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Tools For Squidoo Lensmasters уГЕ

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Totally Free Images - The Ultimate Resource Guide

I am all about saving time while making lens, so here is my collection of tools I use to assist me in making lenses.

Some tools you find on this webpage
Easy HTML and CSS helpers
Quick Lens backup
Help with Amazon products

Please note: Most of these tools are just for Firefox

Have you got any tools you use?
Let me know in the comment section at the bottom of this lens

HTML and CSS

Easily Write HTML Within Any Squidoo Text Box

Embedded WYSIWYG editor

Great for resizing, adding ALT tags,positioning and linking images, within the text box..

Write Area
Example lens: See what "Text Area" can do.

Text Formatting Toolbar

The easiest way to add HTML To lenses

Text Formatting Toolbar - For Squidoo Lenses: It supports three formats: BBcode (bulletin board) like used on SquidU, HTML, and the format used by Wikipedia.

Make CSS Styles - Without Knowing CSS

This is super easy, quick and you view changes in real-time

CSS Style Generator with text: Create a stylesheet with options you need, like font size, border, font, line-height and apply to a paragraph of text. Once all your options are selected, you generate the style and css,html code appears. Simply copy and paste code into text box on your lens.

Lens Backup

Auto-save All Squidoo Text Areas As You Type

Great for the notoriously fickle intro module

Browser crashes

When Internet connection is lost

Windows being ... well Windows

When Squidoo gets their tentacles in a twist while you are editing

Laptop goes dead

Lazarus: Form Recovery

Save Your Entire Lens Easily

Some seriously advanced features

Always a good idea to backup your lenses to your hard drive.
Saves far more info then the XML data that is available with the built-in Squidoo backup.

ScrapBook: Save entire lens
Save snippet of lens

Amazon Tools

A Better Way Of Finding Amazon Products

Better then the Squidoo version - More info like ratings

AmazonAssist pulls the latest pricing, review ratings, availability and other product information from Amazon.com in real time.

Amazon Assist

Image Helpers

Find Free To Use Images For Lenses

Huge time saver

I got tired of searching through several photo sites just to find one free to use image, so I made this handy little image search tool that just searches the top free image sites. ( Uses Yahoo image search)

It is installed on your bookmark toolbar just like the "Amazon image tool"

Find Images Bookmarklet
Totally Free Images - The Ultimate Resource Guide: Do you need images for your Squidoo page, blog or web site?Below I have list the very best places to get totally free photos.I have also included links to e

Miscellaneous

Sticky Notes For Your Lens Workshop Page

Persistent and private sticky notes for Firefox.: Internote allows you to create useful and private notes on webpages which will be there once you return. With Internote, you can do many things. Move, resize, recolor, minimize, import, export, print, delete your notes ... choose the pages where a note appears ... or manage them all at once.

Finally A Text Box Resizer For Squidoo Lenses

First sorry I have only been able to get this to work on Firefox.

The tiny text boxes have been driving me crazy for years now, so here is a fix.

To install:
You need to go HERE to install the bookmarklet as Squidoo does not allow that type of code on lenses.

How to use:
Open up a text box you want to re-size
After you click on the bookmarklet, the text box will display a resize cursor when you mouse over the text box, and to resize text box, you left click-hold-drag.
The field will resize in real-time, so you can see how far you have to go. Once you release, the bookmarklet's turned off.
Squidoo text boxes can only be re-sized vertically..

A Far Far Better Clipboard

Tired of going back and forth?

Excellent for multiple Amazon ASIN's, Youtube videos and link lists
You will wonder what you did without it.
It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time
Just click and drag

Ditto - Clipboard Manager

What You Can Do With The Proper Tools

Here is why I love bookmarklets, toolbars, Grease Monkey scripts and Firefox add ons.
No hand coding of HTML or CSS was involved in producing image you see below.

1. Finding image: Custom built search just CC commercial use Flickr photos bookmarklet
2. Properly attributing and direct linking image: Grease Monkey script
3.Color background with double red border (rounded corners in FF): Custom tag made and added to Text formatting toolbar
4. Image re-sized: Firefox add on called "Text area"

Took just 1 minute to code, the only typing was "puppy"

Watch video full screen. Click full screen first, then play as it will be over before you know it.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by epSos.de

Totally Free Images - The Ultimate Resource Guide

Do you have any tools you use?

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