such as room moderation (to boot trouble-makers and even ban them for specific periods of time).

Try it out, you have nothing to lose.

Deepak