Free and Useful Online Resources for Designers and Developers » Blogging

5 Websites & Tools Bloggers Should Know About

Umar Anjum — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:59:39 +0000

While the job is interesting and one gets to discover the latest about the Internet, blogging is no easy task. “Time is money” could not be any truer for bloggers; impossible deadlines put us under harsh time constraints. Due to this constraint, bloggers are always actively on the lookout for the next great tool that can help us cut back on the time it takes to write our articles/reviews.

Bloggers who run their own website, on the other hand, are not under any critical deadlines – their worries are of a different nature. Taking constant care of their website and monitoring it is an absolute must for them; if a site owner’s website unexpectedly goes down, his/her income will be negatively affected.

Therefore one way or the other, all bloggers have problems whether they are self-employed, freelancing, or fulltime employed. They need all the help they can get.

Today we present to our fellow bloggers five tools available on the internet which will help them in one way or the other. We hope you all find the following tools as helpful as we did.

You are welcome to share if you know more useful tools which our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well.

1. DomainTools

For somebody who plans to start out his/her own website, the first most important step is to come up with a great name. Once the great name has been thought of, one needs to check its availability. DomainTools is a free website that does both things. Firstly it can suggest various names to a user by taking as input a keyword. Secondly it shows us which domain extensions (COM, NET, etc.) is the site name available. If a user wishes, he/she can buy and register the domain name right from the site. In this way, DomainTools eventually saves us a lot of time in the process of naming our website.

2. WhoisLookup/WhoisApplication

WhoisLookup is a freeware application less than 100KB in size. The EXE file is downloaded and can be run without any installation. In the program we can enter the URL of a site and get its Whois information which shows us the site’s various attributes such as its registrar’s information, the location of the site, and the details of its administrator. Whois specifics can help out a great deal when trying to determine which website to blog about. To some extent, it can also show us whether or not the site’s claimed location matches its actual location; this helps us judge the trueness of the website’s credentials.

3. dnspchecker

This nifty little freeware is about 3MB to download and is helpful in determining the status of a website. It is compatible with Linux and Windows operating systems. After we enter a URL into the program, it uses ping command to see if the DNS is live. In other words you can see if a site is up or not. A successful message is show each time the site if up; if the site is down or a valid response could not be received then it automatically checks the site every 60 seconds. This way we do not have to recheck the status of the site each minute (because it is automatically being done for us). To have it not interfere with our work, the program can be minimized to the System Tray and gives an alert when DNS is propagated.

4. Observu

dnschecker can only help you if you have it installed on your system. If you are using a computer on which you do not have the privilege to install new programs and you would like to check the status of your websites, the only way that comes to mind is by actually visiting the website in your internet browser. If the number of websites is more than one then the process could be considerably time consuming. Observu is a free website that lets us register for a free account and enter an unlimited number of websites to be automatically monitored. If any one of them goes down, we are immediately emailed of its negative status. There is no limit to the number of sites we want monitored. Observu can be helpful not only for site owners but also for bloggers who have reviewed a website and want to stay informed of its status. For instance John, a blogger, blogs about www.XYZABC123.com and he is emailed of its negative status the next month; upon receiving the notification, John can updates his previous review and add a note saying that the site is currently experiencing problems and is down. Such responsibility can go a long way and earn loyal readers.

5. BlogDesk

Wordpress is a blogging platform used by many bloggers. Other widely used platforms are MovableType, Drupal, Serendipity and ExpressionEngine. To blog in these platforms, we open up our internet browser window, log into our blogging Dashboard and get started. With the latest platforms we can save our work as we go along but having the data secure on our hard drive is something that most bloggers find comfortable. Also while typing on these platforms, one has to go through special means while inserting hyperlinks and pictures. BlogDesk is a 4MB freeware program that eliminates all the problems associated with typing our blogs on these platforms. It is a desktop application that enables us to type up our blog offline with ease. When we want to publish the article, we can simply blog from BlogDesk directly. The abovementioned blogging platforms are supported by the program. But before you go using it, make sure its option is enabled in the online settings of your blogging platform.

Brought To You By

Do you want to advertise here? Click to get more info…

15 Most Popular Free Software I Am Thankful For

AN Jay — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:38:01 +0000

Today, we are going to say big Thank You to everyone who support us, appreciate us, love us and always be there for us when we need them. So, how can we forget those that makes our computer life easier and did the tremendous work for us. They delivered us those applications/softwares that help us to get the routine work done for our daily use. There are many that we can not count and list down exactly but we are tried to make a list of 15 Most Popular Free Software I Am Thankful For. And Yes! Happy Thanksgiving all of you too…

You are welcome to share other software you would thankful for and that made your life easier. . Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

WordPress

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

phpBB

With a large and highly customisable set of key features coupled with a standards compliant interface, phpBB will grow with, and complement your website. With millions of installations worldwide, it is no wonder phpBB is one of the most popular ways to create and support a community.

Firefox

Firefox 3.5 sets the pace with dozens of new features, including the smart location bar, one-click bookmarking and blindingly fast performance. Avoid online scams, unsafe transactions and forgeries with simple site identity. View Web pages faster, using less of your computer’s memory.

Drupal

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.

Gimp

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a community developed, Linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need – a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more.

Wine

Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available.

FileZilla

FileZilla is a cross-platform graphical FTP, FTPS and SFTP client a lot of features, supporting Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and more. FileZilla Server is a reliable FTP server for Windows. It has a powerful Site Manager and transfer queue and drag & drop support.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment. This is based on a powerful editing component Scintilla, Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. By optimizing as many routines as possible without losing user friendliness, Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment.

TightVNC

TightVNC is a free remote control software package. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer.This is a cross-platform, available for Windows and Unix, compatible with other VNC software.

Blender

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems. It includes tools for modeling – fast subdivision surface and polygon tools, multi-resolution mesh sculpting, metaballs, NURBS, vector fonts, and curves; uv mapping; shaders and texturing – both paint based and node based; ik and fk animation tools with rigging, constraints, skinning, morph targets, drivers, deformers, and modifiers; simulation tools including hard bodies, soft body, cloth, and fluids; and particle systems including hair. Blender has integrated rendering with both its native renderer and the raytracer Yafray as well supporting many external renderers; and python based scripting.

Audacity

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files, cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together etc.

VideoLAN

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

BitTorrent

BitTorrent 6 is a client that transfers large videos, audios or softwares in a faster and cheaper way. A ‘client’ in this case is a computer program that follows the rules of a protocol. The BitTorrent 6 client will give you access to the world of content on the protocol in a lightweight, fast and reliable package.

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Mozilla Firefox As An Open Source Faster, Safer And Smarter Web Browser

Firefox 3 sets the pace with dozens of new features, including the smart location bar, one-click bookmarking and blindingly fast performance. Avoid online scams, unsafe transactions and forgeries with simple site identity. View Web pages faster, using less of your computer’s memory.

Brought To You By

Do you want to advertise here? Click to get more info…

80+ High Quality And Useful Resources For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web In October

AN Jay — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:41:21 +0000

We are always in search of great free resources, tips, tricks, etc. for our readers. Every day we work hard to find new resources and inspiration for designers like you. Today, we have another great post, “Discover the Best of the Web” on SmashingApps. In this, we made a list of 80+ High Quality And Useful Resources For Designers. We obviously cannot cover all the best from the web, but we have tried to cover as much as possible.

You are welcome to share if you know more best of the web in the month of October which our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

Design Tips, Tricks and Tutorial
”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

50+ High Quality Icon Design Tutorials (Part 2)

55 Terrific Cinema 4D Tutorials and Techniques

Create a Realistic Looking Nokia 5800 in 3ds Max

How to Create Roads and Rail Tracks on a Path

40 Adobe Illustrator Text Effect Tutorials

A Beginners Guide to Digital Textile Printing

Create a Transparent Text Effect with Fresh Grass Texture and Custom Brushset

75 PSD to HTML Resources for Web Designers

The Ultimate Round-Up of Print Design Tutorials

Design A Killer Fashion Model Poster

How to Create Smoky Brushes and Type In Illustrator CS4

50 Hot New Tutorials From Around The Web

45+ Adobe Illustrator Tutorials for Creating Cartoon Character Illustrations

Design a Minimal and Modern Portfolio Layout with Photoshop

How to Create an Icon in Illustrator

30 Advanced Photoshop Tutorials for Gamers

Blog Headers: 20 Great Examples and Best Practices

Build a Slick Rich User Interface in Photoshop

40 Quality Photoshop UI Design Tutorials

Artwork, Digital Photography and Inspiration

”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

50 Awe-Inspiring Underwater Photos

21 Adorable Pieces Of Manga Art

100+ Clean, Simple and Minimalist Website Designs

15 Fabulous Examples of Origami Inspired logo Designs

39 Astonishing Examples of 3D Typography

35 Smart Logos With Second Thought To Make You look Twice

11 Amazing Photo Manipulated and Digital Art Wallpapers

A Showcase of 35 Beautiful Typographical Illustrations

40 Beautiful HDR Pictures You Would be Amazed

Trends in Pricing Page Design and Layout

14 Bold and Colorful Print Ads from Various Brands

44 Examples of Nature Inspired Website Designs

35 Creative Twitter User Profile Designs

Showcase Of Beautiful Textured Web Designs

Weekly Vector Inspiration #40

23 Eco Friendly Sites that are Using WordPress

30 Superb Examples of Infographic Maps

Website Design Showcase Of 21 Popular Brands

30 Jaw Dropping 3D Character Creations

45 Inspiring Navigation Menus That You Must See

15 Inspirational Single-Page Websites

10 Unforgettable Interactive and Inspirational Business Cards

105 People Photo Manipulation Works You Will Really Marvel

40+ Beautiful Fish Inspired Logos

25 Absolutely Magnificant Landscape Photo Manipulation

Showcase of Social Networking Websites

15 Elegant Cartoon Wallpapers You Can Not Miss

40 Striking Examples of Graffiti Art

24 Awesome Single Page Portfolio Designs

80+ Photo Manipulations Art to Ignite Your Creativity

Javascript and Ajax

How to Build a Simple Content Slider jQuery Plugin

20 Simple jQuery Tricks

35 Fresh and Useful jQuery Plugins

Curtains Opening Animation with jQuery

xHTML and CSS
”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

Mastering CSS Coding: Getting Started

The Blueprint CSS Framework – Tutorials, How-to Guides and Tools

Purely CSS – Faking Minimum Margins

Resources

90’s Technology

Most Useful Collection of Premium 3d models

1000+ High Quality Free Grunge Textures, Icons, Brushes and Fonts

45 Beautiful Dual-Screen Wallpapers

30 Stunning Fonts To Enhance Your Designs

Collection of 8 Free and Exceptional Icon Sets

80 Stunning Background Patterns For Your Websites

9 Open Source Microblogging Applications

500+ Free Download High Quality Photoshop PSD Files For Designers

24 High Quality Free And Stunning Symbol Fonts

50 Surprisingly Amazing Themes for Blogger

40 Amazing Photoshop Brush Directories and Collections

Miscellaneous Articles

20 Best Wordpress Typography Plugins To Enhance Readability

How to Properly Prepare a Guest Post in 5 Simple Steps

5 Highly Applicable, Yet Easily Overlooked Features in Photoshop

The History and Evolution of Social Media

20 Useful & Nicely Designed Web Applications

24 Useful Tutorials on Creating Photoshop Brushes

30+ Super Secret OS X Features and Shortcuts

15 Most Important Wordpress Plugins To Help You Fight Spam

Guide to a Successful Blog Post

8 Powerful Wordpress Plugins You Probably Don’t Use But Should

9 OpenSource URL shortening apps to make your own services

7 Key Principles That Make A Web Design Look Good

Windows Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows 7

20 Handy Photoshop Tips For a Faster Workflow

10 Useful WordPress Coding Techniques

Brought To You By

Do you want to advertise here? Click to get more info…

Present.ly Allows Secure And Private Microblogging For Your Business

AN Jay — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:23:02 +0000

Present.ly allows individuals to post short, frequent updates that are tracked or “followed” by others. Unlike Twitter, Present.ly provides a secure and private way to share updates among members of a company, without them being visible to the outside world.

You can keep your conversations focused by creating Groups for each project or topic of discussion. Users receive messages that are relevant to the topic at hand and are free to move between conversations as desired.

With Present.ly, it’s easy to share images, documents, video, and audioclips with your colleagues. Whether you’re looking for quick feedback on a new design mockup or sending out new policy documents for human resources, it has never been easier to rapidly share and communicate media in your company.

You don’t need a computer at the ready to touch base with your team. Present.ly provides multiple interfaces that let you keep in touch wherever you are. You can use it from your computer, your mobile phone, or most any device capable of connecting to the internet.

Brought To You By

Do you want to advertise here? Click to get more info…

65+ Must See Resources Especially For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web In September

AN Jay — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:01:14 +0000

We are always in search of great free resources, tips, tricks, etc. for our readers. Every day we work hard to find new resources and inspiration for designers like you. Today, we have another great post, “Discover the Best of the Web” on SmashingApps. In this, we made a list of 65+ Must See Resources Especially For Designers. We obviously cannot cover all the best from the web, but we have tried to cover as much as possible.

You are welcome to share if you know more best of the web in the month of September which our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

You may be interested in these older posts
10 Stunning Photos That Look Like They are Photoshopped But Are Not
23 Awesome Photos That Look Like They’re Photoshopped But Are Not
21 Brilliant Photos That Look Like They’re Photoshopped But Are Not
60+ Incredible Tutorials And Resources Collections For Designers
50+ Creative Masterpieces Of Logo Designs Using Gradient Effects
21 Stunning Examples Of Creatively Done Stop Motion Animations
15 Most Useful & Free Collection Of Ready-To-Use Design Freebies
43 Really Useful Photoshop Tutorials For Excellent 3d Effects
17 Mind-Blowing Digital Painting Tutorials Of Beautiful Girls
31 Masterpieces Of Creative And Clever Advertising Concepts
21 Really Stunning Photoshopped Photos For Creative Inspiration
43 Of The Extremely Creative Wonders Of Macro Photography
27 Best Places You Should Visit To Get Incredible Web Design Inspiration!
21 Extremely Vibrant And Creative Advertisements With Animals
39 Masterpieces Of Creative Advertisements
17 Digital Image Illustration Which You Probably Never Seen Before!
15 Digital Photo Manipulation From Flickr To Get Inspiration
23 Awesome Photos That Look Like They’re Photoshopped But Are Not

56 Absolutely Brilliant and Intriguing Photoshop Video Tutorials

45 Tutorials for Learning Pixelmator

27 Excellent Digital Photography Tutorials

40 Useful Photoshop Tutorials for Photo Manipulation

10 Wonderful Letterpress Type Tutorials

6 Different Ways to Make Your Text and Images Glow [Tutorials]

11 Fascinating and Educational Tutorials Teaching You How to Produce Better Photo Effects

How to Effectively Use Contrast, Auto Levels, and Batch Processing

50+ Most Amazing Adobe After Effects Tutorials You Need to Learn

20+ Car Pimping and Tuning Photoshop Tutorials

15 Of The Best Character Illustration Tutorials Online

Photoshop Tutorials You Do Not Want to Miss

Urban Art Tutorial in Photoshop and Illustrator

Top Places to Find Quality Illustrator Tutorials Online

Artwork, Digital Photography and Inspiration

Typographic Portraits That Are Absolutely Beautiful

100 Artworks from the Top 20 Designers in The Middle East and Africa

23 Colorful And Smart Examples Of Beautiful Web Designs

70 Fresh and Inspirational Blog Designs

Stunning illustrated typography on dark backgrounds

Best of Best WordPress 404 Error Page Designs

20 Amazing Examples of Vector Artwork

Website Design: Some of the most uniquely designed E-commerce websites

40 Gorgeous Fantasy Wallpapers to Spice Up your Laptop

40 Creative and Inspiring Website Backgrounds Techniques

13 Striking Digital illustrations of Horror Girls by Yoshitaka Kawakami

CSS: Design Out Of The Box

40 Excellent Examples of Interior Designs Rendered in 3D Max

25 Examples of Web 2.0 and Traditional Design Rules Coming Together

33 Creative and Beautiful Logos

50 Inspiring Web Application and Service Web Site Designs

50 Beautiful & Unique Twitter Profile Designs

30 Powerful and Inspiring Street Fighter Characters Artworks

50 Websites (and More) for Your Design Inspiration

20 Creative Illustration Advertisements from behance

40 Breathtaking & Creative Logo Designs Just to Inspire

TOP 35 Grunge Websites

Amazing Character Designs: 75 Brilliant Examples

25 Inspiring Examples of Abstract Vector Design

15 Mind Blowing Dragons Illustrations and Artworks

Javascript and Ajax

40 Super-Neat JavaScript Plugins

25 Useful jQuery Tooltip Plugins and Tutorials

35+ Create Amazing Image Effects and Sliders with These Awesome jQuery Plugins

10 Easy jQuery Tricks for Designers

Create a photorealistic web layout – CSS/XHTML available

CSS Wishlist: New Ideas, Debates and Solutions

51 Form Element Resources and Tutorials Using CSS And Javascript

30 CSS Best Practices for Beginners

Resources
”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

60+ Totally Free Rusted Metal Textures for Designers

460 Free High Quality Icons For Web Designers

60 High Quality Photoshop PSD Files For Designers

Massive Collection of Stunning Photoshop Actions

27 Best WebSites to Download Free Seamless Patterns

Fresh Free High-Quality Icon Sets

Style Switchers Showcase and Resources

76 Dirty, Extreme And Creative Free Grunge Fonts

99 High-Quality Free (X)HTML/CSS Templates

Five Free Tools for Multi-Monitor Computer Set-Ups

14 Best Online Typography Tools for Web Designers

16 Free “Premium Quality” Wordpress Magazine Themes

13 Excellent Firefox Add-Ons That Are Absolutely Useful

49 Amazing Resources for Free Vector Graphics

Miscellaneous Articles

20+ Powerful Wordpress Security Plugins and Some Tips and Tricks

10 Revealing Infographics about the Web

30 Incredibly Useful WordPress Hacks

The Only SEO Tools You’ll Ever Need

The Difference Between Art and Design

Must See SEO Guide for All WordPress Bloggers

Brought To You By

Do you want to advertise here? Click to get more info…

13 Simply Useful Wordpress Plugins That Can Make Lives Easier

AN Jay — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:57:51 +0000

This is another post about useful wordpress plugins. There are hundreds of wordpress plugins available on the internet. Some of them are very useful and some of them are only for sake of existence. But itâ€™s totally up to you that how you can make your wordpress blog more strong and powerful using different plugins to give your blog readers an amazing and wonderful experience.

In this post, I tried to list down 13 Simply Useful Wordpress Plugins That Can Make Lives Easier. This list has few of the unlimited wordpress plugins introduction. I hope you will enjoy this.

You are welcome to share if you know and want to share more Useful Wordpress Plugins That Probably Are Essential and our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

You may be interested in these older posts
17 Really Useful Wordpress Plugins That Probably Are Essential
13 Wordpress Plugins You Probably Donâ€™t Use But Should
11 Most Popular Cross-Platform And Free Softwares
13 Most Useful Free Scripts That You Should Know
13 Simplest Free Web Tools That Are Absolutely Useful
5 Useful And Free Photo Viewers For Your Mac OS X
7 New And Useful Free Sites With Unique File Hosting Features
11 Premium But Free And Useful Web Apps For Designers
31 Power Tools For Twitter Lovers To Make Lives Easier
13 Premium-Like Wordpress Themes That Are Free And Stunning
13 Simple And Elegant Free Wordpress Themes
The 5 Best Free File Hosting Services To Store Your Files
7 New And Useful Free Sites With Unique File Hosting Features

Wordpress Download Monitor

Download Monitor 3 is upon us. Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links.

Plugin Manager

Plugin Manager lets you to view, download and install plugins from wordpress.org from an AJAX’ed interface, instead of manually downloading, extracting and uploading each plugin.

Google Analytics for WordPress

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin.

Search Everything

Search Everything increases the ability of the default Wordpress Search, options included Search Every Page, Search Every Tag, Search Every Category, Search non-password protected pages only, Search Every Comment and much more…

Advertising Manager

This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your Wordpress blog. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Unsupported ad networks can be used as well.

Featured Content Gallery

Featured Content Gallery creates an automated, fully customizable rotating image gallery anywhere within your WordPress site. Choose your images and display categories, pages or posts with custom overlay text and a thumbnail carousel. Custom options include gallery size, color, style and more.

Subscribe2

Subscribe2 provides a comprehensive subscription management and email notification system for WordPress blogs that sends email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog.

Wordpress Automatic upgrade

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

TweetMeme Button

The TweetMeme button easily allows your blog to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been retweeted throughout twitter.

BuySellAds Wordpress Plugin

This simple plugin helps you easily integrate your BuySellAds zones and includes anti-AdBlock meaures to prevent AdBlock (and similar software) from blocking the advertisement.

Social Bookmarking for WordPress

Sociable is a plugin which adds social media buttons to your posts, and does so easily, and beautifully.Â It will automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites.

User Community

A plugin to build user communities all around WordPress, mainly itâ€™s around having a well integrated profiles system. This plugin will provide all needed functions and widgets to make it easy and flexible the ways to show all information about a user. Also, there is some user privacy settings to permit which information to show in the profile page.

Pretty Link

You can shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. Unlike other link shrinking services like tinyurl, budurl, and bit.ly, this plugin allows you to create shortlinks coming from your own domain! Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host.

Brought To You By

Do you want to advertise here? Click to get more info…

17 Creative Collection Of Inspirational Resources For Designers

AN Jay — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:14:52 +0000

As a designer, all of us are continuously searching for effective inspiration because getting an idea and inspiration is sometimes really hard and when you are planning to start your new web design project and you are curiously finding for a mind blowing web design inspiration so you donâ€™t want to spend too much time and want to get start something as soon as you can. But most of the time, your mouse is not moving around as you want or your hand is not in your creative control or maybe when you are just tired and do not have creative mood to work. So if you want to get fresh your creative man or come up with some creative web design ideas or just need to motivate and inspire yourself with current design trends, we are today listing down 17 Creative Collection Of Inspirational Resources For Designers. This list is not long in numbers but I promise you that when you start browsing them in details it will must boost your creative design ideas professionally and motivate you for to design your project in such a way that people will never forget that you have made it!

You are welcome to share if you know more resources and collection to get inspired with current design trend that our readers/viewers may like.Â Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

You may be interested in these older posts
43 Really Useful Photoshop Tutorials For Excellent 3d Effects
17 Mind-Blowing Digital Painting Tutorials Of Beautiful Girls
31 Masterpieces Of Creative And Clever Advertising Concepts
23 Magical Photographs To Believe That Are Not Photoshopped
13 Premium-Like Wordpress Themes That Are Free And Stunning
21 Really Stunning Photoshopped Photos For Creative Inspiration
43 Of The Extremely Creative Wonders Of Macro Photography
27 Best Places You Should Visit To Get Incredible Web Design Inspiration!
13 Simple And Elegant Free Wordpress Themes
21 Extremely Vibrant And Creative Advertisements With Animals
39 Masterpieces Of Creative Advertisements
17 Digital Image Illustration Which You Probably Never Seen Before!
15 Digital Photo Manipulation From Flickr To Get Inspiration
23 Awesome Photos That Look Like Theyâ€™re Photoshopped But Are Not

25+ Most Creative and Stunning Photo Manipulations

100 (Really) Creative Business Cards

25 Flourish Designs

20 Beautiful Examples of Photoshopped Smoke Art and Technique Tutorials

25 Unique uses of WordPress as CMS

40 Useful and Creative Infographics

35 Examples Of Masterful Lighting Effects In Web Design

Totally Awesome Joker Collection

20 Stunning Panoramic Landscapes

21 Colorful Artwork Of Character Design To Grab Your Attention

42 Amazing Resources for Inspirational Typography

50 Excellent Circular Logos

25 Great Examples of Using Gradient Effects in Web Designs

60 Beautiful Fractals Created with Apophysis:Part 1

30 Untypical WordPress Sites

25 of the Best Websites for Educational Institutions

50 Inspirational Web Design Blogs

Brought To You By

Do you want to advertise here? Click to get more info…

21 Premium-Like Free Photoblog Themes For Wordpress

AN Jay — Sun, 10 May 2009 09:44:13 +0000

Few days ago, we have been requested to list down some beautiful photoblog themes for wordpress. Today, we are going to deliver the most beautiful collection of photoblog themes for wordpress. This is not the long list with all the available wordpress themes on the internet but this is an exclusive collection of free photoblog wordpress themes that are nice, simple and elegant looking and you may consider any of these themes as per your needÂ if you are searching for your photoblog.

You are welcome to share more wordpress themes for photoblogs which our readers may like.Â Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings atÂ smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

PhotographerDream Wordpress Theme

PhotographerDream Wordpress Theme was build specially for photographers. Right from the main page visitor will see photographer shots. On the photo page image pan is used, so if the image is extra large user will drag it to view every pixel. Your blog visitors can also press control and drag photo to zoom the image.

AutoFocus

AutoFocus is a Wordpress theme specifically for photographers looking for a simple and elegant way to display their workÂ online.

Grain Theme for WordPress

Grain Theme for WordPress is a fixed-width photoblog theme for WordPress 2.3+. To use it you have to additionally install the Yapb plugin; Recommended versions are 1.9 or newer. Grain comes with an administrative backend and relies heavily on CSS for itâ€™s styling. It uses a mosaic style overview page, has archives, can display exif data, browse to random photos etc.

Fotofolio

Fotofolio is a free wordpress template designed for easy creation online portfolio for Visual Workers; Photography, Graphic Design, Manga, Architect, etc.

Wordpress Theme – Photo Blog

Wordpress Theme – Photo Blog is a simple Wordpress theme. No widget and fix width. Huh! Important here itâ€™s simple, clean and easy to modify.

Wp Foto theme

Wp Foto theme is single layout theme designed for photo blogger. It uses custom fields for displaying thumbnail in home page, archive page, category and tag page.

Sharpfolio

Sharpfolio is a WordPress theme designed to enable Web Designers, Graphic Designers, Photographers, Motion Designers, Artists or any creative professional to showcase their work in a simple, clean, beautiful portfolio.

The Unstandard

The Unstandard is a split two / three column WordPress 2.6 or 2.7+ compatible theme. The home and archive index pages utilize photos rather than text. The latest update is completely optimized and stripped of any unnecessary code allowing for complete customization

Fotolog WP theme

Fotolog WP theme for photoblog is suitable for those who have huge interest in photography but have no specific template to showcase their high quality photos with wide dimension. It has 1 column, showing 1 photo for each page and showing maximum 800px width photo on main page (can be modified). Previous photo and next photo link on top and bottom of each page, this will help for better/faster navigation.

PhotoBlog Theme for WordPress

PhotoBlog Theme for WordPress uses the jQuery JavaScript-Framework, which has been included with the standard WordPress installation since version 2.1. The plugin uses the standard JS that is part of WordPress, meaning that it does not need to be installed separately. The decision to use jQuery was made on account of its very small file size (20KB)

Free Photo Gallery

Free Photo Gallery is a perfect theme for those photo bloggers who want to display bigger sized images. The simple web page has links to other pages like About and other images and comment section below the image.

Reflection

Reflection is a simple, clean and elegant theme for running your photoblog using WordPress.

Photoblog Dark Portfolio Wordpress Theme

Photoblog Dark Portfolio Wordpress Theme is ajax content sliderDark style, online portfolio premium wordpress theme.

Grace

Grace is a stylish, minimalistic photoblog theme for WordPress. Graceâ€™s muted color scheme and big frame puts your photos right at the center of the blog making colors seem even more vibrant and beautifully complementing those in black and white.

iQ2 is a WordPress photoblog

iQ2 is a WordPress photoblog theme that fully integrates with the PhotoQ Photoblog Plugin. The main features of the theme consists Fixed width, Fully widget compatible, Built-in EXIF support etc.

Ascari

Ascari is a very simple theme so it is perfect for portfolios of any kind. This will also post a coming soon image if you donâ€™t post a image yourself to keep the theme looking professional.

Spotless

Spotless is a Wordpress Theme designed specifically to be used for Photoblogs.Â This is valid XHTML and CSS wordpress them. This is the most simplest free wordpress photoblog theme of its kind.

Linquist

Linquist is a simple, portfolio oriented theme, without the usual blogging garbage. Inspired by and partially based on the fantastic Sharpfolio theme.

WP Pix Free Theme

WP Pix Free Theme is not just another WordPress theme, it’s more to it than meet the eye â€” it’s a real photoblog/portfolio.

Photo-Biyori

Photo-Biyori is a simple yet beautiful wordpress theme that can generate thumbnail automatically. This is widget ready theme with default picture size 500px.

Viewport Free Wordpress ThemeÂ

Viewport Free Wordpress Theme is a 1 column grey photoblog Wordpress Theme. This is very beautiful theme having attractive navigational structure for images.

Brought To You By

Do you want to advertise here? Click to get more info…

Eight Most Useful And Robust Twitter Tools

AN Jay — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:26:05 +0000

As we all know Twitter is a rapidly growing micro-blogging service in these days. No doubt, It’s a great fun to share information or talk with your friends and the powerful way to spread the word as much as possible. For this reason, there are too many free twitter tools available that are offering you hassle free and simple way to tweet. In this post, we are listing down Eight Most Useful And Robust Twitter Tools that are free and absolutely useful. Whether you are designer, developer, office worker, manager, supervisor, student, home user, etc. We have tried to add something interesting for everyone. Most of them are not very well-known, but they are really amazing in respect to their features. Just take a look at them and share your thought here. If you like this post so please spread the word as much possible via twitter.

You are welcome if you want to share more twitter tools that we have missed here and you think our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application, currently in public beta, that looks to capture the abundance of social media and display it in a unique columned user interface. This is a realtime application that allows users to monitor that information in a single concise view. TweetDeck currently integrates services from Twitter, Twitscoop, 12seconds, Stocktwits and now Facebook.

twhirl

twhirl is a desktop client for the Twitter microblogging service. Most of the features available on the Twitter website are accessible through twhirl, too.It displays notifications for new messages and can also shorten long URLs. You can record a video on Seesmic, and share it on twitter immediately and much more…

twitterfeed

Twitterfeed is a free service that will automatically tweet any post directly via your rss feed on twitter that you publish on your blog.

Tweetburner

Tweetburner is the webservice that lets you shorten URLs, post them to Twitter and follow statistics about them. Simply, Tweetburner lets you track what happens with the links you share on Twitter.

DestroyTwitter

DestroyTwitter is a compact though robust Twitter application built to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux using Adobe AIR. It consists of a series of canvases that constantly update to keep tweets up-to-date using notifications that appear when a new tweet arrives. DestroyTwitter uses a minimal amount of memory compared to its AIR-based alternatives without sacrificing functionality and performance. As a result, it can easily run in the background as an automated process.

TwitterFon

TwitterFon is a simple, clean, easy to use, and super fast Twitter client for your iPhone and iPod Touch. TwitterFon is focused on 80% of your task of Twitter such as check friends/replies timeline, check direct messages, send a reply and/or a direct message, and search. It also focused on easy to use. It has very clean user interface, very fast response and scrolling.

TwitterGadget

TwitterGadget is a clean, robust, web 2.0 style client for Twitter.com, designed to submit status updates to Twitter via your iGoogle homepage or Gmail Account. TwitterGadget is completely AJAX based, meaning, at the user-specified refresh interval, only the status update content is refreshed in-line, on the gadget page. This means reduced bandwidth utilization between you and Twitter.com, while providing for a more user-friendly experience.

HootSuite

HootSuite is the ultimate Twitter toolbox. With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success. HootSuite lets you manage your entire Twitter experience from one easy-to-use interface.

Brought To You By

Do you want to advertise here? Click to get more info…

40+ Must-See Resources And Inspirational Collections For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web In March

AN Jay — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:01:22 +0000

We are always in search of great free resources, tips, tricks, etc. for our readers. Every day we work hard to find new resources and inspiration for designers like you. Today, we have another great post, “Discover the Best of the Web” on SmashingApps. In this, we made a list of 40+ Must-See Resources And Inspirational Collections For Designers. We obviously cannot cover all the best from the web, but we have tried to cover as much as possible.

You are welcome to share if you know more best of the web in the month of March which our readers/viewers may like.Â Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.

You may be interested in these older posts
5 Useful And Free Photo Viewers For Your Mac OS X
31 Masterpieces Of Creative And Clever Advertising Concepts
23 Magical Photographs To Believe That Are Not Photoshopped
13 Premium-Like Wordpress Themes That Are Free And Stunning
21 Really Stunning Photoshopped Photos For Creative Inspiration
17 Mind-Blowing Digital Painting Tutorials Of Beautiful Girls
43 Of The Extremely Creative Wonders Of Macro Photography
27 Best Places You Should Visit To Get Incredible Web Design Inspiration!
13 Simple And Elegant Free Wordpress Themes
21 Extremely Vibrant And Creative Advertisements With Animals
39 Masterpieces Of Creative Advertisements
17 Digital Image Illustration Which You Probably Never Seen Before!
15 Digital Photo Manipulation From Flickr To Get Inspiration
23 Awesome Photos That Look Like Theyâ€™re Photoshopped But Are Not

20 Beautiful Photoshop Montage Tutorials

40 Logo Design Tutorials

30+ Photoshop Tutorials in Creating Amazing Posters

Post Production Tutorial

50 Stunning Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials

Create A Cute Panda Bear Face Icon

40+ High Quality Adobe Fireworks Tutorials, Resources & PNG Files

15 Tutorials for Recreating Authentic Photo Effects

RocknRolla Style Twitter Icon Tutorial

25 Photoshop Tutorials for Creating that Perfect Web Page Design

Use type as a creative effect in Adobe Photoshop

How to Create Super-Malleable Effects with Colorful Lines

Create An Amazing Diamond Advertisement Poster in Photoshop

44 Must Learn Web Design Layout Tutorials in Photoshop

Artwork, Digital Photography and Inspiration
”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

40 Excellent Logos Created with Helvetica

Bizarre Surreal and Dark Art Pictures

50 Stunningly Creative Interactive Flash Websites

15 Beautiful Typography Inspired Websites

50 Brilliantly Photoshopped Movie Posters

26 Floral Websites in Full Bloom

25 Beautifully Colorful Websites – Part 4

15 Powerful Military Photographs

30+ Excellent & Inspirational Digital Paintings

25 Impressive and Inspirational Dark CSS Web Designs

Designing Drop-Down Menus: Examples and Best Practices

Cartoon Websites and Characters

Javascript and Ajax

25 Powerful and Useful jQuery Tutorials for Developers and Designers

70 New, Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

10 Rare HTML Tags You Really Should Know

20 Useful CSS Tips For BeginnersÂ

50 Excellent Image Galleries You Can Use Today

A Huge Compilation Of 60 Free Illustrator Brushes

10 Free Grunge Photoshop Textures

The Ultimate List Of Sources For Free Background Patterns

10 Must Have Firefox Plugins For All Bloggers

30 Photoshop Actions for Touch Ups and Enhancements – Part 2

12 WordPress Plugins for Theme Development

200 Free Exclusive Icons: Siena

60 Excellent Free 3D Model Websites

Miscellaneous Articles
”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

50+ Essential Techniques and Tools for Visualizing your Data

9 Steps To A Happy Relationship With Your Hosting Provider

10 User Friendly Tips for Good Content Heavy Web Designs

Brought To You By

Do you want to advertise here? Click to get more info…