MP3 ringtones are great! No longer do we need to spend £3 on a ringtone from a company like Jamster and be locked into one of their ridiculous subscriptions. Here I’m going to show you how to make your own ringtones from mp3s that you already have. You’ll need the program Audacity - which is free and Lame Encoder.

• Download Audacity from Here
• You will also need Lame Encoder to encode data as mp3 - Get it Here
• Open Audacity
• Go to File>Open and browse for the mp3 that you want - You should soon see the file come up in the window. Like this:

• Usually having the entire song as your ringtone doesn’t work very well and you might want to just use a selection of it. And besides, this will save space on your memory card, as mp3s are quite big, comparitively.
• Use the cursor to select the part of the song you want to use as a ringtone.
• With the selection highlighted go to File> Export Selection as mp3>Save.
• Hopefully you will have downloaded Lame - if not, you need to do it now!
• Search for wherever you downloaded lame_enc.dll and select it.

• You will now have just the selection on your screen.
• You can choose the start of the selection to Fade In if you’d like.
• Highlight the part to fade in, go to Effects>Fade In
• You can also Fade Out the end of the song.
• Again just highlight the part to fade out, go to Effects>Fade Out
• Have a listen to the full selection.
• If it’s O.K, save it.
• You now have your mp3 ringtone!!

Send it to your phone and leave me a comment to let me know how you get on

“Eeeeeeeeeey”

After the initial post, I thought I should follow up with a few more useful applications to help you on your way to creating a website. I by no means am at that point yet but I’m documenting every step along the way. Click here to read the first post in this series.

1. Short Stat for Wordpress - I use the Short Stat plugin by Markus Kaemmerer. It tells you how many hits you’re getting each day, which keywords are dragging people to your site, how many unique visitors you’re getting and much more. The only problem is that it’s easy to get addicted to reading your stats! Get It Here

2. Feedburner - Everyone is using RSS these days. Feedburner allows you to create a feed to send all the goodies from your website to your loyal subjects, your subscribers! No website should be without it. Feedburner is great because it allows you to quickly check how many subscribers you have and helps to promote your feed. Get It Here

3. All In One SEO for Wordpress - Another Wordpress plugin, allowing you to tweak your titles and automatically create meta keywords. Or if you want, you can tweak it to throw up whichever keywords you want. I can’t say enough how this little plugin has improved my search engine ranking for certain keywords. Get It Here

4. Social Bookmarking Buttons - You might be noticing those funky wee buttons I have there on my sidebar? Social bookmarking is a big thing these days, and I mentioned before about submitting your content to these sites. Well when people start arriving from these sites, you want to make it as quick and easy as possible for them to “Digg” or add your contents to favourites. So aside from looking nice, those buttons serve a purpose. And if all else fails, at least the buttons let your visitors feel some sort of familiarity when they see that Stumble icon orFurl “F”.

I used the Text widget to put the code for the individual buttons into my sidebar. The codes are available on the individual bookmarking sites, although sometimes the images don’t look too hot. Again, it’s fairly easy to link to your image instead of theirs. A lot of people also have social bookmarking buttons at the end of articles, this is a god idea, which I am yet to find a suitable plugin for but I’ll let you know.

5. JAW Popular Posts Widget - Again for Wordpress (sorry!). You can see on my sidebar that I have my most popular posts listed? This is useful because quite often people get to your blog and don’t know where to start, or are ther looking for particular content they have heard about. It is quite likely then that if the word is spreading, it will be a popular post. Visitors are a fickle bunch and the more accessible your page is, the longer the stay and the better the reception. You do also need to download Popularity Contest by Alex King, as this will decide which of your posts is popular and JAW will display them. Get Them Here

There’ll be more soon! And remember to contact me if you know of any programs, tools or tips I might find useful.

This whole website/blog thing is new to me and a few months ago a list of useful programs or sites would have been good, so here’s a start to mine.

1.Web Developer toolbar for Firefox - Very handy as it allows you to see the css for all websites you view and for quickly getting the location of all images on that particular page. I found it useful to check the CSS after I had attempted to change things in my stylesheets and saw no change. I wanted to see exactly what the page was displaying before I went in to edit further Get It Here

2.Colorzilla for Firefox - A great little application allows you to use a dropper tool to select any colour on any webpage and gives you the html,RGB etc for it. So when matching your backgrounds up with your templates you can be spot on the right colour Get It Here

3.StumbleUpon - Most of you will know this site, but if you don’t…it’s a social networking site where members share cool content they have found on the web. Other users then view the content randomly through a toolbar in their browser and are taken to all these wonderful sites around the web. I’ve used Stumble to get a few extra visitors to the site by submitting my own content. Also, by browsing other sites, I have found stuff I can write about for instance, World Wide Fido.Get It Here

4.Wordpress - The very page you are looking at is powered by Wordpress, a powerful blogging tool. It is so customisable, with plugins and widgets galore. Most websites have a blog and so should yours! You don’t even have to be good at design as there are hundreds of free templates out there.Get It Here

5.Web CEO - I used this to submit my site to the search engines, it’s great because you just fill in your details and hit submit, you don’t have to manually do it for each search engine.Get It Here

That’s all for now!

If anyone wants to add any I should try, let me know!

I’m not sure of the legality of this but here goes:

Suppose you have a load of WMA files downloaded from Napster but because they are in WMA format and protected by DRM, you can’t add them to iTunes or play them on your iPod. Well, Power MP3 Converter 2008 will convert the WMA files to MP3, just so long as you have an active Napster subscription.

The program costs about £15 and is far better than any similar programs I’ve used, a song is done in under a minute, and you don’t have to use your soundcard to record from, which is handy. Add the WMA songs to PowerMP3, set the bitrate to your choosing, the destination folder and the output type as MP3 and hit convert! Once converted, you can add the mp3 files to iTunes, and from there, add the songs to your iPod. Nice!
£15 isn’t that bad, especially considering Napster are doing free trial memberships! There you are, you’ve converted your protected WMA files to MP3.

Visit the Power MP3 Converter Official Site