Launching IzzyIs Tools!

Hey everyone. Nice to see your guys’ faces again! College has been a lot of handle, as well balancing a part-time job and a contract. Unfortunately this means I haven’t had a lot of a time to develop Go Global!, but this doesn’t mean I haven’t been getting at least some progress done. As a matter of fact you can see some sprite animations I made for the main character, Inster, at the end of this post!

Today I wanted to talk about launching a new section of my website, IzzyIs Tools! These adds a couple of handy tools that I always wanted to be in one, unified place. No more having to search it every time, just bookmark a single webpage and have all the tools I wanted right there. Granted, you could argue that I could just bookmark multiple pages and put them in a folder, but a lot of these tools either want you to signup, want payment of some kind, etc. Not here! The tools will only ever run ads, and that is it for keeping the servers running (they are NOT free). I find this to be the best balance between accessibility and monetization. When making these tools I tried my best to make sure that I wasn’t just copying already existing, dominant tools that have been around for ages. This was especially true for the wheel spinner, as the main dog has been sitting up there for probably a decade at this point. For this post I will quickly go over my 3 favorite tools (and an honorable mention) in the toolset so far:

Offnote

Offnote is my favorite tool that I have created so far. It has everything that I want in Notepad on Windows and more. I find this extremely useful as the computers in my college library don’t come with something like Notepad++ preinstalled. Therefore, having it be available on the web makes this amazing. You can also download it as an app if you really wanted to. It works on most devices (as far as I am aware of). Although its main use is developers, creative writers or just about anyone can use this tool as it has a plain text option. When making this I also thought about people who use Chromebooks and as someone who owned a Chromebook once upon a time this would’ve been a great step towards writing code for the first time. I also decided to not put ads here, since putting ads on a notepad just felt extremely weird. Therefore, as I feel like this will likely be the most popular tool on this list, have decided to make this go off of donations. Server costs are only about ~$2, so that will be the goal until people really start coming towards the service.

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Word Counter for Social Media

Honestly, this is my 2nd favorite tool. Not only is it useful to see the word count for something like Notepad that really only tells you the amount of characters (this does too), but it also the best part: it tells you all the social media character limits. So, if I am cross-posting something on YouTube, Instagram, X, and TikTok (happened a lot when I was a content creator) I can easily toggle those specific character limits and get to typing. I think this is really beneficial for social media influencers who cross-post as often as I did when I was a content creator. If you are a content creator, let me know how you enjoy the tool!

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Placeholder Text Generator

My 3rd favorite tool (did you notice the lines make a P shape, you could also see an F). It was fun getting this thing up and running because as a game developer who wants to have multiple languages in their game I can already see all the benefits this has. If you aren’t a game developer but are a web developer, this may be useful to you since it has some features that web developers might want. I recommend checking it out for yourself to see what I am talking about. For those who aren’t developers at all it might be confusing why this might be such a useful tool. In a nutshell, some languages are not supported in some fonts (usually Asian languages), some languages may have bigger words (German), some languages are logographic characters (Mandarin Chinese) which can make it hard to see on smaller font sizes, and other languages will have you read right-to-left (like Hebrew). As you can see this is a lot that developers have to consider just from text alone and is honestly why many indie creators don’t bother with localization at all (think Stardew Valley or Undertale when they first released). Many of these indie creators that are popular today actually regretted considering localization so late in their process, as you can imagine. If you don’t want to have that be you, then utilize the tools available to you (meaning this one)!

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QR Code Generator

Honorable mention here, but this is a nice tool to have even if many just need for a one-time thing. Most free options out there either make you pay (usually after a week), signup for an account, or limit the amount of QR codes you can generate. Not here! You can generate as many as you like, whenever you like, completely for free. It also includes Wi-Fi QR codes, which is not an option many people think of when it comes to QR codes! This is a general tool: meant from online influencers, to game developers, to small business owners , all the way to your average Joe.

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