These newline characters make it a real pain to upload your articles to your own site through a CMS or to article submission directories. They want free-flowing text that gets broken up automatically by the browser.

If you need to get rid of these newline characters, use the Text Cleaner form below. It works very simply.

Copy and paste your article with newline characters into the top textarea box. Click the button. Copy and paste the cleaned text out of the lower box.

Note: The text cleaner preserves a sequence of “\n\n.” It is assumed that these double newline characters are paragraph breaks, and removing them would make the article illegible.

Text Cleaner Tool: Remove Newline Characters

You can test how your site displays in a few browsers – for example, I often check mine out in Windows IE, Ubuntu Firefox, and Ubuntu Opera. But how am I going to check it on Mac browsers like Safari?

Enter Browsershots.

The premise is very simple. You check off a list of browsers and platforms, enter your website’s url, and click submit. Then the servers open your site, take a screenshot, and upload the display to Browsershots.

You can then view the screenshots and see how your website appeared in those browsers. You can check out some sample displays for an education related website that I created.

Your options are pretty extensive. At the moment you can choose from 36 Linux browsers, 12 Windows browsers, and 4 Mac OS browsers.

After you submit your request, you need to wait until your website comes up in the queue. Each server (factory, as they call it at Browsershots) has its own queue. A lot of the servers will be done in a couple of minutes, but some queues can be one to two hours long.

One of the downsides to the site is that your request will expire in 30 minutes. The completed screenshots will stay up there, but if you have any requests left in the queue they will be canceled.

You can refresh your request by clicking a button, but if you get stuck in a 90 minute queue you’ll have to remember to refresh your request several times.

All in all, very useful tool. I plan to use it to test out any future design projects. So the next time you want to see how a foreign browser would display your site, head over to Browsershots.

I’m sure we’ve all faced this problem at one point or another – how do we get sample HTML to display properly, without being rendered, so that users can view it? Moreover, what’s the best method of doing this?

I first struggled with this when I was writing for another site (Associated Content). Because they filtered out a lot of html tags, it was pretty tough to find a way to get it to display properly. The only method I could get to work reliably was to pad the tags with spaces, like < html >.

Not the best method, but thankfully there are better ways to do it on your own site.

The basic trick is to convert all of your < characters into < and > characters into >. Want to go do all that by hand?

I didn’t think so. I tend to do it by hand if I’m just typing one or two tags, but for a full-fledged example it’s much easier to have a script do the work for you. So I built a tool to do just that.

Head over to the HTML Encoding Form, copy and paste your sample code into one textarea, and press submit. The HTML will be escaped for you, at which point you can copy and paste it back into your tutorial.

What is it? It’s a form that let’s you send a trackback to a blog from any website. It might sound silly, but trust me… it’s not.

I faced this problem with another website of mine (Babel). I was using a CMS (cmsmadesimple) instead of a blogging platform.

Still, I had some blog-like posts using a module in the CMS. I wanted to be able to trackback to someone else’s blog to signal that I was referencing their post, but there was no trackback functionality in cmsmadesimple.

I looked into writing a full plugin and tag for cmsmadesimple, but I decided it would be easier to just write a simple form and a script to do the work for me. Thus, the trackback-via-form tool was born.

You can read more about trackbacks and why you need this form, or just head over to the form and start submitting pings to blogs.

Browse through and use what you need. If you have an idea for a new kind of tool that you need, and I could build, leave a comment. Maybe I’ll put it on my to-do list.

Submit Trackbacks with a Form

Trackbacks are great, but not all blogging platforms and websites support them. Solution? Submit them from a third-party form – like the trackback-via-form tool I wrote.

You provide all the necessary information – the trackback URI and your webpage’s information – and the script sends the trackback to your target. Pretty nifty tool for publicizing websites that don’t have built in support for trackbacks.

Text Cleaner Tool: Remove Newline Characters

This is a simple tool that can come in handy for uploading articles to your own site or to article directories. If you used hard line-breaks to format the article for print or for e-mail, you’ll need to get rid of those new-lines. Just copy and paste into the form, and those newline characters will be a thing of the past.

You can access the Text Cleaner Form here.

Form to Encode Sample HTML for Display

If you want to display sample HTML for the user to see, you need to jump through a few hurdles. With this tool, you can copy and paste HTML into the textarea, hit submit, and get text that has all of the special characters escaped for you.

Copy and paste that on to your page, and it should appear as a perfect snippet of sample markup. Check out the HTML encoding form here.

These trackback pings will show up in the target post’s comment section, and sometimes the author will separate trackbacks out to show at the beginning of the list. Although they won’t always get you search engine ju-ju, thanks to rel=nofollow, they are a great way to get people to come to your website.

Why Trackback If the Search Engine Doesn’t Care?

I know that every time I get a trackback to one of my websites, I immediately check out the source. To some extent I want to check for spam, but I’m also concerned with, “Who’s this new guy talking to me?”

When I’m viewing another person’s blog, I also usually follow the trackbacks if I was interested in the original post. I rarely click on the typical name-link included in a comment, though.

The trackback signals to both the target website’s author and to its readers that this comment has something worth while for them to read. So often they’ll click the link and see what you have to say.

Ok, How Do I Send a Trackback?

Well, if you’re using a standard blogging platform like WordPress, it’s pretty easy. At the bottom of your post editing screen, you’ll probably see a space to enter a trackback URI. This is the link from the original website that you send the trackback ping to.

Just enter the URI in your editor, and you’re all set. The problem, though, is that not every blogging platform supports sending trackbacks. You might also want to send a trackback from a non-blog website, if you’ve added some content that speaks to the original post.

Enter the trackback-via-form tool. This form will do all the work for you. Enter the necessary information (Trackback URI, your page’s title, your page’s URL, an excerpt of your page, and your blog name), and hit submit.

You should see a response with either an “All clear! Trackback was sent successfully.” or some kind of error message.

Enjoy, and good luck trackbacking. Test it out by sending a trackback to this page or the form’s page.

If you’re done with the trackback form, why don’t you go back and browse through some other online tools?