Easy way to find recipes for the ingredients you have

• Research Buzz has a tool to help you find recipes for the ingredients you have.
• You enter the ingredients in a search box and the site uses the terms in a special Google search. When you run the search you get taken to a Google search results page for recipes with those ingredients.
• For example, click here to see recipes that use ‘Chicken, wine, tomato’.
• Very handy

Cut and paste any part of your screen with Snippy (freeware)

• This tiny little freeware utility lets you cut and paste any part of your screen
• You can cut rectangle/squares, or do freehand cut and pasting
• You can cut with/without borders and define border thickness + colour
• V Cool

AWESOME flash video!! ‘Animator v’s animation II’ (Matrix’esque)

• Top ranked flash video of all time at ‘Newgrounds.com’! – this video is Very cool
• Click the link above, then click on the ‘Watch this movie’ icon to see it

Blogging for profit – get more people to your site

• Simple, little article about blogging for profit
• In summary, it recommends doing a bit of ‘blog promotion’ to get lots of users to your site, rather than just doing lots of posts to get your site to the top of blog directories

Cool web games, reviews etc at Web Game Magazine

• Growing blog-style magazine that reviews and rates web games
• You can look up games by type or popularity. They also have some handy quick links to their favourite games in the left hand column.

Take visitors to a random post on your WordPress blog

• All you need to do is add ‘?random’ to the end of your URL and the link will go to a random page on your blog e.g. click here for a random post from my blog
• See the article on this function here

Share big files with a ‘Box.net’ widget

• WordPress have just joined forces with Box.net to give us a cool widget to let people download big files
• You can see an example and learn more here

People sharing their secrets anonymously by post card…

- VERY cool site where people send in postcards with their secrets written on the back
- Some are quite intense/adult in nature (you have been warned!)
- Cards are usually done in quite an arty way
- Site claims it is ‘the largest advertisement-free Blog on the Web’ (hit counter shows 74 million + visitors)

Uk’s richest get 20% richer in a year!

Click here for a BBC article on this.

Concert Tickets… peer-to-peer style

*Click here for concert tickets site (StubHub)*
StubHub is a site that lets you buy and sell concert tickets (and sports/theatre tickets) online. Its a peer-to-peer style system a bit like e-bay (in fact was bought by E-Bay in Jan this year,) so you also get the security of a big company being involved in the buying/selling.

Becoming/being self-employed… hints and tips

*Becoming/being self-employed article here*
Especially aimed at web-workers, a nice little summary of ‘best practices’ for the self-employed is available at WebWorkerDaily (lots of other interesting posts here as well.)

Free traffic! Increase web site traffic for free.

Get some free traffic to your blog / web site (through a site called ‘ipings’.) All you do is fill in 4 boxes on a form (name, URL etc), and click submit. When you do, a bunch of sites get notified that you have new content for them to come and index. Its a dead easy way to increase traffic to your web site / blog.

**WARNING! – you should only use the service when you add new content to your site. Pinging without having new content “probably will get you banned or ignored”!!

If you want to know about how the site works and what happens when you ‘ping’, check out the ‘about‘ and ‘to ping or not to ping‘ pages. Well worth reading IMHO – there are good explanations of how web spiders work and how pinging can help you get listed on major search engines!

Do you Digg?… Digg this post at Digg.com

Digg is a GREAT place to go to find out what cool/interesting/fun sites people have come across. Its a major (ranked 88th most popular site in the world! at Alexa.com) ’social bookmarking’ site, where members submit ‘content’ (weblog posts, news articles, etc.) Other users then check out the content themselves and if they like it they ‘Digg’ it.

**To Digg this article, click here **

Mortgage refinancing. Get the best mortgage rate!

Mortgage refinancing can “substantially slash mortgage repayments” – this article details five easy to follow steps to help you get the best mortgage rate you can, and to pay your mortgage off early.

Funny stuff – page cannot be displayed…

Comedy web error page… “This page cannot be displayed because you need some fresh air.” It goes into more detail… V funny, and probably applies to lots of us Click here to see the page.

Robots in our future

Scientists are predicting that in the very near future (within 5 years) we’ll have robots for things like child-minding, care-home work, and prison monitoring! This is according to an article in the Daily Mail, a large UK national daily paper… “Are we safe from robots that can think for themselves?“

The BBC also have some interseting articles on this subject. An article written yesterday talks about future robots being autonomous, decision making machines. It also talks about ‘robot rights’! amongst other things. There are some other good robot articles in the right hand column as well.

Blog marketing – get your blog known

If you want to do a bit of ‘blog marketing’ and get your blog known, there’re a whole bunch of blog directory sites where you can get your blog listed. There’s a good list of them at Google, and another list here from IsPopularOnline. The IsPopularOnline site also has a big list of sites (on the same page) where you can submit the RSS feeds from your blog.

(a few of the links seem to be down, but most of them are good)

Car Insurance

Car Insurance is a big area these days with loads of companies to choose from. There’s a site called reviewcentre.com that lets users rate companies on different criteria, then shows them all in a list. If you’re looking for car insurance it may be worth having a look here. The AA look to be one of the best rated – if you scroll down the list, they’re the first company with more than 10 reviews and they manage a decent rating of 7.7 (at the time of writing this.)

The site also has reviews for a ton of other stuff

Reiki healing for free

Free Reiki healing is available at The Reiki Experiment. All you need to do is leave a comment on the ‘Request a healing’ Page and someone will ’send’ you a healing. There’s a Wikipedia entry on Reiki if you want more info about this type of healing.

Online checkers with power-ups

Awesome 2 player web based ‘checkers’ game with tons of power ups and squares that can be raised and lowered (you’ll see what I mean.) This game could get to be VERY addictive

Click here for the quick video tutorial.

To get started, enter a guest name, click ’start’, then click on a few names in the opponents box and someone should give you a game fairly quickly.

Have you caught the latest bug?

‘Who is sick?’ is a site where users record their illnesses. The data gets plotted on a Google map so, for example, you can see if you’re the victim of the latest bug going around. There’s a bar chart showing whether reports of different types of sickness are growing or falling, various search functions and a discussion forum. The site’s still in its infancy but this could well be an interesting site to come back to once its been going for a while. Remember to ‘Digg’ it up if you like it

Online ‘Peer to peer’ style loans

There are at least 2 websites on the go at the moment that facilitate a ‘peer to peer’ style lending & borrowing system. The UK site is called Zopa, and the US site, Propser. ‘Prosper’ has had a whole host of positive press coverage, and Zopa also looks to have been highly rated, e.g. ‘What Investment’ magazine rated it product of the month in Aug ‘06.

Does anyone have any experience of these sites?.. This seems like a great idea to me.

Funny cartoon of a typical internet argument

Very funny comic stip – this is probably a familiar sight (in some form or another) to most people out there…

Must have bookmark for movie fans – IMDB

If you like movies and you don’t know about IMDB, WHY NOT!! – IMDB stands for Internet Movie DataBase and has HUGE amounts of info, reviews etc about almost a million titles. Stats from their website are:

372,912 movies released theatrically.
440,186 TV episodes.
59,360 made for TV movies.
43,375 TV series.
55,254 direct to video movies.
5,491 mini series.
5,396 live action video games.

UK pound goes through $2 barrier

Looks like UK interest rates are going up again. Check out the full article here.