Free Books Online

If you're looking for free books on-line, checkout the Penn University book library online. Online catalog now exceeds 1 million items, you can follow their latest releases on twitter. Topics you can search on

A: General Works (Overview)
B: Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion (Overview)
C: History: Auxiliary sciences (Overview)
D: History: General, and Regions Outside the Americas (Overview)
E: History: United States (General) (Overview)
F: History: United States (Regional), and the Americas (Overview)
G: Geography, Anthropology, Folklore, Recreation (Overview)
H: Social Sciences (Overview)
J: Political Science (Overview)
K: Law (Overview)
L: Education (Overview)
M: Music (Overview)
N: Fine Arts (Overview)
P: Language and Literature (Overview)
Q: Science (Overview)
R: Medicine (Overview)
S: Agriculture (Overview)
T: Technology (Overview)
U: Military Science (Overview)
V: Naval Science (Overview)
Z: Bibliography and Library Science (Overview)

Enjoy..

Wrzuta.pl - Poland's You Tube

If you are into You Tube, I welcome you to try out the Polish site called Wrzuta. It's full of videos, images and audio (flash player). I'll translate some of the UI for you below so you can start your search easily.

Once you arrive on the site you can put anything in the main search box and click on OK and it will perform a search across audio / movies / images database. If you want to search on a specific topic you need to select one of the ugly pink links on the side. Here is the translation for each one.

filmy means movies
obrazy means images
audio means music files (no need to translate)

I really like to use the site for music as they have a lot of European music that you won't find on the US sites.

Enjoy..

Finding that cheap flight south

I'm always on the lookout for some cheap flights south, a site that I recently found very useful is Kayak.com. When you submit a search the site goes out to all other airline sites and finds all possible prices. Once you have your results, the site give you lots of options to filter the results on. Some examples are

- Easily check off which airlines you're interested in
- Select the number of stops you're willing to make during your flight
- Move a sliding bar to quickly filter on departure times and flight length
- Filter out airports you're not interested in with a click of a mouse

Other features of the site are searching for

- Hotels
- Cars
- Cruises

Good luck on your searching for that deal..

Tracking Website Statistics 2

So you are tracking your website statistics and you have a pretty good idea where most of your users are coming from to your website. Now, another thing that you might want to know is how does your site rank in traffic volume in comparison to your competitors. A site that will help you out with this analysis is Statsaholic

"Statsaholic (formerly Alexaholic) blends Alexa website traffic graphs with a lightweight ajax-enhanced interface to satisfy hard-core traffic chart junkies – aka Statsaholics."

To explain a bit better, Alexa collects Internet traffic statistics from users that download the "Alexa toolbar". The benefit of this toolbar, it helps you determine if you're visiting phisher and scammer sites buy letting you know "live" who owns the site and how much traffic the site gets.

Statsaholic allows you to view the Alexa statistics through an interface where you can view a traffic volume graph for up to 5 sites on a single graph. The graph results can be adjusted to show you

traffic by type:
- reach, rank, page views

traffic in a date range:
- 7 days, 14 days, 1 month, 3 month, 6 month, 1 - 5 years

I think this is powerful information to any person running an on-line business.

Finally you can put a widget on your site with a direct link to a specific traffic volume query at Statsoholic. Also you can add a directly link from your bookmarks in your browser. So the site gives you a lot of options to keep an eye on the traffic of your competition for free. Enjoy!!

Note: I have not done much research yet into how relevant the Alexa statistics database is or what is the user base of the Alexa toolbar. One thing I will do is compare Statsoholic traffic results to one of the other websites out there tracking website statistics and see how they compare. I'll update the article with my finding.

Local Fylers On-Line for Ontario

The site FlyerMall has been a favourite of my for a long time and it keeps getting better. I'm sure a lot of people know about this site, but here is my review of it just in case you don't know.

The main feature of this site is the ability to view 90% of the major store flyers you get in your mailbox weekly in Ontario for free ON-LINE. I wish the site actually allowed you to opt out of getting the paper flyers (save some trees), but I don't think that will ever happen. By having all the flyers in one place, you can compare prices between all the stores and hopefully save some money.

Other features that I don't use as often

• Free Classified Ads Section
• New Products Section - highlights new products in flyers
  
• Food Recipes Section
  
• Entertainment Section - advertises bars, attractions, clubs in Ontario
• Store Openings - new stores opening in Ontario

I hope you benefit from this site as much as I have. Enjoy!

Tracking Website Statistics

If you own a website, it's always nice to know how many users are visiting and where from. A free tool that I have been using for about 3 months now is Google Analytics. This website statistics tracking tool is full of great features and has a great layout. Your dashboard is broken down into:

• Executive Summary shows 4 graphics which are
• A line graph that shows page views vs. number of visits
• A pie chart showing new vs return users
• A world map that shows which geographic area users are coming from
• A referral pie chart showing which sites are users linking from to your site

• Conversion Summary
  
• Shows percentage statistics for your site, showing you how your site is doing in comparison to the previous date period.

• Marketing Summary shows you
  
• what sites are referring your sites the most
• what key words are generating leads to your site

• Content Summary
  
• report shows whether site entrances, bounce rates, exits, and page views have increased or decreased from a previous date range

• Site Overlay
• Visually shows you visually your site and which links people follow the most on your site

There are other more detailed reports that allow you to drill down even more into your site stats. If you purchase adWords from Google to promote your products, you can track

• which keywords drive the most traffic to your site
• ranking of your adWords in results

If you would like to try use service visit http://www.google.com/analytics

London Ontario Images

Searching for London images, I came across this site called Imagery which is a re-designed front end to Google image search. It's a very cool search interface because it allows you to

• Dynamically keep images that you only are interested in on the search page, images you don't like can be easily discarded
  
• Control how many images your search query will return
• Open the image in a new window or go and see the full web page that shows the image
• See image height / width / size and file name by hovering over the image
• Search by image color, file type, image size, filter obscene images out
• Only works in Fire Fox browser, sorry IE users
  

It finds images that I never seen before of London like this one from DotyDocs.com

London Ontario Air Travel

I wanted to share a new website with you, finding air travel at the lowest prices has just become more fun with Mobissimo, this site searches all other sites out there for you and brings back the lowest prices. I looked at at trips between London and Calgary and found Westjet was the best at $434, but Air Canada was offering the same price from Toronto. You can also search for hotels, car rentals, and an interesting way of searching for your destination based on the activity you're looking to do on your trip. I hope you save some money with this site...

Protect Your Children and Respect Their Privacy

I don't have kids yet but for those of you who do, I came across this free application called IMSafer. The application monitors the instant messenger conversations of your children (currently works with ICQ, AOL and Yahoo! Chat) to help you balance protecting your children and respecting their privacy.

The IMSafer service will notify you via email when your child is engaged in a potentially dangerous conversation on IM. As a parent you won't be invading your child's privacy because the software only lets you see a snippet of the conversation that contains the suspicious part of the chat.

To sign up for the FREE service go to IMSafer