Many of you have probably notice the recent update of a Flickr Uploadr – a great tool for bulk uploads of your new photos to Flickr. I’ve been a fan of Flickr for quite some time, and plan to use it for photo streams on some of my blogs in the near future.

I absolutely love the new interface and yet simpler and more effective interface of the 3.0.x beta, but was, like most of you, startled to find out the proxy unfriendliness of Flickr Uploadr 3.0.x.

There’s no mentioning about proxy configuration in the Settings dialogue, and that’s why you will have to fix it yourself. Luckily for all, it’s not a complex process.

Configure Flickr Uploadr to use proxy

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make sure Flickr Uploadr is closed

2. Confirm your current proxy configuration

Internet Explorer proxy settings

In Internet Explorer, go to the Tools menu, pick the Internet options menu, then select the Connections tab and click the LAN Settings button:

After this, you will see the current proxy settings. Simply take note of the name of the proxy server (proxy on the sreenshot) and its port (8080 in my case):

Proxy settings in Firefox

And here’s how your proxy settings window will look. Once again, note the name of the server (proxy in this example) and its port (8080, which is pretty standard):

3. Locate the configuration file for your Flickr Uploadr.
Most likely, it is called C:\Program Files\Flickr Uploadr\defaults\preferences\prefs.js

4. Add the proxy settings to Flickr Uploader config file
Open the file in any text editor (Notepad, for instance) and add the following lines to this file (replace the AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD with the IP address of your proxy server):

pref(“network.proxy.http”, “AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD”);

pref(“network.proxy.http_port”, 8080);

pref(“network.proxy.type”, 1);

Important: Make sure you’re saving the file as clear (ASCII) text, and not a Microsoft Word or RTF document!

Notice: The type of a network proxy should be 1 for manual (direct) proxy server configuration, while for PAC (automatic proxy configuration scripts) it should be 2. Try value of 1 first, then 2 if it doesn’t work.

5. Restart the Flickr Uploadr

6. Enjoy!

That’s it! Let me know if you need any further help with getting your proxy to work.

Like flickr? Buy this book!

Just got an email from Wordze, announcing their next round of free 30-day trials.

The following link should work for the next 7 days, good chance for all of you who wanted to try keyword research with Wordze: Wordze – Free 30-day trial

I’ve been a happy customer of Wordze for the past month and a half, and so I think you should go and give it a try. Who knows, you might like it!

As this month gets started, we are nearing the official year anniversary of Wordze’s launch date. So for a limited time, we are going to do something crazy that we have never done before. For the next 30 days if you post in this thread the keyword list you would like to have, you may just wakeup the following day to find out that we have picked your request and posted a 10,000 keyword file on this forum for you to download for free.

The only rule is that you can request one keyword per day!

Here’s a link to the DP forum thread: 30 days of free keywords from Wordze

I've been using the 103bees.com service for a couple of weeks now, and it's definitely a must-have search engine traffic analysis tool for any serious blogger.

From the 103bees official website:

What is 103beees.com?

It's a real-time online tool for webmasters and bloggers that is highly focused on natural search engine traffic analytics. It provides tons of detailed statistics and in-depth information on the search terms that drive visitors to your webpages.

103bees is an indispensable tool for search engine optimization and internet marketing – everything you need to know about your search engine traffic in one place!

This tool allows you to easily get various views of your search engine traffic in real time. At any time, you can view a list of the latest searches which brought visitors to your pages, as well as see your top landing pages, top keywords used or SERP rankings of the all search requests which generated traffic. All this is provided for free, and you get a 30 days of historical data to analyze for as many websites (you call them projects in your 103bees account) as you like.

I'll write a review for it in the coming few days, but for the moment just wanted to share this tool with you and point you to a great review by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger: 103bees: Search Term Analytics Review.

Here are the tools I recommend. All of them give you a color scheme as a result, and allow you to copy the hex values of each color:

Color Schemer
It's an online tool from a well-known publisher of the Color Schemer Studio – a software for Windows and MacOS platforms. If you're serious about your new color scheme, you'll probably benefit most from downloading the software, but basic experiments can be simplified with their online tool.

As you can see, the idea is built around you picking a current color, and then the tool will suggest you matching colors based on its algorithm. Using the "Lighten Scheme" and "Darken Scheme", you can change the contrast of a scheme.

Color Scheme Chooser
This is a free online tool from SitePro Central. Not only does this tool offer you great functionality, but it is also possible to place the tool on your own webpage using the provided HTML code.

You can probably see from the screenshot, that this tool offers you even more flexibility in choosing your base color. In addition to this, you get a choice of color scheme definitions, which allows you use the same base color to produce different color schemes – based on analogic, complimentary, split complimentary, triadic and double contrast approaches for picking colors.

Colormatch Redux
This tool from Style:Phreak, while having probably the simplest interface of all, has pleasantly surprised me by its choice of export options – for example, you can have it export all the colors of a current scheme into a clear text file. But the best export option is to save the scheme as a Photoshop color swatch file. Really handy!

Color Scheme Generator 2
This tool has a very interesting way of picking colors and gives you more precise control of the angle for the tool to pick opposite colors for your scheme. There is also a number of variations available to slightly alter your scheme – Default, Pastel, Dark Pastel, Light Pastel, Constrast and Pale.

That's it for today. Hope you find this round-up useful! If you know any more online color scheme tools worth including, please let me know by leaving a comment!

I don't think I'll even try it, cause I'm a solid Firefox guy, but for everyone interested, here's some useful info:

Internet Explorer 7 – direct download links:

32-bit versions: IE7 - Windows XP and IE7 - Windows Server 2003
64-bit versions: IE7 - Windows XP/Server 2003

Internet Explorer blog: IEBlog @ blogs.msdn.com

The idea behind the feed button is that you conserve the precious space by showing only one button, but when your visitor hovers the mouse pointer above the button, it automatically expands to show you all the possible subscription options.

The idea is simple, and I believe any blog which currently has more that 5 feed subscription buttons can probably benefit from using it. All you need to do is give their feed button generator a link to your blog, and your piece of code is going to be provided in just a few seconds, ready for you to copy & paste onto your blog's sidebar code.

Go check it out: FeedButton Beta. 

It has no fancy toolbars and doesn't care about WYSIWIG, but it gives you a wonderful platform for creative distraction-free text writing. 

Here is how a typical session in Dark Room looks like:

Link to this editor page on Perfect Blogger: Dark Room

Performancing for Firefox is a great blog editor. It's a wonderful extension for your Firefox browser which has multiple blogs support

Jed Brown has an extensive post explaining new features and APIs of this Performancing Firefox version. Please have a look: Performancing Firefox 1.3 Final!

I've also created a page for Performancing Firefox in the Editors section of my Blogging Tools, just follow this link: Performancing Firefox.