K9 Web Protection: Control your internet usage
After a recent upgrade of Firefox, one of my favorite plugins, LeechBlock, stopped working. So I went in search of a new control system that would help me think twice before I surfed my day away.
I’m now in love with K9 Web Protection, a free internet filtering service. Sure, it’s made for parents to protect their kids, but as a professional with a bad web habit, I appreciate its ability to keep me from wasting my precious time.
You set sites that you’d like to limit, and you can eliminate entire categories of sites. I am particularly bad when it comes to reading news articles. I can read article after article and waste an hour or two… Time just slips away. With K9, you can allow access for 15 minutes or a certain period of time. That way you can pop in to check on your friends in Facebook, but soon you’re back at work.
And it’s free. I love free.
K9 Web Protection – Free Internet Filtering and Parental Controls Software.
chartbeat: Real-time website analytics
by Beth on August 20, 2009
in Beth Favorite, Low-Cost, Mac, PC, Web-Based, Worth Paying For
I first discovered chartbeat when Ashton Kutcher and CNN were competing to be the first Twitter account with one million followers. Chartbeat showed the race live, and I was hooked.
For about 10 bucks a month, you can monitor the traffic on up to 5 websites in real time. I mean really real. It shows how many people are visiting, whether they’re new or returning, what pages they are on, how long it took for their pages to load, who is talking about you on Twitter, where they live… everything you might want to know.
On sites with very moderate traffic (like mine thus far), it can be incredibly boring. But when I send out a newsletter or one of my tools goes viral for a few minutes on Twitter, I can monitor the “stickiness” of my site. Do they visit just one page or click around for a few? How long are they hanging out?
As I write this post, a new visitor to my site is checking out my entry about Wordle from a computer on the East Coast. Cool!
You can set up alerts so you get a text when a certain number of people visit your site at once, and the service sends you emails (or texts, your choice) when your site is down (which happens more than you know).
TRY IT! Keep Cheapskate Freelancer open and click here to see yourself on the site. 
chartbeat – real-time website analytics and uptime monitoring.
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CSS Sprite Generator: Create fast-loading web graphics
My good buddy Josh Cunningham from JoshCanHelp.com swears by this free tool. Honestly, its use is beyond my capabilities, but if Josh loves it, you may as well.
This is about the best free web development tool I’ve ever seen. Go to the CSS Sprite Generator, upload all the images referenced in your CSS file, pick a few options, and hit submit. The site will not only generate the sprite image but it gives you the new CSS values as well. Talk about a time saver!
CSS sprites help your page load much faster by only accessing a single image (like the Google one above) instead of many. This only works for non-repeating images called as a background in your CSS file. For more info, see this A List Apart article and this Smashing Magazine post.
