AnswerThePublic

Great topic ideas for blogs or social media posts.

Have a Blog? Do you Need Blog Topic Ideas? A good place to get some fresh ideas is "Answer the Public." Simply type in your broad topic, and in a matter of a few seconds, you'll get a list of questions and bullet point ideas.

Your topic results are broken down into questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical.

Website Description

The auto-suggest results provided by Google & Bing is a goldmine of insight for today???s marketers. As you type you are presented with an aggregated view of the questions & therefore a hint of the motivations & emotions of the people behind each search query. It???s perhaps one of the best but most underutilized sources of research for content ideas.

AnswerThePublic is brought to you by the team behind CoverageBook. Find out how over 1,500 PR teams worldwide Make Coverage Reports, Faster at CoverageBook.com.

https://answerthepublic.com/

Some Sample Searches to Try

Interested in the capabilities of Answer the Public, but don't know what to put in the search query? Try these to start:

• Boston, Massachusetts
• Red Sox
• Macintosh Computers
• Donald Trump 2020
• Guinness Beer

Interesting Use of "Answer the Public"

One of the nice things about "Answer the Public" is that you can get some creative questions out of it. These are good to ask in technical interviews. In addition, these are good when putting together technical documents, making sure that your document or paper answers some of the questions.

This is also good for those A-Z challenges. You can get creative ideas on your topic from A to Z.

Trip Clip

Create custom activities for kids

Daily routines are difficult with some kids. They may not always remember certain tasks that they have to do every day. Thankfully Trip Clip has come up with some handy checklist for children. These can be completely customized to your needs.

Trip Clip has all sorts of creative games that keep kids off technology for a bit: Airport Bingo, Mazes, Word Search, Coloring Pages, Crosswords and so much more. The Word Search is very cool because you can add your own words, think Spelling Words, and it will help your children remember the letters. You can buy a clipboard to help the kids perform their activities - in the car or at the airport.

While this isn't a free service, it's pretty cool and certainly worth checking out if you have children.

Website Description

https://thetripclip.com

Good Deal!

For $14.95 you can have lifetime access to all the activities on the website. If you're a grandparent, this is a great site to have as a resource for "things to do" on a rainy day.

Not a Paid Endorsement

Just like all the blog post that you see on cryan.com, this is not a paid product endorsement. This is a cool service that I think is worth sharing.

If you know of a better service, please let me know in the comments below.

Technology Book Generator

Create Your Own Technology Book Cover

Working in technology can be stressful, and every once in a while it's nice to brighten up things with some humor. One way is to create silly O'Reilly Book Covers.

If your not familiar with O'Reily Books - they are known technology books with some animals on the cover. They cover just about every possible technology segment and have been around for years.

Website Description

https://dev.to/rly

Sample Books

Inkatlas

Create cool looking maps with Inkatlas

Google Maps are great, but it isn't helpful if you want to draw and showcase areas around a location. That's what makes inkatlas so great. You can draw and print out maps.

Description from Website

https://inkatlas.com/create/

Sample Map

Sample Map created with InkAtlas

Markdown Table Generator

Make tables for any markdown editor

Markdown formating is becoming really popular. Cool apps like Notion is making is easy to copy/paste data. Markdown is also very popular in the Wiki community.

One of the challenges of Markdown is making tables. Thankfully sites like Table Generator makes it easy to create table. Simply define the number of rows and columns - and presto you have a working Markdown template to fill in.

Description from Website

https://www.tablesgenerator.com/markdown_tables

Sample Output

Sample seven-day table.

|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |

Xicon

Easily Create ICO icons for websites

Creating .ico can be complex, but Xicon makes it easy. You can easily create icons from any size image. There are some tools that help remove the background and add additional touch-ups

Website Description

http://www.xiconeditor.com/

Five Things I learned about Xicon Editor

• The site launched on October 28, 2010 by Microsoft.
• You can import any size image to convert to an ico icon.
• Using the paint bucket you can easily remove the background.
• The final image isn't compressed, and the site offers some suggestions to help compress the image.
• The preview is a good way to preview the icon as a bookmark, Window's dock icon, and in the tool bar.

Ranking of Weather around the World

Find out the extreme temps from the past 20 years

Ever had one of those days where it felt like it was the hottest place on Earth? Or perhaps it's freezing outside and your thinking it must be the cold place on the planet?

Well now you can check it out from ogimet.com. You can see the Hottest Temps, Coldest Temp, Rainest and Windest place on earth. Not just right now, but anytime in the last 20 years!

You can find out what the extreme Temps at the time someone was born in the past 20 years.

Description from Website

http://www.ogimet.com/ranking.phtml.en

This is a free service, and there is a time limit on how many history searches can be performed. (I believe it's one query for every 1 minute.)

LCD Generator

Quickly create cool looking LCD screens

Using an LCD generator to display text is one way to make your message stand out. What's nice about avtanski.net solution is that there are so many ways to quickly generate a custom LCD screen. Simply drag/drop the graphic to Slack so that everyone knows.

The LCD Generator is a unique way to display your phone number on your website or business card.

Website Description

http://avtanski.net/projects/lcd/

Examples

Facebook Design — Devices

Facebook has great mockup templates for any design purposes.

There are a lot of services/solutions to creating mock-up and a quick Google search for "iPhone Mockups" produce about 50,800,000 results. Yikes! How can one find good quality Mockups to use in Photoshop, Sketch or Affinity Photo?

Facebook!

Facebook? Yes, that Facebook. They have a developer area where you can download all sorts of device design ideas which you can download and use as mockups.

Website description

https://facebook.design/devices

Sample Design

Using the iPhone XS Max, and Dell XPS design I created the sample layout in Affinity Designer:

Text to ASCII Art

Create cool ASCII art from your text

Ascii Art is a popular way to highlight text. In the 80s and 90s it was popular to show Ascii art in popular chat rooms at Delphi Internet or Compuserv. Nowadays, Ascii art is used for terminal login headlines.

Patorjk's Text to ASCII Art tool is a great way to create all sorts of Ascii art.

Website Description

http://patorjk.com/software/taag

Five things I Learned

There are 174 fonts in four categories: 53 Feature FIGlet Fonts, 10 ANSI FIGlet Fonts, 75 Regular FIGlet Fonts and 36 AOL Macro Fonts.

The "Test All" is a good way to look at your text in all the fonts!

You can't cut/paste the output into Slack. The best way to display in Slack is to use a screenshot

If you use like the Text to Ascii Art tool, there is a Chrome Extension. Now you can easily create Ascii Art whenever you need it.

There is an Ascii Art Web Ring where you can find other sites that offer Ascii arts.

Sample Output

  ___ _ __ _   _  __ _ _ __    ___ ___  _ __ ___  
 / __| '__| | | |/ _` | '_   / __/ _ | '_ ` _  
| (__| |  | |_| | (_| | | | || (_| (_) | | | | | |
 ___|_|   __, |__,_|_| |_(_)______/|_| |_| |_|
           |___/