Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

Ever wonder what LA looks without any cars on the streets? Many images on You-Are-Here.com have been taken without any cars in the pictures. Hard to tell how he got the shots without the cars, because the images don’t look manipulated either. The Los Angeles photos were taken by a German tourist photographer and sorted into categories by year built, districts, boulevards and more. He also has pictures of graffiti, murals and sorts them by medium used.

The site has thousands of pictures of LA, many (maybe most?) without cars, all sorted by many different criteria which makes this a great resource for anyone interested in Los Angeles architecture or in need of inspiration for their project. Tourists will appreciate the fact that all images come with an address. The idea of taking all these images without cars is what makes this site special. How often have you seen an image of LA or any metropolis for that matter without any cars in it?

Using border radius for rounded corners, box and text shadows and other styles is a snap with the CSS3 Generator. Not only does it give you a preview and the option to copy or download the code snippet, it also shows you which browsers and mobile devices your generated code is compatible with. Use this tool also for gradients, CSS Transition, CSS Transform, CSS Animation and @font-face properties.

If you’re working on a project that uses location names, you can use Geonames.org for your research and to download databases of location names from around the world free of charge. GeoNames integrates geographical data such as names of places in various languages, elevation, population and more from various sources.

This geographical database is available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains over 10 million geographical names and consists of 7.5 million unique features, 2.8 million populated places and 5.5 million alternate names. It also offers some population and area statistics. According to the site Geonames users include Ubuntu, Apple’s SnowLeopard, Bing Maps, The New York Times and more.

Get 1000 well designed royalty free icons in 16×16 and 32×32 in png format at PC.de. This selection includes monochromatic (including black and white) as well as multicolor icons. You’ll get icons for social media sites, blog related, feeds, web page tools, mobile apps, settings and more.

Enter up to 1000 keywords into the Jumbo Keyword editing tool and use any of the 70 different functions to edit them and get them ready for AdWords.

This keyword editing tool lets you auto de-dupe and edit to broad match, “phrase match”, [exact match], -negative match. It also has sorting functions such as sort by match type, URLs and bids and features a very useful find and replace function. The Ad-Maker lets you create ads and preview them in different formats for your AdWords campaigns.

There are dozens of QR barcode creators available, but the one on QRStuff.com is one of the more versatile ones, letting you create the barcode in color and select from 14 different data types. After creating your QR barcode, you’ll be able to print it (PNG or raster PDF), get analytics (when you register), email it, or use it to create t-shirts and other products via the Zazzle print-on-demand website.

The site offers paid options to create the barcode in high resolution, batch processing, save your codes and more. Click here for more info on QR barcodes.

If you’re interested in how much traffic your article on Wikipedia is receiving, or what the most popular topics are on Wikipedia, visit the Wikipedia Article Traffic Statistic site. It’s very simple to use: choose your language, the year and month and a keyword and ‘go.’

Here some sample searches:

- Views of Google+ article in July 2011
- Views of 405 freeway article in July 2011
- Views of Harry Potter article in July 2011

Spelling makes a difference: when you use harrypotter instead of Harry Potter, the statistics are different, even though the article is the same.

The site states that it “is very much a beta service and may disappear or change at any time.”

Google has launched a web fonts site that lets you browse through hundreds of free, open source fonts that are optimized for the web. You simply pick the fonts you like, review them used with actual text (no lorem ipsum), then click the ‘use’ button. You can choose from plain, bold, italic and see the impact on page load time and then download the fonts, or simply add a snippet of code to the header of your website to refer directly to the font.

You’ve just taken a dozens of images you were planning to sell or add to your website when you suddenly realize that you don’t have your camera. Has it been lost or stolen? Then you’re thinking of all the pictures on your camera: what will the people that stole it or found your camera do with them? Will they simply delete them, or will the pictures end up on the web, possibly Photoshopped in some undesirable way? Then you’re thinking why the industry hasn’t introduced passwords on consumer cameras, or a function that will self-destruct the camera, or something like a Lo-Jack for cameras, or a camera finder of any kind…

So you can’t remotely delete the photos and you can’t destroy the camera. The next best thing is to use stolen camera finder. All you have to do is drag and drop one of the images you had taken with the camera previously onto the page and the site will show search results of other images that have been taken with the exact same camera. This service works by using Exif data embedded within your photo to search the web for photos taken with the same camera.

If you don’t have any photos handy that have been taken with the stolen camera, you can also type your camera’s ‘internal’ serial number if you have it (usually not the one on the box) into a search box to see who’s posting pictures with your camera. Exif is a standard used by digital cameras and other electronics and may also include your camera’s ‘internal’ serial number. This may be a long shot, and if your camera isn’t listed, this tool won’t work. It also won’t work searching on Facebook or MySpace because they scrape the Exif info from the photos according to the site.

(To see the actual data your current camera embeds within your photos, try Jeffrey’s Exif Viewer.)

See what can happen if you have an Eye-Fi card installed in your lost/stolen camera.

How accessible is your site to folks with disabilities? You can find out easily with the web accessibility checker at the International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet website at ICDRI.org.

Simply put, accessibility means making resources usable by the largest number of people possible. Techniques used to make the Internet and Web accessible can range from very simple, like adding the ‘alt’ or ‘longdesc’ attribute, to the more complex, like changing scripts, navigation and structure of a site.

When we used the web accessibility checker to test our site the results resembled a to-do list with instructions. Changing the ‘alt’ attribute for images came up several times. This is a reminder that a text equivalent for every non-text element should be provided and the use of the word ‘image’ or ‘.jpg, .gif, .bmp, .jpeg’ within the text should be avoided, which makes sense because it’s not descriptive of what the image actually is. The text used within the ‘alt’ attribute should also be shorter than 81 characters.

Applying these techniques will help a visually impaired person access the content of a web page with software which will read text and describe the images it encounters on the page.

Other suggestions that may come up when you test your site are that redundant text links should be provided for each active region of a server-side image map; and that row and column headers should be identified for data tables for example.

For resources on making your site more accessible, including a Section 508 checklist, visit the ICDRI’s accessibility primer page.