How to calculate the readability of a passage

The engine at read-able.com performs its function flawlessly when you add some text to be analyzed. 

The following text is from an article on "4 crucial facts Google Analytics can tell about your readers". And the following are the results after assessing the piece of text.

As can be seen from the table itself, several parameters are calculated on the text. An explanation with the formula for each parameter can be found below.

Simple Textual Properties of the passage

Text Statistics	Value
No. of sentences	7
No. of words	163
No. of complex words	16
Percent of complex words	9.82%
Average words per sentence	23.29
Average syllables per word	1.45

No. of sentences

Simply counting the number of full stops along with an algorithm

No. of words

Simply counting the number of spaces along with an algorithm

No. of complex words

I have no Idea, what can be construed as a complex word and what cannot. In my opinion, there must be a threshold number of characters in a word, exceeding which; the word can be construed as a complex word.

Percent of complex words

It can be calculated with the ratio of number of complex words to the number of total words.

The following is a valid formula for the same,

Percentage of Complex Words = ( ( number of complex words / Total Number of Words ) x 100 )

Average words per sentence

It can be calculated simply by dividing the number of words with the number of sentences

Average Words Per sentence = ( Number of Words / Number of sentences )

Average syllables per word

Syllable is a single unit of a word, separated in accordance with its sound. If you type 'Gutter" you have two syllables "Gut" and "ter". So the word "Gutter" will have two syllables.

A valid formula for the same can be

Scores found through empirical Formulas

Readability Indices	Value
Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease	60.7
Flesch Kincaid Grade Level	10.6
Gunning Fog Score	13
SMOG Index	8.8
Coleman Liau Index	11.1
Automated Readability Index	11.7

Flesch–Kincaid Scores

Flesch–Kincaid readability test indicates the difficulty in understanding a text. They use word length and sentence length as parameters for their calculations.

The scale ranges from 0 to 100. Higher the score, easier is the text to read. If you receive a really low score, it means that the text is really complicated and hard to understand.

Flesch–Kincaid Score = 206.835 - 1.015 x (Words/sentences) - 84.6 x (Syllables/words)

Gunning Fog Score

Gunning Fog Index is simply the number of years of formal study; a typical US student would have undergone to understand the text written. So if you get a fog index of 11, it would mean that a typical US student of about 17 years would comprehend the subject completely.

The following is the formula for the same.

Fog Index = 0.4 x ( (Words/sentences) + 100 x (complex Words/Words) )

SMOG Grade

SMOG is a short form of Simple Measure of Gobbledygook. Just as Fog index measured the years of schooling required to interpret a piece of text for US based students, SMOG index can be applied anywhere.

The following is a formula for the same.

SMOG Index = 1.0430 x square root (30 x complex Words/sentences) + 3.1291

Coleman–Liau index

This index is also used to determine the difficulty of text. It uses only the number of letters per 100 words and the average number of sentences per 100 words.

The following is a formula for the same.

Coleman–Liau index = 0.0588(letters per 100 words) - 0.296(sentences per 100 words) - 15.8

Automated Readability Index

It takes in parameters as average characters per unit word and the average number of words per unit sentences.

Automated Readability Index = 4.71 (Characters/Words) + 0.5(Words/Sentences) - 2.43

Related Reading,

Here's a codemakit research article on the relation between readability and viewership.

This was about,

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A Dialogue with Allie from Grammarly

English Grammar is a vexing concept that comes into use at every turn in your digital life. It is here, you often encounter Grammar Nazis who would tear you limb to limb if you're found with a wrong grammar construct or a misspelled word. 

You just cannot afford the time and energy to check every comment and every blabber by copying and pasting it into Microsoft word, just to check for mistakes. It simply seems too much work.

Introducing Grammarly, a service that can correct you anywhere, from typing in the hostile depths of social networks chained within 140 words, or replying to a racist comment at Facebook to mailing your boss about why you didn't submit the report.

We have with us Allison VanNest, Director of Public Relations at Grammarly. She seems petrifying, but trust me, Allie is a really bright and considerate professional who agreed to take time out of her busy schedule to let us trouble her with our questions.

Let me start with Grammarly first. It is a really efficient service that helps you write correct grammar in your everyday communications. The service works on several platforms and instantly points you towards an incorrect grammar construct or a misspelled word. You can then use it to provide correct alternatives to your incorrect sentence.

Grammarly is renowned worldwide as the best grammar checker there is. It was founded in 2009 by two entrepreneurs. Brad Hoover the CEO holds the reins of the san fransico based web service giant. The service can chekc more than 250 different types of grammatical errors that users often  make. The website boasts more than 3 million users as of 2015 and has an alexa rank of less than 4000.

Grammarly has performed consistently well at its job and hence, won too many awards and accolades to even mention here. However in august 2013, Grammarly was ranked number 344 on Inc. magazine’s 32nd annual Inc. 500 list, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. It was also the finalist in the “Best Bootstrapped Startup” category in the 8th Annual Crunchies Awards in Feb 2015.

Introduction

Mohit: Tell us about the story of Grammarly, How did the idea take flight?

Allie: Grammar rules can be confusing, and they are constantly evolving. Grammarly was founded in 2008 by Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn, both English language learners, to instantly and accurately provide written writing assistance to the more than two billion native and non-native English language speakers worldwide. The automated proofreading tool provides an easy way for students, professionals, job seekers, and English language learners to become more accurate English language writers.

About the Team

Mohit: Online service based companies are often depicted as geeky heaven with chocolate fountains, free food to sleeping pods. How is the work environment and culture at the offices of Grammarly?

Allie: At Grammarly, we codified our culture profile with one word -- EAGER. The goal is to have a memorable, understandable, and actionable company culture. While EAGER describes the attitude of Grammarly's team members, it’s also an acronym:

Ethical: Be honorable to earn trust. Do the right thing, even when no one is watching, without exception.

Adaptable: Embrace change, and learn in order to evolve and succeed. Apply a positive, problem-solving attitude.

Gritty: Demonstrate passion and perseverance for long-term goals, since persistence drives achievement. Do whatever it takes to get the job done, whenever it is necessary.

Empathetic: Treat others as you want to be treated, so we can work well together. Actively listen and put yourself in others’ shoes, and then respond accordingly.

Remarkable: Be recognized as exceptional yet humble, because talent drives impact. Seek out those who are exceptional and learn from them.

Although we have remarkable benefits at Grammarly – yoga, catered lunch, and more – we feel like the most important aspect of our work environment and culture is each other.

Tackling Competitors

Mohit: I'm sure you're aware that some websites have performed tests on Grammarly to check its accuracy. Some have found promising results (like me) but some (mostly rivals) have not. What is your opinion of such usage tests performed by individuals and rival firms on Grammarly?

Allie: We’re pleased you’ve found our product promising. The fact is that Grammarly’s ever-evolving algorithms work to accurately catch English spelling and grammar mistakes based on deviations from baseline grammar standards. For each potential issue flagged by Grammarly’s algorithms, users receive a detailed explanation so they can make an informed decision about how, and whether, to correct the mistake. While Grammarly’s algorithms are very powerful and constantly improving, they are not a replacement for a teacher or proofreader. Grammarly is an automated, cost-effective, and always-available tool to improve users’ English writing and skills.

On Social Networks

Mohit: You have a thriving Facebook community, which provides a platform for grammar discussions. With more than 4.5 million fans at facebook and nearing 2 million at Google plus, describe the challenges faced by your social media team in increasing and maintaining fans.

Allie: We actually don’t emphasize growing our social media fan base. It has been a fun thing for the team to watch, but it was never a sign of our success. Instead, Grammarly emphasizes engagement rates and reach. This has been the greatest challenge—to test, optimize, and adjust to make both our fans happy and the social algorithms. We’re just getting to know our audiences and responding. It’s just a conversation. Sometimes we say something wrong, but it informs how we say things moving forward.

On Business

Mohit: Cloud-based processing is often an advantage when you have exceedingly large algorithms to process the users' input. But this system often takes a hit in countries with no reliable internet connection. How do you propose to solve this?

Allie: Interestingly, some people who do have reliable access to the Internet are not able to make use of certain cloud-based tools for monetary reasons. That’s the first problem that the Grammarly team is tackling. Grammarly believes that quality writing improves confidence and credibility, and we know that everyone should have access to these personal and professional tools, regardless of income. 

Through the launch of Grammarly’s Chrome extension, we’re now offering our quality spelling- and grammar-checking tool for free to users of Google Chrome. We hope to extend this functionality in 2015 to other browsers so that any writer with a reliable Internet connection can improve their credibility and communication style.

Mohit: Note. For those without Chrome, Grammarly services can be accessed from various portals including the Grammarly Plug-in for Microsoft Office Software or Grammarly Words, a contextual online thesaurus or the Grammarly Editor at Grammarly.com

Here we conclude this interview. Allie, I would like to thank you for taking time out of your schedule to help us understand the nitty-gritty of a service-based business and introducing us to Grammarly, which quite simply is an exceptional piece of work.

Our readers can pitch questions to Allie through the comment section and I'll make sure the questions reach Allie.

Related Reading

You know we have our share of interviews with really successful entrepreneurs like the one we've discussed here. For example, you should read about one of my local we designers, i.e. Jetbro from The Den. Just like Alex and Max, we also have the geniuses at Degoo.com and at RescueTime who have developed a service of similar standards.

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Auto Grammar Check, Grammarly, A Review

Word Processing softwares like Microsoft word are simply awesome in correcting your essays, reports and business letters. But, not all mistakes are picked up by such softwares. Reason, they're not made for sentence corrections. They're made to help you type, change font sizes, colors etc. But checking grammatical compositions? I don’t think so.

During one such endeavor, I stumbled upon Grammarly. Really neat pieces of online software which can scan your text and help you modify it according to the correct grammatical rules. This article is a reality check for Grammarly and its services.

Let us check out Grammarly's features.

• Of course it has a grammar checker or a grammar correction engine which checks and advices modifications to your text.
• It also has a contextual spell checker which advices on the correct spelling of a word based on the context of the sentence.
• It also has a Grammarly Plug-in that adds similar features to your Microsoft word and Microsoft outlook software.

Signing-up is simple enough,

Adding it to chrome is easiest

The Test Results

Codemakit itself tried its hand on the perfection seeking online gizmo. So we uploaded a previous article from codemakit on "The dangers of Fair Use Copyright Policy". It is a common policy at codemakit that each and every article published on the website, goes through a series of checks to keep the quality of writing consistent with the highest standards possible. As a result, the text of each article is subjected to

1. The normal spell and grammatical check at Microsoft word,
2. Additional Checks at blogger platform
3. Proofreading of the complete document to ensure removal of contextual or logical errors that may have crept up.

The same article was abridged to remove unnecessary fringes and uploaded to Grammarly (After signing up at a fairly simple form).

Yes Errors were minimal, but they were still present. It came out as a surprise that Grammarly could point out 5 errors in the text uploaded even after it was subjected to such rigorous checks.



The errors were
2 Insertion of commas
1 Replacement of the word ‘of’ instead of ‘in’
2 Insertion of hyphens

Other Reviews

In the recent times, Grammarly has been under fire from various websites because of its non performance in pointing out errors in some easy statements (The economist was one of them). Grammarist.com conducted a test of its own for determining Grammarly's efficiency in pointing out errors in statements. 14 incorrect statements were typed in the Grammarly interface. Grammarly could find 4 errors but was unable to find anything wrong with the other 10. Since some time has passed since grammarist's test was conducted, Codemakit now repeated the same test with the same 14 sentences to check for updates in the engine. We found that now Grammarly could find 6 errors as opposed to the previous 4.

Final Verdict

The perfection loving Grammarly isn't perfect, but just as a human, it is improving with time. Though imperfect, it is still better than the spell check tool at Microsoft word. I would definitely recommend its use to students and businessmen alike.

Update

After writing the article, I was sending a mail to some bloke and grammarly came in swooping like an eagle, pointing out two mistakes at my mail's disclaimer.
Oh this reminds me, I have to edit the disclaimer.

Related Reading,

A previous post on organization of articles will help shed some light on the workings of codemakit aside from simple grammar check.

If you found the example text interesting, you'll be pleased to note that, we have another one like it, i.e. a case study on the dangers of fair use copyright policy.

This was on,

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4 Crucial facts Google Analytics can tell about your readers

Here are 4 crucial cues about your readers that you can get by observing your Google Analytics data.

Just like in any project, knowing who you cater to helps you in increasing your work's quality.

Google Analytics help you bridge that gap by answering your most asked questions.

Why Google Analytics?

GA will help you understand where your website or blog visitors come from. Let us think how that information can be helpful to us. An example, you're standing in a garden at night and suddenly you're hit by a ball. You don't know where it came from. After 5-6 hits you have a faint idea where does it come from, at what height and at what speed. After 10 hits you'll be proficient at ducking them and even catching them.

Who are they?

This is exactly how Google Analytics would help you understand visitors at your website. GA would help you find out the following points,

1. What age group do they belong to?

2. Their Gender

3. Their preferences

Using such information you can actually modify your website according to the readers/ visitors and enhance their experience.

For example, What if you write a blog about biking equipment and find out that most of your visitors are of the female gender with ages 15 to 30. Here you have an opportunity which can be capitalized. How? Let’s find out. 

Using the information you received you can write a blog about certain widgets used in bikes for females. You can experiment with your blog colors and use compatible fonts with best practices to please your intended readers. You could also loop-in a guest post from a prominent blogger who belongs in their age group and gender.

Where do they come from and what do they speak

Owning an international blog fills you with pride. What good is it, if you cannot cater to your international viewers properly? Not all visitors will be from your own country (though you’ll have to check if some countries have not blocked your website). They might even be from your neighboring countries or even from far off islands. 

Google analytics will help you determine which country's residents find your website most appealing. When you have that information, you can extrapolate to what language most residents in that country read (Remember there is a huge difference in most countries in the language they speak, write and read). If you find that many users come from countries whose primary language isn't English, you can try for a multilingual website. If that seems unreasonable, at least add a Google translate toolbar to help visitors read your content in the language they're most comfortable with.

Note. Do you know some countries hate your website?

How do they get here?

This is usually found out in the following ways.

Google analytics would tell you which browser the user was using when he/she visited your website. Using such information you can streamline your website to be run smoothly on the particular browser. 

If your website is read by a certain section of society which uses internet explorer, you can either modify the website in such a way that there are no lags or errors when they open your website in IE OR you could try answering the question why do users from Chrome or Firefox, not visit your website often. Is it because there is an inherent error which crops up when your website is viewed at those browsers or is it because the positions of elements get messed up and it looks like a grotesque pixie.

Google analytics would also tell you what device the users use when viewing your website. Certain users might use an iPad, certain might use PC and some mobile devices. It would be a good practice to check if your website works perfectly at these devices.

From where do they get here?

Another way Google analytics can help you is by finding out how did the visitors land at your website. Using GA would help you isolate (Or what I would like to say stalk) your visitor entry methods at your website. You would find out which website led them here. 

For example if you find that majority of viewers come to your website from your facebook page you would think if you could utilize that opportunity to optimize facebook advertising or adjusting your strategy there. You could also think why visitors come from facebook when you have a twitter handle too.

Though there are several Google products which can help your website like Google Adsense or Google Adwords, none of them come close to the quality of data provided by Google Analytics. Top 500 websites on the web are often found using similar tools to get more information about their viewers or find more ways to impress and retain them.

These were,

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An Interview at RescueTime

Do you know you could increase your productivity up to 80% if you could assess and remove your most distracting activities from your work schedule?

With an ever increasing dependence on computers and PDAs for fulfilling our work and entertainment requirements, it is hard to keep track of when you digress and spend your precious time on unproductive activities. RescueTime literally rescues your time from the clutches of monsters like non productivity and gently nudges you towards more productive and gratifying activities.

RescueTime tracks your digital activities and shows you through interactive graphs the amount of time spent on different types of activities. It helps you point out which activities are given larger share of your time and which of your daily activities need more time to help you stay productive. 

I've used rescue time and can boast that I've spent most of my time in productive activities (proof attached :-p), but enough of me, lets haggle Robby Macdonell, the Head of Product Development for RescueTime.

An Introduction

Mohit: Okay Robby, our readers have a fair idea of RescueTime, but they'll be thrilled to hear it from you. How does it work?

Robby: RescueTime helps people understand how they really spend their time when they are in front of a computer or mobile device. We do this by keeping an accurate log of the different applications that a person is engaged with, then categorizing and scoring that time to help people get a richer picture of where their time is actually going.

Often, once someone understands where their time is going, they want to optimize it in some way. They may want be to be more productive, or simply more balanced. We have a bunch of tools to help people change their behaviors. There’s no one method that works for everyone, so we give people several options to choose from.

Customer Support

Mohit: We've seen dozens of services created by startups which often delegate the responsibility of customer support to other firms. But you actually have yourself responding to queries and making help pages. How does that turn out?

Robby: I can’t imagine ever outsourcing our support. We’re lucky to have a lot of people that use RescueTime, and they generate a fairly large volume of support and product discussion. It takes time to deal with, but if we didn’t do it, we wouldn’t really understand the problems that people were running into. I’m not just talking about problems with RescueTime. It’s important to fix bugs of course, but understanding what someone is personally trying to accomplish or overcome when choosing a tool like RescueTime is one of the most important things for us to hear about.

Mohit: Sure Robby, in the beginning stage every firm must have a firm understanding of what people want from your product, which can very well be understood by answering questions through customer support. But what if, in the near future, you become something short of an internet giant. Would you still go forward with answering such plethora of questions with an ever increasing user base?

Robby: Well, I've worked at some of those "internet giants" before. In the most successful one, the CEO made it a point to speak with at least one customer a day. Obviously you have to structure things differently when working at a larger scale like that, but like I said before, I can't imagine ANY scenario where we would choose to completely cut ourselves off from that feedback channel. It's just way too valuable.

The Business Part

Mohit: First time users often take a shot in the dark when they use RescueTime. How do you encourage new users to try your service?

Robby: We've been really fortunate to have had a lot of people say nice things about us, so that certainly helps. We work really hard to give people a good experience and actually solve problems, and if we’re doing that correctly then our users become the best amplifier of who we are and what we’re doing. If I’m having a one-on-one conversation with someone, I tell them to think about the last time a manager or colleague asked them what they've been working on lately. Was it a struggle to remember? Did it feel awkward? That feeling was the reason we built RescueTime in the first place. We were sick of tripping over our tongues looking for answers when people asked us things like that.

The Technical Part

Mohit: It is awfully difficult to integrate one service into so many environments like PC, Android, iOS etc. But for RescueTime you have to do it for efficiency's sake. What were the challenges you faced when you try to integrate a service in several environments?

Robby: The big challenge is figuring out how to manage the data across different devices. We chose early on to go with a cloud-based approach, largely because we were all better at building web applications than we were at native apps. It turned out to be a really good decision, because it means that to support a new platform, all we have to do is write a relatively lightweight client that tracks data and sends it back to the server for further processing. It’s helped us stay focused on the overall experience.

Mohit: Talking about receiving data, you must receive a huge amount of data from an equally large number of users. How do you ensure that the personal data you receive from the users are stored safely and cannot be hacked by or leaked to other parties?

Robby: That's not really my area, so I'm light on the details, but we use industry-standard secure data practices to isolate the data in a private network, and control access to it through authenticated and encrypted trails with an audit path.

On RescueTime Blog

Mohit: You also have a RescueTime Blog where you often discuss its applications. What role does a blog play in creating a positive image for RescueTime?

Robby: It gives us an outlet to tell the story of RescueTime from our perspective. Working with this type of application, we get to explore a lot of interesting things, and we love sharing what we find. Sometimes it’s a new way to use RescueTime. Other times it’s interesting things we’ve learned from researchers studying attention and productivity. We don’t have a structured content strategy. We just post the things that we feel like sharing with our users.

Conclusion

Mohit: I have been using RescueTime for quite some time and let me tell you, it has shown me ways to shut non productive distractions and focus on the rewarding ones. Visiting your testimonials confirmed that this view was shared by many. Did you envisage your service to be so popular and utilitarian?

Robby: When we started building RescueTime, we thought it would only appeal to complete nerds like us. But when we started telling people about it, we found that the problems we were working on are pretty universal. People spend a LOT of time in front of a computer (or some other digital device), and there are so many competing things going on, all vying for our time, that it’s REALLY easy for it to start to feel like a black hole. RescueTime gives people a way to feel more in control over their time, and that’s something that it turns out a lot of people can appreciate.

That’s all for today, I on behalf of our readers would thank Robby for taking time out of his busy schedule and answering our questions.  Do you know he battled blizzards (and emerged victorious) at his town to send us his answers? But that is for another time. 

If our readers have some questions that they would like answered; add it to the comments below and I’ll make sure it reaches Robby. The last interview was made interesting by one of our readers who added an insightful question, which was answered gracefully (have a look at the interview with the geniuses at Degoo.com).

Also you can find them at their twitter handle or at their facebook page too.

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Check your Website for Mobile Compatibility Part 2

A Website can be easily converted into a mobile Website. A blogger based blog, still easier. What after the conversion? How do you reckon that the website is now mobile friendly and none of any readers will have problems opening the website in their PDA.

A previous article by codemakit talked on compatibility of websites for its use in mobile devices. The article talked of GoMo which developed a tool known as GoMometer which analyses the websites and reports its findings. 

A major disadvantage in GoMo is that you need a person to give the feed-back. In Short, you need to ask a person to visit your website and fill the GoMo form. When many of them view and report their satisfaction/dissatisfaction, you'll get a fair idea about the website in question. But what should you do when you do not have enough beta testers, or if you're alone, you’ll need something better and faster. 

Behold! Out from the ashes, emerge, "Google Webmasters Mobile Friendly Test"! There exists a bar where you need to enter your website's URL and click analyze. To think of it, it is very similar to the page speed analysis page.

Best Practices for Mobile Compatibility

Though Google has enlisted some stuff which has to be thought of before you consider it as a mobile website, you can still view the condensed version of Google's Webmaster mobile best practices.

Large Sizes

The worst thing about viewing a website from a mobile device is the strain your eyes have to endure while reading. A lower font size not only increases eye strain but also lowers the reader's interest leading to higher bounce rates and lesser session duration & Pages per session. If you're not sure which font size is the best, check out codemakit's study on the best font sizes for websites and the best font types for better user interaction.

Low Flash

your website must have minimum of Flash content as it creates complications in mobile environment. Actually too much of flash content is not good for any website. 

Though Flash content looks more beautiful than most non-flash websites, the flash content is rarely read by bots and hence it is not indexed. 

Viewports

The Ability of the website to scale itself, since the website will be opened in Tablets, Desktop computers, mobile devices etc. you cannot expect the text box in the website to be the same throughout. You'll need to configure your website's viewport so that the website content is modified to find with different screen widths. (For more information check out Google’s support page on setting the Viewport)

Checking Mobile Compatibility

If you have followed the three steps enumerated above and you're still not sure about how google sees your mobile website, you can have a look at Webmaster's mobile friendly tools.

Though Google is reliable, what is more reliable than the creators of the internet, W3C or World Wide Web consortium too has an awesome mobile check tool, where after analyzing a URL, it will display the areas in which the website is weak and need improvement. Being a purely technical checking tool, the W3c mobile Checker can be a harsh checker. (It gives a score of 37% out of 100 to facebook.com) But it has the ability to point out separate problems in the website.

Related Reading,

You can check Google's mobile usability tips from Google Support

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When was a Webpage Updated

Ever wanted to find when was a webpage updated? Here are some methods to find out when a webpage was updated. We'll be discussing several methods to find when a webpage was updated. 

For example the WayBack machine method, change Detection method and JavaScript method.

The WayBack Machine

One of the most popular methods for non-programmers is the wayback machine method. Codemakit had already discussed the method in one of its previous articles on the Internet Archivist.

It is a project by 'The Internet Archive' a non-profit enterprise which has been receiving data from Alexa and many websites. In short it is a type of library that stores versions of your website.

The usage is awfully clear, you need to enter the URL of the website which you need to check in the search bar and press enter. The previous version would be right before your eyes. Now it must be clear that you cannot use the Wayback machine for determining the last updated version of a website that needs a login before you enter, simply because, the website would need authentication.

Another problem is you would not get a very accurate date. For a smaller/ not so popular website it would be in the range of a month. If you need a more accurate method of finding when your page was updated, keep reading.

Change Detection Method

A website known a change detection also performs a similar task but differently. Here you need to paste the URL of the page and your email address. So, whenever the website/Webpage URL changes, you'll be the first one to receive a notification. The only problem with this method is you will not be able to get any historical data. The mails would start from the point when you enter the email address and never before.

The JavaScript Method

The JavaScript method is by far the most simple and the most effective method i have found to determine the last updated/modified version of the webpage. The steps too are simple.

1. Go to the URL you need
2. Paste the following code "alert(document.lastModified)" (without the quotes)
3. Now type the following on the code "javascript:" (without the quotes) *
4. Such that the complete code looks like "javascript:alert(document.lastModified)" (without the quotes)
5. Press enter **

The steps are outlined below,

* Note. It is very important that you type in the code in third step. It doesn't seem to work without it. The code is said to work in all major browsers and gives the most accurate time and date.

** Note. You need to remember that the results are in the MM/DD/YYYY format and the Time is in HH:MM:SS format. This is particularly useful when you have a date as 01/04/2014.

This answered your Question,

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7 Best Free Image Websites without Watermarks and More

How often have you felt the need of a really nice image for your blog but all you can find are stock images charging you 1.29$ or 3.99$ for a single image. You try and optimize images you already have and you put on a long face cursing the website for the outrageous prices and move on?

But you know, high resolution photographs and images are often a major requirement for a better web design, this has been said even by design experts like, Jacob Gube and Steven Snell

Codemakit presents to you the best of the best image websites hosting free images for your benefit, Images that do not have a grotesque watermark at the center, Images that do not need any attribution (some that allow you to use for commercial purposes too) and definitely no websites that charge you outrageous amounts for seemingly stupid images. These need no attribution (some might), are absolutely free and you are free to meddle with them (almost).

Codemakit has always tried to bring you a comparison of the best. Never has it presented its own opinions on its readers. Take the examples of the Top 8 form creation websites or A comparison of Free storage for your website or even the recent Best Office websites of 2014. When you see the top competitors (each offering a different approach) you connect with them and finally bookmark them.

Stock Free Images

Stock Free images by far contain one of the most vibrant collections of stock free images (Ahem). The images are free to download, displaying image size, and dimensions along with sharing options.

Free Images

Free images, A UK based website, too has a really nice collection of images from around the world. My advice to them is to start working on the SEO side of their website. Otherwise everything else is nice, mate!

UnProfound

Unprofound was started by Jim in 2001. Though his website has been attracting a lot of attention lately because of the sheer number and quality of images it hosts. But he still needs to work on his website.

Foter

Foter is by far the best website in terms of website design, and functionality. The landing page does not boast of overly beautiful images and sunset beach photos, but just a search bar where you need to type in your query and the engine would comply.

Morgue

Morgue file, though a small website with a little collection to offer is still workable as the pictures are of high quality and often meet the standards set by the webmasters. (p.s. It is the best website for photography students)

Public Domain Archive

Public domain archive is an altogether different website. A professionally designed website filled with a really beautiful High resolution images. Codemakit tried contacting Matt the founder of this project for an interview but couldn't get through. I guess I would have to post a public invitation (So Matt if you're reading this, you are invited for an interview with codemakit)

As is the custom, codemakit provides a complete comparison of all websites that have been studied in terms of functionality, web design and above all, content. Though the websites have been ranked, the readers not familiar with codemakit website rating (CWR) system can have a look at the rating document of Website Ratings.

Rank	Name	Download Available	Creative Commons	Free	Codemakit Index
1	Public Domain Archive	Yes	Yes	Yes	A2
2	Pixel Perfect Digital	NA	NA	NA	NA
3	Stock Free Images	Yes	NA	Yes	A3
4	Foter	Yes	Yes	Yes	B1
5	Free Images	Yes	NA	Yes	B2
6	Morguefile	Yes	Yes	Yes	B2
7	UnProfound	Yes	NA	Yes	C1

Update

Pixels

The website, Pixels provides photos licenced under Creative Commons Zero Licence. This means, you are free to download and use the images as you please. They have a huge collection of photos available in different sizes.

Large Photos

The website and its photos are mainly focused on commercial usage. But, don't fret yet, they're completely free to use. You can choose whether or not to attribute to the photos. However, as the name Large Photos suggests, the size of the photos can be pretty large.

Related reading,

• Photo Editor Online: Edit your images on the go, Learn how to edit your photographs and images online.
• Answer questions like, Why do Black and White images look awesome?
• Or questions like, What is the optimum number of images for a webpage?

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