Picnik is an excellent web-based tool for editing images online. But this application has more features than what meets the eye. The Firebox browser extension for Picnik allows you to take a one click screenshot of any webpage. This feature might fail to impress at first glance. But ask yourself a question. How difficult is it to take a screenshot of a website that does not fit in your browser window. Instead of taking multiple images of different sections of the website use the Picnik Firefox plugin. After the install simply right click anywhere on the page and click Picnik. Firefox will load a new tab which takes you to Picnik with the image pre-loaded. Edit it if you wish and download the new image to your computer. This is one of the best ways to take screenshots of long webpages.
OpenX, also known as OpenAds, is an open-source advertising management platform. The program is an excellent add-on to your blog or website when you want to promote private ad sales. It is also a great resource to track which affiliate offers are getting the most clicks. This way you don’t have to depend on guesses and assumptions during affiliate marketing campaigns. You can replace that with hard statistics when it comes to simple, banner-based campaigns.
Technical Details
OpenX download is a 30MB package which includes everything you want from a mature advertising management solution. The huge PHP script might look like an over sized and complicated setup. But the size is caused by template data and performance statistics gathering and reporting scripts. The statistics and reporting data that is collected is not a substitute to Google Analytics, but it is enough to make OpenX valuable. In fact, my reason behind installing OpenX was to do some split-testing and collect hard numbers on various affiliate offers.
OpenX and Private Ad Sales
Another benefit of using OpenX is private ad-sales. With OpenX you automate the process. You can assign weights to all campaign banners according to costs or any other metric and use them in rotation. For high paid campaigns you set it to show permanently for the advertising duration. After the ad term is over OpenX will automatically take it out of rotation and fill in the spot with house ads or AdSense, depending on its configuration.
Bad Side of OpenX
Support for OpenX is one of the most lacking aspects. The open-source community is helpful and supportive. Any help that you need is restricted to Googling the error messages and trolling through the OpenX (previously known as OpenAds) support forums. The OpenX Forums are a great source for troubleshooting. But it can be a difficult place to locate your exact problem and hopefully find a solution. During my experience with OpenX I ran into a couple of error which is more like bugs. I saw a couple of open forum posts on the exact same error. But only one of them was answered. I will discuss the specifics of the error and resolution in a later post. But before installing OpenX understand that it has a high learning curve. It is not like Wordpress, following tutorial steps will only take you so far.
Everyday a few more applications move to the web. Image editing has seen above average trend in moving the service online. Picasa, Flickr, Image Shack have pioneered the online image editing and sharing market for quite a while. Adobe has arrived late to the game but is trying to muscle in with Photoshop Express. Photoshop Express is a ‘light’ version of Photoshop the industry wide leader of image editing applications. Using a Flash based user interface Adobe Photoshop Express looks to easily fix common problems with pictures.
Adobe Photoshop Express allows users to upload up to 2GB of photos on to one account. Categorize the images in galleries and present the galleries in cool templates. Editing features include – crop, rotate, auto correct, red-eye removal, changing brightness, contrast, focus and sharpness. It also allows you to include a few effects in one click. Some of the effects such as pop color and tint will give your pictures a bit of professional feel without any of the image editing headaches.
Photoshop Express might be backed by huge investments and several brilliant programmers. But like all other programs it needs time to reach its potential. Till that time I will continue to use Picnik.