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Using Twitter from LeapFish

This post is part of a blog series on "Why I like LeapFish". It is also an entry into the LeapFish $100,000 Cash Dash contest, which you can signup for here.

In this blog post, I'll be covering the Twitter widget on LeapFish. On your own customizable LeapFish home page, you'll have a section for Twitter that you can use to stay up to date on your Twitter stream, as well as post, reply to and retweet tweets.

To do this, scroll down to the Twitter widget located on the right hand column about half way down the LeapFish home page and click on the "Sign in with Twitter" button. This will bring up a new OAuth window, which asks you for permission to allow LeapFish to access your Twitter account. Click on yes to allow LeapFish to access your Twitter account and then you will be returned to the LeapFish home page and your Twitter account will be active.

Inside the Twitter widget, you'll see options for Refresh, Home, @ Replies, Direct messages, search and other options. Underneath that you'll see a "What's Happening?" text box, where you can post Twitter updates and click the Update button to send out some tweets. There's also a "Shorten URL" tool and underneath that, you're friends stream.

It almost looks exactly like the Twitter.com homepage itself. The Twitter widget is definitely a nice feature on LeapFish and it's very handy to be able to check on your stream as well as post Twitter updates all from one personalized home page. Check it out on LeapFish.com.

Using Facebook from LeapFish

This post is part of a blog series on "Why I like LeapFish". It is also an entry into the LeapFish $100,000 Cash Dash contest, which you can signup for here.

In this blog post, I'll be covering the Facebook widget on LeapFish. On your own customizable LeapFish home page, you'll have a section for Facebook that you can use to stay up to date on all of your Facebook stream information, as well as post comments and performing other actions.

But first things first, if you've just started using LeapFish, sign up for a free account and then sign in. Afterwards, scroll down the home page and on the right hand column, you'll see a section named Facebook with a Facebook connect button. Click on the Facebook connect button and then authorize LeapFish to access and update your Facebook account. Afterwards, you should be all set and your Facebook "stream" should now appear on your LeapFish home page.

You'll see all the latest updates from your Facebook friends, just as if you were on the actual Facebook.com site. There's options for "Home", "Profile", "Friends", News Feed, Events & Birthdays. You can also Refresh your Facebook stream and Logout if desired. Underneath that section, you'll see an input box for "What's on your mind?", which allows you to update your Facebook status right from the LeapFish widget. 

While viewing and scrolling through your friends updates, you'll notice options for Comment and Like. So nothing ground breaking here, you get exactly what you would expect to have right on the Facebook website. You can comment on your friends updates/photos etc, or you can simply "Like" a particular update.

The Facebook widget on LeapFish is particularly useful as it allows you to keep up to date on all of your Facebook activities without actually leaving your home page.

Customizing Home Page widgets on LeapFish

This post is part of a blog series on "Why I like LeapFish". It is also an entry into the LeapFish $100,000 Cash Dash contest, which you can signup for here.

To follow up on my post about the LeapFish home page from yesterday, in this post, I will be discussing the customization features of the LeapFish home page and how you can modify it to fulfill your personal tastes and needs. 

As I mentioned in my last post, you'll need to sign up for a free account on LeapFish.com in order to use the customization features. Once you have your account, you can sign in and start modifying your home page to suit your own preferences. 

By default, you see a bunch of news widgets, Twitter and Facebook widgets, and a popular YouTube videos widget. If for some reason you don't like any of the default widgets provides, simply hover your mouse over the top right section of the widget, find the X and click it. This will remove the widget from your personal home page.

If you'd like to add more widgets/content to your LeapFish home page, just click on the Customize Homepage button on the top right of your screen, and you will be taken to a page that shows a variety of widgets from all types of websites and services. If you like a particular widget on that page, you can simply click on the "Add This" button underneath that widget to get it added to your personal home page.

When you are on your own personalized home page looking at all of your widgets, you can also drag and drop the widgets to reorder them. This can be useful if you have a certain widget that you want to see at the very top of your homepage screen. Simply drag it to the top and it will stick.

If you'd like to view a screencast video on customizing the LeapFish home page and using widgets, take a look at my YouTube video here.

The LeapFish Home Page

This post is part of a blog series on "Why I like LeapFish". It is also an entry into the LeapFish $100,000 Cash Dash contest, which you can signup for here.

In this post, I'll be talking about using LeapFish as your home page. LeapFish is not only a multi-source search engine, it is also a web portal and content aggregator. LeapFish encourages you to set your homepage to LeapFish.com, and they provide many customization options to personalize your home page just for you.

In order to customize and personalize your LeapFish home page, simply sign up for a free account and then sign in. 

The default layout will provide news content from a variety of news sources, along with a widget for Twitter and Facebook. Yahoo News is found at the top by default. You can also filter the news headlines by Top news, World, Business, Sports and Technology, allowing you to get a quick glance at the News for a certain category that you are interested in.

Underneath, by default, you'll see sports news, including options for NFL, NBA, WNBA and NHL. Then you'll see celebrity news, social networking news from Mashable and Popular videos from YouTube.

All of this is customizable, you can move around content or add or remove sections (widgets) from your home page, which I will be discussing in a future blog post.

If you'd like to view a video on the LeapFish home page, check out my YouTube video here.

LeapFish shopping search

This post is part of a blog series on "Why I like LeapFish". It is also an entry into the LeapFish $100,000 Cash Dash contest, which you can signup for here.

I've covered many of the other types of LeapFish services and today I'll be writing about their Shopping Search feature. From the top of LeapFish.com, click on the "Shopping" option in the top blue bar, first item from the right in the blue bar, next to "Blogs". This takes you to http://shopping.leapfish.com, their dedicated shopping search feature.

As you might expect, the LeapFish shopping search feature provides you with information and details on where to purchase a product and prices at various online websites. 

In my Shopping search example video, I searched for "Logitech nano mouse" and showed how LeapFish Shopping search brought up online auction results for the product, with results from Ebay. It also shows Online Retailer results from Amazon Shopping and gives you many different product options and purchasing price points for various products.

Providing shopping results for both online auction sites as well as online retailers is a smart move. Some people might not realize how cheap some products sell for on ebay, or on the Amazon marketplace. LeapFish changes that by providing you all of those results in your shopping search and I'm sure it will help people find a good price and a good place to get their product. So if that sounds good to you, check out the "Shopping" search feature on LeapFish.com

LeapFish Blogs search

I've covered many of the other types of LeapFish services and today I'll be writing about their Blog Search feature. From the top of LeapFish.com, click on the "Blogs" option in the top blue bar, second item from the right, next to "Shopping". This takes you to http://blogs.leapfish.com, their blogs search engine.

Enter your search terms in the top search bar, hit enter, or click the "Search Blogs" button.

LeapFish will return a few additional suggested search terms in the "Also Try" section near the top and then it will display a comprehensive listing of Blog results.

The LeapFish blog search results will show you relevant results, but also timely results. Perusing through the Blog Search listings, you will see that many of the results are newer, sometimes within hours of the blog posts going live online. It's almost like a "real time" search for blogs.

Searching on blogs specifically can be a great way to read about opinions, expert analysis and the latest buzz on the net. 

The advent of blogs and blogging revolutionized the web by providing an easy to use, quick, publishing platform for the masses. Just about anyone can easily get online with their own blog, especially with free and simple services to use like Blogspot.com (which hosts this site) and Wordpress.com.

This "Blogosphere" as they call it, can provide a wealth of information and is many times referred to as the pulse of the internet (until Twitter came along, that is).

So give the LeapFish Blog search feature a try, you might be pleasantly surprised by the results.

LeapFish News Search

This post is part of a blog series on "Why I like LeapFish". It is also an entry into the LeapFish $100,000 Cash Dash contest, which you can signup for here.

In this post, I'll be discussing the LeapFish "News search" feature. LeapFish contains search options from many different search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Topsy, YouTube) and it also contains options for specific search types. So, if you're interested in just finding information about the latest news, the last information for a given keyword or topic, you can simply click on the "News" link at the top of LeapFish.com, which takes you over to http://news.leapfish.com.

This news search feature will only return results for current/new articles and news items on the web. This can help you keep up to date with the most recent, relevant information, without worrying about getting results for pages that may contain out-dated, stale or no longer accurate information.

The news feature appears to be powered by Google News search, as the results that show up in a LeapFish news search say "via Google" underneath each result. I find this to be a good thing, as the Google News search has always worked very well for me and I've used it as a resource on many occasions.

So if you're looking for a search engine/search provider that will provide the latest, up to date news for a given term, http://news.leapfish.com is definitely worth a look.

LeapFish images search

This post is part of a blog series on "Why I like LeapFish". It is also an entry into the LeapFish $100,000 Cash Dash contest, which you can signup for here.

In this post, I'll discuss the LeapFish "Images" search feature. As I've mentioned before, LeapFish is not your standard search engine. It will provide many, many types of different content in addition to plain ole web results. It has a heavy focus on multimedia results, including image results.

You search specifically for just image results using http://images.leapfish.com. It's as simple as typing in your search term(s) and hitting enter or clicking the "search images" button next to the search box.

LeapFish will then display a listing of Image Results from Google and Yahoo. The top eight images on the page will be from Google, while the bottom eight come from Yahoo. In total, sixteen images are displayed on the page after performing an Images search on LeapFish. Image width and height are cataloged under each thumbnail, allowing the user to get a quick glance at the full size of each image.

But it doesn't stop there, LeapFish has a handy pagination feature that you can use to quickly flick through new pages of image results. To access this, simply click on the little arrow icons on the top right hand side of your image result thumbnails.

Another handy feature is the auto-zoom preview of larger versions of the thumbnails when you hover over each thumbnail in the image results. This allows you to get a better look at each image result without leaving the LeapFish Images search results page. 

If you click on an image, a shadow box appears to launch the slideshow feature. While in slideshow mode, you can simply click the image to advance to the next, full size displayed image, or hover over the image near the top right to click the next button. You can also hover over the top left to click the previous button.

And of course, if you want to go to the original website that posted the image, you can always click on the hyperlink that appears under the thumbnail of each image.

Overall, it's a pretty slick way to provide image search results and allow a user to easily navigate through the results set.