WordPress for iPhone, the only iPhone app that lets you write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (2.5.1 or higher), users of all experience levels can get going in seconds.
Have you recently started a freelance business? Have you been thinking about starting one? Would you like some advice from experienced freelancers who have successfully started the same exact business as you?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, then I have some good news — starting in the next week or two, FreelanceFolder will be launching “Getting Started Guides” aimed at helping new freelancers find their footing and successfully grow their business. Each guide will focus on a specific type of freelancing, e.g. graphic design, writing, web design, and will walk the reader through every single step necessary to start a freelance business in that industry.
From creating a corporation, to getting clients, to establishing a project workflow — these how to guides explain every step in detail, and are written by expert freelancers each individual field. For example, our “How To Start A Freelance Writing Business” guide is written by Laura Spencer, an experienced freelance writer who has been successfully earning a living on her own for over 7 years.
We’ll be launching these guides individually over the next few months — starting with “How To Start A Freelance Writing Business”. The first guide will be out in the next week or two, and will sell for $10-$15.
Want to be notified when each guide is launched? Want to get a serious discount when the guides are released? Sign up for the FreelanceFolder Early Notification List below, and you’ll be the first to get discounts, information, and news 🙂
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To-do lists are great for prioritizing tasks, and writing down everything you need done, before you can forget them. You simply write down whatever you have to get done, and tick things off as you get them done.
There is always the traditional pen-and-paper to do list, but there are many free online to do lists that let you create to-do lists. Here is a list of 9 free online to-do lists. Many of these services also have mobile or iPhone versions; so you’re in touch with your to-do list all the time
Note: There are more good to-do lists out there that I may have missed. If you’ve got one in mind that’s not included here, please do tell us, in the comments. Enjoy your more productive self!
One of the most widely known online to-do list services on the internet, RememberTheMilk is one of the leaders. The service is free, but you need to sign up. Signing up takes only a few seconds, and you can quickly get to creating your to do list. RememberTheMilk has many features, such as a “task cloud” (kind of a tag cloud), and a map to locate your tasks. There is even an iPhone application available, so your to-do lists are always with you. A highly recommended tool.
Ta-da List is a project from the creators of Basecamp. Sign up takes about 10 seconds, taking you quickly to the thing that matters: creating a to-do list! Although there are not as many features in Ta-da List as RememberTheMilk has, the simplicity of Ta-da List aids in productivity.
Voo2do has a simple interface that might take some getting used to, but it does the job. Sign up takes a just few seconds. You’re able to share projects [collaboration], organize tasks by project, add tasks by email, and more… All in all, it’s a real nice to-do list application
Todoist has a very minimalistic interface. Sign up takes just a few seconds, as expected, and you can start creating a list immediately. The simple interface of Todoist gains it plus points for productivity-boosting. There are the normal features such as a calendar and mobile access. Other features include keyboard shortcuts [a nice feature]. Plus, there’s also Gmail integration, a QuickSilver plugin and other useful features.
Toodledo has a clean, simple interface. Sign up takes 31 seconds [according to the people at Toodledo]. Toodledo has all the features a to-do list normally has, but it also has a scheduler, which can schedule your time for you. Neat, isn’t it? There’s also an online task importer, which can import your tasks from many to-do list software and online lists. Then there are the collaboration tools. It’s also available on the iPhone. All these features make Toodledo a robust online to-do list.
ToSimplyDo is the most basic and direct to-do list I’ve ever seen. There’s no signing up to do whatsoever. You arrive at the homepage, and add items. That’s it. There’s nothing else to do; no knobs to play with, and this is what shoots your productivity high up… highly recommended. Since there’s no logging in required, I don’t think you’ll be able to save your lists, so remember that!
OrchestrateHQ is simple and straightforward too, like ToSimplyDo. You do not have to register: you can start creating a to-do list right away! It has a elegant Ajax based interface that allows you to move items around.
Springpads “are free online notebooks that help you manage your life. Use your springpad to keep track of notes, photos, maps, to-dos, contacts, appointments & more”. There’s a pretty straightforward sign up process, and you can get to creating your “springpads” quickly. The interface might be a little confusing at first, but the learning curve is not steep. There are “springpads” for many different jobs: nursing, job tracking, party planning, and so on.
Stikis takes on a unique approach to to-do lists. Instead of the traditional list structure, this one adopts that of a brainstorm-ed diagram. You register, and then start making stickers and arranging them around the board. Fun, as well as ensuring that work gets done
What are the odds? At roughly the same time we saw the top two user generated video sites on the Web show us a glimpse at the future:
At Google I/O, Vic showed us an HTML 5 demo of YouTube. It looks the same, but the controls are in HTML, powering the video tag. The related videos on the right hand side had a cool new feature. As you mouse over them, they would play along. Right now seeking around in video is an awful experience. With larger pipes we will be able to do iMovie style flip-throughs to find exactly what they are looking for in a video.
DailyMotion goes a step further. They announced not only a demo area but “a new R&D platform dedicated to open video formats and web standards: openvideo.dailymotion.com“. You can find 300k videos all encoded in open formats right now.
Firefox has lead the way with Ogg Theora support, but as Mark Pilgrim noted Chromium can be built with support. The question as Mark says is “Will Chrome support Theora video?!”
Let’s not kid ourselves, piranhas are out there in the murky waters, so it is a balsy move for anyone to do this, especially folks with lots of $ to go after…. but we need to blast open the doors. Here’s to the march of Open Video.
“Why doesn’t Google use GWT more?”
That is a question that I was asked maaaany a time. There are sites like Base and the old mashup editor and others…. but “why not something big like Gmail?”
It was always so tough because it wasn’t a totally fair question.
Google Wave on the other hand, had the chance to really evaluate GWT and they went with it. There was a talk at Google I/O about why, and some of the cool new features they use such as runAsync that does some incredibly smart things to lazily load code when needed (and gives you a much smaller initial download).
I don’t have much to add to the massive coverage that Wave has gotten today. I see two pieces. The one that most people focus on is how it looks and what the site does. It is very rich, and cool, and some people will try it and some will not like how it feels.
That isn’t the piece I am most excited about. Although it is great to reboot what a communication tool could be in 2009, but I am much more excited about the APIs. A lot of servers and frameworks and languages are vying for the “real time Web server” trophy. What Wave gives you is a federated implementation AND a spec to build your own stuff. At its core I see it as a great way API to let people collaborate on a shared object. That is a fantastic building block.
When I heard about it, I immediately thought about my own world of Bespin of course. From the initial prototype we had the notion of creating a collaborative social experience with code. One feature that has long been on the drawing board can be seen here:
We want to tie chat/status/microblogging content to files and even code snippets in a project. Imagine being able to highlight some code and see not only who created it and when, but also what was discussed. The social bar on the right has some of that concept. Then down below you see the timeline view that lets you go back in time and see the code change before your eyes. Maybe you want to replay the coding that a coworker did while you were out instead of staring at the diffs? This is the kind of thing that I hope we can experiment with Wave to do. We will see!
Robert Kroeger has released a nice library for local database access. The Web Storage Portability Layer nicely abstracts on top of HTML5 and Gears for database access.
The WSPL consists of a collection of classes that provide asynchronous transactional access to both Gears and HTML5 databases and can be found on Project Hosting on Google Code.
There are five basic classes:
google.wspl.Statement – A parametrizable SQL statement class
google.wspl.Transaction – Used to execute one or more Statements with ACID properties
google.wspl.ResultSet – Arrays of JavaScript hash objects, where the hash key is the table column name
google.wspl.Database – A connection to the backing database, also provides transaction support
google.wspl.DatabaseFactory – Creates the appropriate HTML5 or Gears database implementation
Also included in the distribution is a simple note-taking application with a persistent database cache built using the WSPL library. This application (along with Gmail mobile for iPhone and Android-powered devices) is an example of the cache pattern for building offline web applications. In the cache pattern, we insert a browser-local cache into the web application to break the synchronous link between user actions in the browser and server-generated responses. Instead, as shown below, we have two data flows. First, entirely local to the device, contents flow from the cache to the UI while changes made by the user update the cache. In the second flow, the cache asynchronously forwards user changes to the web server and receives updates in response.
By using this architectural pattern, a web application can made tolerant of a flaky (or even absent) network connection!
You can of course take a peak at the code to see how it works, for example:
JAVASCRIPT:
| 1 | google.wspl.DatabaseFactory.createDatabase = function(dbName, dbworkerUrl) { |
| 2 |
var dbms; |
| 3 | if (window.openDatabase) { |
| 4 | // We have HTML5 functionality. |
| 5 | dbms = new google.wspl.html5.Database(dbName); |
| 6 | } else { |
| 7 | // Try to use Google Gears. |
| 8 | var gearsDb = goog.gears.getFactory().create(‘beta.database’); |
| 9 | var wp = goog.gears.getFactory().create(‘beta.workerpool’); |
| 10 | // Note that Gears will not allow file based URLs when creating a worker. |
| 11 | dbms = new wireless.db.gears.Database(); |
| 12 | dbms.openDatabase(”, dbName, gearsDb); |
| 13 | wp.onmessage = google.bind(dbms.onMessage_, dbms); |
| 14 | |
| 15 | // Comment this line out to use the synchronous database. |
| 16 | dbms.startWorker(wp, dbworkerUrl, 0); |
| 17 | } |
| 18 | return dbms; |
| 19 | }; |
| 20 |
Nicely done. It would be great to see a version that acts as a shim and when in Gears mode manually implements the HTML5 standard API so you can write your user code to that and not a new google package.
MooTools ScrollSpy is a unique but simple MooTools plugin that listens to page scrolling and fires events based on where the user has scrolled to in the page. Now you can fire specific functionality with just a few simple parameters. David has shown us 4 examples of using ScrollSpy.
Example 1: “Top the Top”
When you scroll down a defined number of pixels, you get a “Scroll to Top” link in the lower right hand part of the screen. When you’re back at the top, ScrollSpy is directed to hide the link.
Example 2: “The Show”
When you click the link, the window scrolls to the right. During the scrolling process, ScrollSpy shows and hides content blocks based on where in the scrolling process the window is.
Example 3: “Team Colors”
This displays a different background color depending on where you are in the page.
Example 4: “Position Pointer”
This displays imagery in different positions on the page based upon where the user scrolls.
In these days of the ever-increasing competitive world of the web, time is as valuable as money. To be noticed, and to stay at the top of the game, content writers must post a lot of content on a regular basis. To keep up with time constraints, WordPress plugin authors provide an array of useful plugins that will drastically reduce the time required to write, format, and post your content.
In this article, you’ll find 10 excellent WordPress plugins intended to reduce and simplify tasks associated with blogging so that you can spend more time creating content, and less time with site administration.
Post Ideas is a basic plugin that enables you to create rough drafts of ideas and thoughts for future articles without having to make a draft of the post. This plugin helps the writer enter a draft title, description, keywords, links, and most of all, priority of the post idea. Once all the ideas are collected, the writer can pick an article to write by either priority or self-preference. This will enable you to have a web-based idea bank that sits right inside your WordPress installation.
Tidy Up is a port of HTML Tidy into WordPress. This plugin can run the HTML Tidy algorithm through all of your posts and or pages and return a proper generated report regarding the HTML code in your posts or pages. In case it contains any kind of errors, it points out to the writer where it is and how to fix it. The plugin does not stop there; it also features a database-cleaning utility that removes unnecessary data in your MySQL database.
The Pages+ plugin is very handy in case your site has many pages. The default ‘manage’ option via the Administrative Control Panel in WordPress provides very little features for managing any of your pages. Page orders, categorization, deletion, addition, and much more, can be accomplished via this awesome plugin.
Mass Post Manager helps you easily manage existing posts. This plugin enables you to manipulate the categories and comments related to existing posts. This is an essential plugin to have in case you need to re-allocate categories of your posts, or manage the comments in the same posts, which is quite tedious via normal WordPress Administration Panel.
Attachment List is a simple plugin that spices up those boring old icons that appear on the attachments of a post. You can use this plugin to replace the default icon used by WordPress and replace it with a set of icons, available free-to-use from FAMFAMFAM.com.
Survey Gizmo is a premium plugin that has a free version. This plugin is for creating, running, and managing survey results within the WordPress interface. The plugin also allows you to generate printable reports of your results.
Tweetable Twitter is a great plugin if you use Twitter. Tweetable Twitter allows the user to integrate Twitter into your WordPress blog and automatically Tweets the latest post that you publish. The automatic Tweeting can also be configured to choose the URL shortening service of your choice.
Secure Files is a plugin that aims to solve the problem faced by Registered Only plugin users. The latter plugin allows only Registered users on a particular website to view the content in it, whereas guests can’t see anything at all. Although this protects the content of your database – other files, such as images and CSS files, aren’t protected. The Secure Files plugin is developed to take care of that issue. This plugin allows users to create a directory outside of the root directory for file uploads and downloads. This is an essential plugin to have for multi-author blogs.
SmartVideoPlus is a plugin that will completely change your simple blog layout to a full-blown video website! Watch the demo of this awesome plugin here.
Sticky Post is an impressive plugin that adds the specified post or article on top of each post in the website, without having to modify the current theme that the site uses. This is quite useful, if you want to grab the visitors’ attention with an old, but still is important, blog post.
Spell Check Rex is an Open Source Spell Checker Application. It’s a Free spell checking program, written in PHP and MySQL, that can be installed on your website to regularly monitor and report on spelling mistakes. This should be particularly important for e-commerce sites, sites with dynamic content, and generally for people who want their sites to present positively.
It supports frame-enabled websites & directories, pages can be excluded. This Free Application spiders the site it is installed on and generate reports. These reports are then provided both on-screen and via a download-able report.
Admin panel has multilingual support but Spell Check Rex can only spell check English written websites.
Everyone loves the Gmail and Facebook inline chat modules. This Gmail/Facebook Style jQuery Chat Module enables you to seamlessly integrate Gmail/Facebook style chat into your existing website.
You can see the chat box displays at the bottom right hand corner of the screen. You can keep the chat boxes open and stores state (data) even when pages are browsed/refreshed. It will display “Sent at…” after 3 minutes of inactivity. You can also minimize and close chat boxes easily.
This chat script can be used for free under LGPL-style license for non-commercial purposes. However, you need to purchase a license for commercial purposes.
