You waste your server resources for web applications? Why don’t accept the help of Google. Just a few days ago Google launched its Google App Engine. Being still in beta it allows you to upload your web application on the Google network and use their computational power. With a free account you are already able to use 500MB space, a CPU usage of 200,000,000 megacycles and a maximum of 10GB bandwidth per day. Also you get several other features:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

Great – Where do I have to sign in?

Google App Engine is still in beta. There were 10,000 beta accounts available but after ca. 3 hours they were all gone. Google already announced that more accounts will follow in the near future. So don’t hesitate to subscribe to the waitlist.

Talking from web2.0, you think of fade effects, live form validation and other nice and often practical effects. But how are these things realized? Is it something that only professional programmer can assemble?

The only thing that would be helpful is a general understanding of Javascript and HTML. Many of the effects you may have in mind are realized by using open-source libraries or other freely available code snippets. You just have to integrate a few Javascripts and call a few functions to have a beautiful web2.0-ish effect for your website.

In my view the best library is script.aculo.us in connection with prototype.js. They are easy to understand, have a large documentation and a good community. Other libraries worth mentioning are jQuery, Dojo, MochiKit, mootools and YUI. After installing the libraries, it’s so easy to create. Make a few Ajax calls, fall back on entire functions, get some groove effects – and your code is much lighter than before! So why not try to use one of these libraries, after a bit practice you will thank yourself for taking this step.

But even if a library can’t provide you the effect you need, there always is a better way than writing everything on your own. Use some ready-made code snippets. You find them everywhere on the Internet. Snippets for some common problems are Lightbox and ThickBox, which make it possible to overlay an image or other content on the current page. Sometimes the snippets make use of a specific Javascript library. But be careful that not all libraries work well together.

To sum up, I can say that both JS libraries and code-snippets will save you a lot of time (and maybe money). So have a look at them and don’t let the complexity awe you.

What is the aim of every blogger? As much traffic as possible, of course! Normally it means a lot of work and sometimes money. But than comes BlogRush and says it has the ultimate weapon to send you thousands of visitors for (quite) nothing.

To start, go to BlogRush.com, register for a free account and add your blog. You can select a category which will later help BlogRush finding the right content for your site. After you have installed the widget, let the magic begin..

How does it work

Now you can see the BlugRush widget on your site (or look in the menu on the right of this blog) showing 5 posts of blogs with related content. If you click on one of these links, a new window will open and refers you to the article. But how should this supports you drive more traffic to your own blog? That’s easy. Always when the BlogRush widget is shown on your site, one of your posts will, in return, appear in the widget of another (topic related) blog. This means that if you have 100 pageviews a day, your posts will appear on 100 other blogs.

Furthermore BlogRush offers detailed statistics and filters. The filters can be set to permanently block a certain URL or posts (on the basis of blocked words), from being displayed in your widget. Since a few days you can also choose between different widget-’flavors’, to fit your sites design.

Good or Bad

I want to make clear that we didn’t get paid or something else to write about BlogRush. It’s just a new tool bloggers should know. But what about the real effect of the widget?

Many bloggers deny using BlogRush but other welcome it.. I will try it and in a few weeks we will see whether it has brought us a crowd of visitors or not.

If you want to know what others say, you could read Despite Recent Criticism, Blogrush Means Business, BlogRush is a Blog Bust or My BlogRush Stats – Can John Reese Make This Work?.

Time – time management means productivity, means money! In a world of multitasking you have to reduce stress and improve your self-organization. You can use pen and post-its or you try one of these web-based equivalents…

Online Mindmaps

1. Mindmeister is an Ajax driven web application specialized on collaborative mind mapping. Also it allows you to instantly start a Skype conference with your friends/partners.

2. Mindomo, a very heavyset mindmapping tool, enables you to structure your maps in every detail. It’s one of a few which supports image-integration.

3. Bubbl.us uses Ajax and Flash for creating beautiful and simple mindmaps. You can share them with your friends or print your work.

To-do Lists

1. Rememberthemilk is a powerful to-do list tool that allows you to locate tasks, share, publish and get reminded of them via IM, SMS or email.

2. Blablalist is a simple to-do list. It’s fast, and offers all the basic features. It tenders an easy-to-use interface, but loses points because of a nerving pop-up window, launched when setting up a new list.

3. Roughunderbelly is a Ruby on Rails running to-do list, which allows you to set yourself a deadline for your tasks and classify them.

4. Ta-da Lists, also built with Rails, offers a wonderfully simple and clean to–do manager. Ta-da Lists uses a lot of whitespace and big fonts to make the lists more appealing and open.

5. Voo2do provides detailed task management for individuals.

6. Toodledo allows you to group your tasks, assigned to due dates and priority.

7. With Taskthis you can create to-dos with notes and publish them via RSS. If needed you can share your lists with your friends.

Web Calendars

1. Yahoo Calendar – “Access dates and meetings from anywhere, anytime”
2. Google Calendar – “Simplify. Organize. (And relax.)”
3. Hipcal – “it’s about time”
4. Kiko – “dead simple calendar”
5. 30boxes – “it’s so easy my mom can do it”
6. MSN Calendar One of the big three together with Yahoo! and Google.

It’s always difficult to find the right typeface for a logo or even a website. Here are some resources of free fonts but remember if your are using special fonts on your site less visitors will be able to see the site with the actual font and most see the site in a standard font. I recommend you to use rare fonts just for your logo but if you really want to use such a special font for your site be sure to declare alternative font styles in your stylesheet.

Free font resources:

• Dafont.com offers user created free fonts. 7500 typefaces have already been submitted to Dafont.
• Grsites.com has a big collection of about 6800 fonts, including a logo and button maker.
• 1001freefonts.com gives you 1001 fonts for nothing.
  
• There are 11202 nicely categorized fonts on Abstractfonts.com. It’s one of the biggest free anthologies out there.
• Fontriver.com includes a collection of nice fonts for PC and MAC. Also Fontriver provides some useful tools for fonts, e.g. a font manager.
• Highfonts.com offers a well-designed free font site with more than 3000 fonts and another 25000 to pay.
• Fontmaniac.com has nearly 12000 fonts.
• Fontasy.de includes a huge collection of free fonts as well as some links to font tools but attention not all of them are for free.
• Fontviallage.com presents you a nice collection with about 6000 fonts.
• You can get ready-made collections of free fonts on allfreetemplates.org (containing up to 7952 Fonts!!). But in order to get the fonts you have to register once on their site.

Do You want to create your own font?

• Macromendia Fontographer 4.1 is on of the best fontcreating tools but the newest version isn’t available for free. I linked to version 4.1 which is latest one available for free downloading.
• DTL FontMaste can be downloaded for free in a light version. It’s a good alternative to Macromedia Fontographer.

Helpful Web-Applications

• typetester.maratz.com is a website with a realtime font-preview app that lets you easily see how a certain typeface affects you.
• Searchfreefonts.com is a search engine, indexing more than 13000 free fonts.

If you know other good and free font resources or gadgets you can post them in the comments.

About one week has gone since Firefox passed the 400 million downloads mark. A lot of people and of course webmaster use the revolutionary browser to explore the web. So this time I want to present you a bunch of plugins, especially for web development!

Debugging

Firebug – A masterpiece of plugin! If you want to edit your sites CSS and preview it in real-time, this plugin is what you need.

JavaScript Debugger – A powerful JavaScript debugging environment.

Console Two – A plugin/console to display errors filtered by type, language and context.

Analysis

View Source Chart – A cool plugin which enables you to display a color-coded chart of a website’s source code.

OperaView – Open pages in Opera from Firefox context menu.

View Dependencies – This plugin adds a tab to the Page Info window which lists all the files that have been loaded to show the current page.

lori – It can tell you how long it takes to load a page.

HTML Validator – This plugin displays the number of found errors of the site you are viewing.

CSS Validator – As you may guess, it validates a site’s CSS stylesheet.

RSS Validator – One of many plugins to validate a RSS Feed using the W3C Validator.

Window Resizer – A plugin to resize your window to standard sizes; useful to see how your site looks with different resolutions.

IE Tab – Handy extension to see how your site is displayed in Internet Explorer.

ViewSourceWith – An extension that primary allows you to view the source code of a site with an external application but you can also open images with other apps etc…

CSS

Aardvark – This extension can show you the attributes, classes and ids by highlighting a page element with your cursor.

Font Finder – If you ever wanted to see the css-styles used for a certain element on a website, you need this plugin.

SEO

Social Media for Firefox – Really good plugin that shows the stats of 4 social services (digg, reddit, stumbleupon, delicious) for the page you are visiting, in the status bar. Useful if you want to know whether a site you own already has been submitted to one of these services.

Niche Watch Tool – Very good plugin that provides you the technical information like backlinks, page rank, keywords strength… everything a webmaster needs to analyze his site.

KGen – This addon retrieves all words of a page and lets you know how many times they appear; interesting for SEO optimization.

Others

Greasemonkey – Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript; a Must-Have!

Dummy Lipsum – Not the most valuable plugin for Firefox – it generates a “lorem ipsum” text.

ColorZilla – Nice Addon to pick the color of a page element and see its values.

Screengrab! – A plugin that saves the entire page as image (no flash elements).

Image Zoom – Offers you a zoom in, zoom out function for pictures.

Web Developer – Good extension that adds a toolbar to your Firefox with various web developer tools, e.g. Site Validation, CSS Viewer…

Unicode Converter – Converts entities or character references into Unicode and back.

Platypus – Another great addon which lets you modify a website from your browser. In addition to that you can save your modifications as a Greasemonkey script to make them ‘permanent’!

ShowIP – A useful extension that shows you the ip of the current page in the status bar. Also it enables you to see the whois details by querying some web services.

MeasureIt – Little Firefox extension that enables you to draw a ruler across any webpage to check the width or height of a element

Most of the VCP-310 professionals have 70-291 as well as N10-003 to their credit. They do these courses while studying for their 642-901.

The market of free tracking services is full of good and bad tools. So I collected the best and most innovative tracking services that are available. They are useful for every webmaster to optimize/monetize his site and see what content is appealing to the masses.

Google Analytics is a great user tracking service because it shows you most of all important information you need about your visitors like where they from, what site referred them (and links, keywords etc…). Also it creates handy graphs to easily see how your site grows or not.

whos.amung.us does not offer a lot of statistics (just 3) but 2 very useful services. The first good one is a live-counter, which of course shows the number of current visitors and the page they are browsing on. The second tool is a “normal” graph that displays a few colored bars. The last but very cool one, is a map which allows you, in addition to see what page your visitors are browsing, to locate each user on a map.

Feedjit, originally designed for blogs, is a nice tool to study where your visitors are from, how they have been referred to your site and how they leave your site again. By the way Feedjit just exists since 3 months but already has 3 million widget impressions per week.

FireStats is a plugin for WordPress (a blogging platform). The ajax-driven startpage gives you a quick overview of whats happening on your blog. See user locations, browsers, referrer, page visits…

getClicky, an analytics tool for blogs and small sites (it costs a few dollars for bigger sites). Among the basic features and graphs, Clicky displays the user activity on a map. And beside its fully customizable dashboard it works with users that have disabled JavaScript which is not the standard.

ENQUISITE isn’t a user tracking service like FireStats or Google Analytics but it strengths are the analysis of search engines. ENQUISITE reports how users entered your site and offers a search engine ranking-analysis that gives you information about your SEO, SEM, PPC and ROI and presents you tricks’n tips to optimize your site.

If you want to have stats and graphs about your site’s feed activity, Feedburner is the service you need! It enables you to see how many people are reading your feeds and what reader they use. They also offer a nice badge which shows the number of current readers. Since Google acquired Feedburner in may 2007, PRO stats are available for free.

Peteris Krumins’ did it again! After building a Reddit clone with integrated picture previews (Reddit Media) he now coded a photoversion of digg.com – digpicz!

All he needed was the digg API and a bit code, to create a service many users were waiting for. Until now just a short announcement has been made on the official digg-blog that a picture page will be added to digg in the following weeks.. and he did it in about 7 hours!

To get more details on how Peteris build the site, see his blog.

As you may noticed, we have a small button on the right sidebar which shows the number of recent visitors. It’s a service of amung.us, called whos.amung.us. When you click on the button it used to show a list of what sub-sites your visitors are surfing on and you could see hourly, daily, monthly and yearly graphs (graphs.amung.us). At the beginning of this week they re-designed the page a bit and added a handy feature called maps.amung.us. It enables you to see where your visitors are from – on a map.

The maps have a clean design and if needed they can be customized a little. The cool thing about amung.us is that you only have to insert one of their widgets to make all of the three services work for you!

similar services: clustrmaps, gvisit, frappr

Over the last few months a lot of photo editing services launched. To name a few popular sites: Picnik, Fauxto, Phixr, picture2life. And now a new startup wants to beat’em all – FotoFlexer.

With FotoFlexer you can easily import and export pictures from social networks (Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace) and edit them on the go. It seems as if FotoFlexer combines all the great functionalities of other existing sites and bundled them into one masterpiece! I don’t want to say that desktop photo editing is dead, but it has another big competitor. Professionals will probably stick to Photoshop or GIMP however normal people can make use of this sites to edit,share and store photos with ease.

What makes FotoFlexer top the list? I tested it for a while and and I can say that it has many features I missed using other online editors! Just click ‘start flexing’, connect to e.g. your Flickr account or manually upload a picture and begin to edit your photos. You can do that by changing colors, resizing, adding effects or turning your whole image into a cartoon.

So whenever you need a heavyset photo editor, I would prefer using FotoFlexer!