One of my colleagues sent me a link the other day to Web Site Grader, and asked me to check it out. I popped on over to the site and entered a few URLs to sites that I work on. I was pleasantly surprised to see how in-depth and accurate the analysis provided appears to be.

The utility is an SEO analyzer that rates your site in comparison to all of the other sites that have been analyzed using the tool. It offers quite a few interesting options, including the ability to compare your site to specific competitors, the ability to grade your site on specific keywords, etc.

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I just wanted to make a good, quick post about two good resources I find myself using quite a bit.  The first is an md5 encrypter.  It’s a very nice, simple tool that simply converts any string into an md5-encrypted string.

At work, I find myself making a lot of very simple scripts that require me to set up administration areas, but don’t really warrant taking the time to set up online registration, etc.  Instead, I simply use the md5 encrypter to encrypt the passwords I want to use, and then I enter those encrypted passwords directly into the database.

You can find that tool, along with quite a few others, at http://www.iwebtool.com/tools.  The link directly to the md5 encryption tool is http://www.iwebtool.com/md5.

The other tool I’ve found myself using quite a bit, for basically the same reasons listed above, is a random password generator.  The one I’ve been using the most is presented by PCTools.com.  It offers a lot of options, and does a very nice job of generating random, secure passwords.  You can find that tool at http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently went through the trouble of restoring our family computer to its original factory settings in order to try to get a little better performance out of it. However, even after all of that work, the computer is still performing fairly poorly.

Therefore, I went to the Web to look for some fairly inexpensive options to upgrade the computer. I happened upon crucial.com. Now, I’ve heard the name of that Web site thrown around on a lot of forums, but I have never bothered to visit. In the past, it was fairly easy to purchase memory upgrades, because there were only a handful of different kinds, and every memory stick worked on every motherboard.

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After my unfortunate adventures with the bandwidth limitations of my Internet connection, I decided to search the Web for some sort of utility that would help me monitor and hopefully limit my downloads and uploads.

While I didn’t find anything that would actually limit my downloads and uploads (no utilities that would temporarily disable my Internet connection if I got close to my limits), I did find a really nice utility for monitoring my connection.

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I came across a cool, free utility the other day while I was searching for ways to get video prepared for my Zune (which I’ll review at a later date). The utility is simply called “Free YouTube to iPod Converter”. The utility was developed by DVDVideoSoft and it is extremely useful.

Basically, the software was designed with one purpose in mind, and it does that very well. It converts Flash Video files to video that’s compatible with your mobile devices. It’s main purpose is to convert YouTube videos to the iPod mp4 video format, but it does do a few other things, too.

First of all, not only can it convert FLV files from your hard drive into mp4 video files, it is also capable of extracting an FLV directly from YouTube. All you do is plug in the URL for the video you want to convert, and the utility accesses YouTube automatically, finds the video file embedded in the page, and extracts it for conversion. Unfortunately, it seem to only work on YouTube; it doesn’t seem to be capable of extracting FLV files from other video sites.

In addition to being able to convert FLV files to iPod video (giving you four options for the quality of the output video), it can also convert your FLV files to three quality levels of PSP video, three quality levels of mobile phone-compatible mp4 video and four different quality levels of mp3 audio.

The only issue I’ve come across in the software so far (and some people may consider this a pro for the software as opposed to a con), is that it doesn’t throw any errors out if it it fails to download the entire FLV file from YouTube. Instead, the progress indicator jumps from wherever it encountered the problem straight to 100%, and the utility tells you that it’s done converting the video. Sometimes you get the whole video, other times you only end up with a few seconds of video before it cuts off.

You can download the utility for free and view a tutorial explaining how to use the software from the main project Web site. If you have a digital media player, a PSP or a video-capable mobile phone, you should definitely get ahold of this application.