Free Web-Based Tools

There are a lot of GREAT Free tools out there mostly thanks to open source software development. Thank you to all those contributors! I thought I would share a few tools that make my life easier. These are in no specific order, and are by no means the only ones available.

Jing captures anything on your screen. It is great for taking screen shots, or to create a how-to video. Jing was a life saver for me when I needed to teach my mom how to use her wordpress sight while I was in Boulder and she was in Tucson. If any of you have ever tried to explain blogging to their parents, then you know what I was up against. So, I recorded my steps with Jing and said what I was doing while I was doing it. Then I sent her the short step by step video. It worked great and she can replay it when she gets lost.

Fastone Image Viewer is an easy to use image browser, converter and editor. I know there are a lot of other image options out there, but I like this one because it is simple. It does what it needs to do without trying to take the place of Photoshop, for example, which is a beast of a program meant for serous art. Adjust the contrast, hue, saturation, crop, quick resize etc.

Prezi is awesome. Powerpoint is my nemesis and Prezi is my savior. This tool actually makes creating, presenting and viewing presentations FUN. It allows you to think holistically about your presentation, instead of using only a slide by slide approach, and provides the flexibility of zooming in and out. As they say, using Prezi is a lot like thinking; it's very intuitive. It enables your images to leap right along with your thoughts.

Wordpress.com is  a  great choice to a get a free blog up and running in minutes. They provide the hosting and the security, as well as over 60 themes and visitor stats. They give you a domain at wordpress.com, however you can upgrade for about $10 per year to map to your own domain(s). Because they provide the hosting, there are limitations for security reasons, including no javascript. However, because the wordress.com community is so large, someone has most likely found a way to provide most any functionality you want.

Wordpress.org is a content management system (CMS) with the same user interface as its' .com counterpart but more flexibility because you install and host it with your own domain. There are thousands of themes for wordpress.org, free and premium. Of the themes available, Thesis gets a lot of blog press. It is not free and comes with a whole new list of terminologies. I found that unless you are going to spend a lot of time developing your own themes, that the FREE Atahualpa theme provides about the same amount of customization and does not require you to learn CSS.

Drupal is a content management platform. It has a very large developer community and more free themes are being added frequently. The terminology and user interface is different from Wordpress but I found going from Wordpress to Drupal was an easy switch. Drupal was actually easier for me to install and provides detailed notes throughout. While there are quite a few differences, I needed more control over user management, which Drupal is very good at. I would say that wordpress is great if you want a straightforward blog or website but adding members with their own interface is a better job for Drupal.

Remember the Milk is an online task management system to help you be more organized. You can share tasks with other people and see your tasks on a map, as well as have reminders sent. It is a simple way to organize your life.

Google Docs is part of the google pack that comes with you Gmail account. It is great for sharing documents and allowing multiple editors at once. You can also create web-based surveys and embed them in your site. The data feeds directly into a google spreadsheet document and creates chart reports immediately. The format is not very customizable but it is a great way to go for a simple survey.

Google Analytics is essential if you have your own website or blog. It monitors your web traffic and reports on source, bounce rate, time on site, pages visited and referring sites among others. It also provides a map overlay of where the visitors are in the world. Pretty powerful stuff! There are a lot of other free resources out there, these are just a few I use often.

Let me know what your favorites are and I will keep you informed as I find new useful tools to make your life easier!