As a web designer or web developer, image optimization is very important for loading website faster and also reduces the bandwidth consumption benefit your hosting bill. You should perform both basic and advanced optimization for all images without changing their look or visual quality. Basic optimization includes cropping unnecessary space, reducing color dept, removing image comments, and saving the image to an appropriate format. Advanced optimization involves further compression of JPEG and PNG files. Here is a roundup for all the excellent web-based image optimization editing tools that you can use without a dime on the web.
Web-based Image Optimization Tools
1. Smush.it
http://smush.it/
Smush.it is a free service that optimizes images for publishing on the web. It compresses and converts images automatically and works with most types of image formats such as JPGs, PNGs, GIFs, and animated GIF files. You’ll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download. You can choose to upload your images directly to the service, provide Smush.it with a url, use a Firefox plugin that analyzes a whole page at once, or the Sumsh.it bookmarklet.
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Yahoo! Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. FeedMingle is a new alternative of Pipes, makes lives simpler for web designers and developers, feed readers, bloggers that is able to merge two or more valuable RSS/Atom feeds into a single one. It mixes all the feeds provided and creates one RSS feed, Atom feed, JSON feed, and a html widget to simply paste into your website or blog. Additionally, you can use this web application to mix different Twitter posts or more twitter posts, blog posts or any feeds and publish the mixed posts to another twitter account. You simply add the feed URLs one each line by pasting them and then choose a title for the new merged feed. FeedMingle can also auto-detect feeds for your site. Just give a try first as you don’t need to create an account beforehand and this great service is free for charge as well.
If anyone knows how hard and time consuming it is to create a stripes, these useful web applications will really make your design workflow quick and easy. Let me know if you have anymore great tool that you like at the comment section.
1. Stripe Generator 2.0
http://www.stripegenerator.com/
Stripe Generator 2.0 is the top one stripe generator machine for quickly create Web 2.0 style diagonal, horizontal, vertical stripe background with multiple colors and gradient for your design. It’s a very easy to use tool with different customizable parameters like stripe color, stripes spacing, orientation, colors etc. You can choose up to 5 different color palette for your stripes. Once you register a free account, you can share your stripe design with other designers. Easily browse through the stripe gallery of design community to make inspiration.
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Plagium is a Copyscape alternative of online free tool that allows you to check whether a content from your website or research paper has been copied and used anywhere else. Plagium can accept much larger blocks of text for searching while using a search engine like Google or Yahoo can always search single terms only.
To check your content for plagiarism online, simply paste a block of text inside provided form or submit its url and then hit the “Track plagiarisms” button. Wait until Plagium sources the web and brings a list of websites containing the matching text. It’s better to register a user account in order to setup alerts and receive weekly email plagiarism reports. Plagium supports English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
