Earlier this week, thousands of sites, including JoeTech.com, blocked or hid their content as a symbolic gesture to protest the impending SOPA/PIPA legislation that threatened the integrity of free-flowing information on the Internet. While some sites displayed a pop-up message allowing users to move on to content by clicking a button and Google simply changed their logo to appear censored, sites like Wikipedia and Joe Tech completely blocked all content from users to truly emphasize the impact such legislation could cause. An example is seen below. This post will show you how we did it in just a few very easy steps.
Black Out Your Site Like Wikipedia
This site and Wikipedia both used a pretty harmless method to block our content for the protest. The method we used involved simply covering up the normal content with a layer of HTML that hides it and shows something else in its place. To accomplish this in an elegant way, you will need an image and/or content to display, the HTML shown below, and a small change to your site’s CSS. Here’s how it’s done:
1. Create your image and content. In my case, I made a couple very simple changes to a large version of my logo image to make it more protest-y.
2. Add the overlay code. In your site’s template (or your theme’s footer.php in WordPress), copy the code below and paste it right above the /body tag. Modify it as indicated to include your own image or message.
<div style="position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px;
width:100%;height:100%;
background:url(/images/darken.png);text-align:center;">
<!-- Add your image and message below this line -->
<img src="/images/sopa.png" />
<!-- Add your image and message above this line -->
</div>
3. Stop the scroll. Update your site’s CSS file to stop the original content from being larger than the new overlay content. This may not always be necessary, but will be pretty obvious when it is. Just add the following code anywhere to the bottom of the CSS:
body{overflow:hidden;}
That’s it! Follow the three steps above and you’ll have your protest/maintenance/special message up in no time on every page on the site.
I had the opportunity this week to check out another site where you can search for and buy mp3 songs on the cheap. At 16 cents a track, iomoio.com is a fraction of other sites, leaving you to ask, “What’s the catch?”
What’s The Catch
The first thing most people wonder about a site offering cheap mp3 music downloads is if it is legal. According to the site’s FAQ, it is. The reason they can offer these tracks for so cheap is because they’re outside the U.S. and have different licensing rules and agreements. Giving your credit card to a site outside the U.S. might make some people nervous, but I didn’t feel that way with iomoio.
Features, Selection, And Quality
Any time I visit a music site that I haven’t been to before, I look for three key components: site features/usability, music selection, and quality of the music being played. I give iomoio.com a 90/100 for features and usability. The site was very easy to sign up and navigate and finding tracks was easy with a comprehensive search that auto-completes for artist, album, and track. In my searches, I found most of what I searched for, and I have an interesting taste in music. Even though it didn’t find one of the tracks I was searching for, it did find a few artists I didn’t expect results for, like Faderhead and Stromkern. Of course, iomoio had plenty of the top artists like Rihanna and Lady Gaga too. I gave iomoio a 95/100 on selection. Out of the 10 tracks I searched for, it found nine, but the site had two out of three albums for the one it didn’t find.
When viewing a list of tracks, you are presented with a play button to preview the track, but the music preview plays about four different parts of the track rather than just the first 30 seconds, providing a better sample of what you’re buying. In addition, the preview lets you skip ahead by clicking the outer ring of the circle. When you purchase, you get to download mp3 songs without any DRM, so you can add them to any of your devices and listen wherever you want.
When a track or album is purchased, it’s placed in your Downloads page, where you can download a .ZIP archive including the song or album. Downloaded tracks included the important track information like album, artist, track number, etc. and are 256k, earning a 100/100 for quality. The tracks I listened to sounded perfect.
As a bonus, when you sign up, you get two free tracks. I give that 100/100.
Conclusions
Like a lot of people in the U.S., I’m a little sensitive about who I give my credit card information to. Being a site in a foreign land may turn people away, but the trade-off is really cheap tracks at great quality with fast downloads. Even if you’re not ready to make a purchase, just head over and pick up a couple free tracks.
Although the preceding was a sponsored review, as always I strive to provide an honest opinion of the product reviewed.
Although the following is a sponsored review, as always I strive to provide an honest opinion of the product reviewed.
There are a lot of online sources to help you find files online, but many of them are limited to only a few upload sites and don’t remove old links. Others put really annoying sponsored links up that look like regular results to get you to click on a paid link. This week, I was asked to review a file sharing search site called General-Files.com. It promises a cleaner search of more files with a bunch of features.
Finding and Downloading Files
There’s not really a lot to finding files to download online. Generally, you search and something will come up. The problem I’ve had in the past is that I’ll search Google and half of the results are other file search sites that generate a fake hit for sponsored links. In this case, however, I skip Google and head to General-Files.com and search for my file. The search is pretty quick and returns just what I’m looking for in most cases. Some people will use sites like this to download movies for free, which can be illegal in some cases. Others will visit hoping to download free music, which comes with the same legal concern. This is not the case all of the time, though. Many artists will share their music online for free and it’s perfectly legal. I often use a site like this to find fonts, clip art, a viral video or image, or any number of things. The possibilities are virtually endless as this site includes results not only from Uploading, MegaUpload, RapidShare and many others, but it also returns direct links to files from around the web.
In addition to searching for what you know you want, you can also choose from their lists of Most Downloaded, Most Commented and Most Rated, as well as Hot Files and the Latest uploads. Just use common sense when you download random files. Finally, when you’re ready to download a file you can click right out to the site that hosts the file and begin your download one file at a time, or you can queue them up to download all at once.
Additional Features
For those who want to be more involved in the social process, you can vote for files on a five-star scale, comment on files, and even report some of the less savory content out there. You can also send a Good Report to indicate that the file is generally good, virus free, or erotic in nature. Reporting bad content warns others against downloading it and comments and votes help guide the “Most” and “Hot” lists mentioned above. It’s the same concept as liking and commenting on Facebook posts. And speaking of liking on Facebook, each file’s details page includes a Like button so you can help others find it, too.
One of the features I nearly overlooked is the Alert option. Alerts are turning up everywhere these days. From Facebook push notifications on your iPhone to Google searches, alerts are a popular way to find out right away when something happens. On General-Files.com, you can set a search alert to let you know via email when someone uploads a file matching your search criteria. This feature will be invaluable when you’re searching for a hard-to-find file.
General Conclusions
With any file hosting site or search, you need be aware of what you’re downloading. General-Files is a little more helpful in this regard when the reporting features are used. The clean, ad-free and fast search along with compiled lists and alerts make this file search stand out heads above the others I’ve come across. It’s in my bookmarks and should have a place in yours if you find yourself searching for files often.
Although the following is a sponsored review, as always I strive to provide an honest opinion of the product reviewed.
One of the most complicated things to do for the first time is build a web site. Most people don’t even know what the HTML acronym stands for, much less how to turn hundreds or thousands of lines of HTML into a web site. And let’s be honest. Your first web site is usually hideous just like mine was. One way around this is to hire a website developer to create your site. An alternative for those without a huge web development budget is a site like the free website maker reviewed here.
(viewing a photo in my new site’s photo gallery)
How uCoz.com Works
The idea behind uCoz is pretty simple. They provide a web site that helps you create your own website online. From choosing a site name and design template to installing and configuring even the small details of what they call site modules, the whole process is done without the need for any real skill, an HTML book, Photoshop, or even a paid hosting account because uCoz hosts the site for free.
(one of the many configuration panels)
When you build a website, you’ll get a control panel, and this is where all the magic happens. From the control panel, you can change basic site settings, languages and wording, and add, edit, and remove pages as well as view stats on individual pages. Becoming familiar with how everything works in the control panel is the first order of business that you should attend to. This was pretty easy with help along the way, but there were a couple areas that took a little longer to comprehend. In general, most processes were easy to follow and accomplish, but there is a lot to play with.
The uCoz.com Web Top
The part that surprised me a little was the uCoz Web Top. The Web Top is a web interface that looks and acts remarkably like Windows. With everything from background configuration and even its own programs, the Web Top is your gateway to your websites. This is because they let you have more than just one free site. At first glance, the Web Top looked like a very over-done way of providing simple access to your multiple sites, but after playing, I realized that it offers a lot more than that. It has games, which I think is fun but counter-productive. More importantly, it has applications built right in. Beyond the simple Calculator and Task Manager are much more useful applications like the code development program and Pixlr, the image editor with lots of great features.
(creating images is easy with the Pixlr image editor)
I develop complex websites all day long in PHP and the tools I use the most are Photoshop for design and Zend for code editing. The offering of similar tools from within the Web Top makes this a much more viable web development and hosting platform for those with a little more skill and creativity.
Features and Modules
After you’ve created a basic web site you can add and configure a number of site sections or modules such as forums, photo galleries, a guest book, online games, a blog, polls, classified ads, and files. Each module is pretty configurable and most of them include user interaction like being able to give a photo anywhere from one to five stars. The sites also allow for user registration so that users can log in to interact. Behind the scenes, as an admin, you can block users, set up groups and permissions, and the list really does go on.
One of the cooler features I came across was the use of content tokens. A simple token I used was for an image. I uploaded an image to use with content and the system generated a token $IMAGE1$ for displaying the image. I copied that token to the spot in content where I wanted the image to appear and it showed up there. A more useful example was the widget token that was created when I generated a Twitter widget. I then just used the token in the same way I had used the image token and the Twitter feed widget appeared in the site.
Conclusions
uCoz.com looks great, but hides some really cool features behind your user login. I had no idea about Web Top until I was already using it. Other than the occasional broken image in the interface, everything was very intuitive and I had a basic site with some fun features up pretty quickly. The only area I felt needed some attention is the selection of templates. There’s a few nice templates to choose from (and you can modify any of them or make your own), but the selection is pretty slim. The non-commercial limitation is the only thing that should scare away those looking for a site on a shoe-string budget, but for a personal site, I don’t know of a better free solution. If you need a personal site, this should be your first stop.
