Web Worker Daily

Increasingly, from blogs to marketing materials to online video show production, web workers are working with video. The good things you can do with online video go far beyond YouTube, and there are a number of free applications and utilities–many of them open source–that you can turn to to help with web video tasks. In this post, I’ll round up six of my favorites.

If you send video of any kind out on a network basis, look into Xvid. This free application compresses video files, which are often huge and unwieldy in size. I’ve gotten better than 100-to-1 compression ratios with Xvid.

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If you’re running a web site that includes small chunks of information – addresses, say, or reviews – a new service named BeamMe.Info wants to help you get those chunks over to your readers’ mobile phones. The idea is pretty simple: include a tiny bit of javascript that creates a “Send to mobile” button; when readers click the button, they can type in their mobile number and Beam Me’s servers do the rest.

The company offers two pricing models: pay-as-you-go (on a per-message basis) or advertiser-supported. There’s also a RESTful API for developers who want to tie their own creations into this service. While it won’t fit in everywhere, it offers one more easy integration path for those in the information business.

Spell checking functions are built into many tools these days including Microsoft Word, blog editing programs, and even now into browsers such as Firefox and Opera.  However, this doesn’t stop web publishers or bloggers (including me!) from slipping and including an occasional spelling error into our posts.

NetMechanic aims to help. Begin using this service by entering in your URL on their website. Their robot checks your site for spelling errors and gives you a report based on its findings. You can specify a custom dictionary if you’d like the service to ignore certain words. Additionally, you can set NetMechanic to check either a single page or go drill down 20 pages into the site.

A new site called Spellr.us goes one step further.  The site, currently in a closed beta, will offer hourly, daily, or weekly analysis of your site and will give you a visual image of the page containing the spelling error, annotated with strikethroughs.  Pricing is hard to find on Spellr’s homepage but if it’s kept at a reasonable rate, I could easily see publishers paying for this type of service.  Perhaps a more efficient way for Spellr to operate is to scrape a blog’s RSS feed and provide error notification using this as a tool.

How do you keep track of the grammatical health of your site?  What’s your method of monitoring these types of issues?

[From Net@Nite via TechCrunch]

We’ve covered picking the ideal office chair, fixing up your workstation with a treadmill, and choosing the right office desk. But there’s another alternative for the web worker that we haven’t touched on yet: standing while you work.

While the idea of standing – instead of sitting – at your desk may seem unnatural, it has some high-profile advocates, including most recently Jamis Buck of 37 Signals (not to mention Donald Rumsfeld). There’s even a whole industry devoted to selling you higher-than-usual desks, including Standupdesks.com and Biomorph. Read the rest of this entry »

Just because web workers have done away with the traditional office, it doesn’t mean we’re also rid of the stress that comes with working.

We encounter equipment failures, personal problems, and a scary client every now and then. Still, we need to keep our cool despite the stresses of web working.

Here are some ways to start…
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Calgoo – whose products we have covered in the past – has just announced the addition of Apple iCal support across its product line:

• Calgoo Hub, which supports sharing calendars
• Calgoo Connect, which handles synchronization of online and desktop calendars
• Calgoo Calendar, a desktop calendar product

This brings iCal into the growing Calgoo compatibility list, which also includes Google, 30 Boxes, and Outlook. There are other options for synchronizing Google Calendar with iCal, but Calgoo is one of the few vendors trying to cobble together some sort of universal synchronization solution.

BlackBerry is the smartphones du jour for web workers, and it’s not hard to see why. A straightforward interface, Fort Knox-like security and superb email handling make it the platform of choice for mobile email, but there’s a lot you can do to improve on the BlackBerry’s out-of-box functionality for email.

Note: this article is written for BIS users running BlackBerrys with OS 4.2.

How to Turn Email Off
One thing that’s irritated me about BlackBerrys from day one is the inability to turn off email delivery. No wonder there are so many ‘CrackBerry’ addicts out there!

But there are a few workarounds. To stop receiving email, turn off the data connection by going to Manage Connections > Mobile Network Options and switching Data Services off. Any email sent to your BlackBerry while this is turned off will be queued up and downloaded as soon as you turn data back on.

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Here at Web Worker Daily, we’re all about helping you find the applications that you need to be productive or run your business. But what if the existing solutions just don’t work for you, or don’t even exist?

You could have it custom programmed or even develop it yourself but that takes coding skills, as well as a considerable investment of time and money. Imagine if there was a free tool you could use to visually draw out your business process and an application would automatically be created to manage it – no coding required.

That’s the premise behind the newly released Iceberg 2 Development Platform from the folks at Dublin based Iceberg.

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