Robin Good: Let's CC is a specialized search engine that can find any image, sounds, video or text that has been published under a Creative Commons license and is available for re-use. Free to use. Very useful. 8/10 Try it out now: http://eng.letscc.net/ 
Robin Good: Pinvolve is a Facebook app that allows you to style your "timeline" as if it was a Pinterest page. Once activated Pinvolve can be applied to any of the FB Pages that you administer, resulting in a new tab on each one that shows you the visual Pinterest-like version of your Facebook timeline. Pinvolve is free to use. Try it out now: https://apps.facebook.com/pinvolve/ Robin Good: TinyVox is a commercial mobile app, available for both iPhones and Android devices that allows you to easily record your voice and to then share it in one click on any of these social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler and Soundcloud. You can add text notes to your audio recordings and TinyVox can generate a special URL that will auto-play your recording when accessed. More info: http://tinyvox.com/ App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tinyvox-pro/id401071992?mt=8 $ 4.99 Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tinyvox.free&hl=en € 1.50
Robin Good: Jux is a wonderful and extremely easy-to-use web service which allows you to create a great-looking one-page visual showcase about yourself or about anything that may interest you. Jux is characterized by a super-simple interface through which you can easily add anyone of this content "containers": b) an article c) video, d) images e) slideshow f) countdowns and g) streetviews. A page created with Jux has a natural elegant "feel" to it, as it is very visual and its alternative layout presets make it next-to-impossible to do a bad job. Excellent for profiles, authors, artists, photographers and video-makers. Here's my own test page on Jux: https://robingood.jux.com/ Highly recommended. 9/10 Try it out now: http://jux.com 
Robin Good: TheAppBuilder is a new web service cum downloadable app (for PC and Mac) which allows anyone to create, design and publish a custom branded app to the iTunes App store, to the Android Market and to the Windows Phone Marketplace at once. TheAppBuilder makes it extremely easy to develop a multi-platform app (iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 7) by simply following the options and requests offered in its wizard and very intuitive app editing system. An app can integrate RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter channels, YouTube video, images, news, custom content items, contact information and more. The downloadable Mac and PC editing apps, allow you to edit and modify your app as much as you want, and to upload the updated version to TheAppBuilder cloud servers. By using this approach the newly created app can be edited from anywhere and at anytime, including from your mobile device, and updated with new info instantly. TheAppBuilder is free to use to develop and test your app, and it costs $29/mo to start publishing and distributing to the three big online app stores. Full review by Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/1825568/mobile-apps-close-to-the-apps-20-era-become-almost-off-the-shelf?partner=gnews Key features: http://www.theappbuilder.com/features.html Introductory video tutorial: http://vimeo.com/37406745 How-to video clips: http://www.theappbuilder.com/howto.html Pricing info: http://www.theappbuilder.com/pricing.html Examples: http://www.theappbuilder.com/examples.html More info: http://www.theappbuilder.com/ Robin Good: Lifeyo is a web-based service that allows you to create a website without having any technical skills. Pages are created with simple commands, and content components (such as images, videos, text, etc.) can be easily dragged and dropped into position at will. Key features include:
Lifeyo starts at $8/month for one website and unlimited pages. FAQ and tutorials: http://www.lifeyo.com/support/ Pricing info: http://www.lifeyo.com/plans/ More info: http://www.lifeyo.com Robin Good: Adobe Shadow is a cross-platform software as well as a mobile app that allows you to preview the layout of any web page across any number of different mobile devices easily. To make Adobe Shadow work you only need to install the software on your Mac or PC, as well as on the mobile devices you want to test your web pages on. "I love using Adobe BrowserLab. It’s a great way to check how your sites look on different browser platforms. But I’m even more excited about Adobe Shadow, a new Adobe Lab that allows you to test your web sites on mobile devices by creating a dynamically-updating connection between your devices. In layman’s terms, this means that you can visit a web site on your desktop browser and simultaneously preview it on multiple phones and tablets. So, as you browse through different pages on your desktop, the mobile devices also update their screens." (Source: Ray Villalobos on Lynda.com)
Download Shadow for Mac or PC: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/shadow.html Shadow for iOs: http://www.adobe.com/go/sd_ios_app for Android: http://www.adobe.com/go/sd_android_app Video intro: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-technology-sneaks-2012/adobe-shadow More info: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/shadow/ 
Robin Good: Onbile is a free online service that allows anyone to create easily mobile websites without any programming knowledge. The service makes it extremely easy to create rapidly a professionally-looking mobile web site by allowing the iser to easily create as many sections and pages as needed and to include/upload your preferred contents in each. The free service is advertising supported, while a premium solution costing as low as $5/month provides full control of your mobile website contents with no advertising. Key features for the Pro plans include:
Mobile websites examples created with Onbile: http://www.onbile.com/real-examples/ Pricing info: http://www.onbile.com/plans-and-prices/ FAQs: http://www.onbile.com/customer-support/ Video tutorials: http://www.onbile.com/customer-support/tutorials/ More info: http://www.onbile.com/ Using premium templates with high quality design. With the best prices and suitable for every phone screen resolution. 
Robin Good: Silk is a new web-based web publishing platform which allows anyone to easily create information-based websites, that can leverage to the max the use of structured information and tags inside the published content. "In Silk, adding structure to content is as easy as writing it. This structure can be searched, aggregated and visualized, making it a breeze to find information." Everyone can make a Silk site and start adding pages with text, images and links. Key features: - Tags: facts in your text can be tagged. - Collaboration: you can let multiple people work on your site by inviting and managing site editors. - History: history versions are kept of each web site edit executed, so that going back is easy. - Domain mapping/hosting: You can run Silk on your domain, just adjust your DNS settings and you are done. - Look and feel: Moreover, your site can be styled any way you like it. You can have your own CSS to determine background, colors and fonts to match your style. - API - available API set N.B.: Custom styling and Silk on your own domain are paid options. Sample sites made with Silk: Take a look at one of our public Silk sites: Countries of the World, The Next Web Index or the Simpsons. Video tutorials: http://www.silkapp.com/tutorials More info: http://www.silkapp.com/ 
Robin Good: PressJack is a service which allows you to utilize any RSS feed to create a professional-looking digital magazine which you can host directly on your own web site. If you are looking for a way to make better use of the resources you curate, share and bookmark online, or for a way to create extra value for your newsletter subscribers PressJack may offer a very interesting proposition. By using PressJack it is in fact very easy to aggregate into a beautiful-looking magazine content coming even from multiple feeds and to "edit" only those stories and items you think are of most value. (You can accept or reject individual stories, edit their content, and the specific images that will be published). For this capability alone PressJack provides an excellent way to "curate" your own content stream while producing a richer and more focused content item. A free version of the desktop software (PC - Mac) that allows you to see how you can build your own digital magazine, is immediately available on the home page of the site. There are three versions of PressJack one of which is fully free. This free version allows you to create and publish up to 3 digital magazines at a time on your website. The magazine does contain a few ads, but I must say they fit in quite nicely without disrupting or diminishing the overall output quality. This version does not support reader statistics. Examples of digital magazines created with PressJack: http://www.pressjack.com/online-magazine-samples.html Pricing info: http://www.pressjack.com/digital-magazine-pricing.html More info: http://www.pressjack.com/ 
Robin Good: Quipol is a new free service which makes it extremely easy for anyone to create a one-question poll to be rapidly published online. Readers can vote up or down and comment as well. Created polls can still be edited with Quipol even after having been published, and can be deleted at any time. Check this Mashable review: http://mashable.com/2012/01/30/quipol/ Other interesting tools in this space: Toluna, Micropoll, PollDaddy. The service is free. Find out more: http://quipol.com/ 
Robin Good: You have probably seen this cool little widget at work on many sites already, and have probably been wondering, how could you get that on your web site too. Well the answer is simple: The Slide by SimpleReach does it all for you, and at no cost. It recommends related posts without asking you much in return. It can increase pageviews and the time web visitors spend on your web site. Useful. 8/10 
Robin Good: OnSwipe is a brand new service which allows any web publisher to instantly create a beautiful-looking iPad magazine by simply providing the references to RSS feeds, Twitter, YouTube/Flickr channels and more. OnSwipe does the rest. The service is extremely simple to use. Just go to OnSwipe.com, click Get Started, and one registered you only need to provide the URL or name of your different content or social media channels. Once you have setup all of your content sources, OnSwipe provides you with a snippet of JavaScript code to place in the head tag of your web site. iPad-based web site visitors visiting it will automatically "see" the "optimized" OnSwipe view. You can also setup a custom domain such as robingood.onswipe.com for your iPad aficionados. Very promising. 9/10 N.B.: The service looks like it has been freshly baked and there are a few things that may not work yet as expected. I am myself testing it and trying to understand how to make it work. Read more about Swipe and the philosophy behind it: http://blog.onswipe.com/news/the-road-ahead |
Robin Good: The Open Font Library is an online resource which hosts, organizes and offers quality professional typographic fonts for download and use. All of the fonts that are part of the OFL are free to use, share and remix. You can browser the full fonts catalogue here: http://openfontlibrary.org/en/catalogue To find out more about Open Fonts see: http://openfontlibrary.org/en/guidebook Presently the Open Font Library hosts 126 font families. Find out more: http://openfontlibrary.org/ 
Robin Good: Feeed is a simple and elegant web-service which allows you to easily create a Pinterest-like visual magazine by aggregating any number of blogs or RSS feeds. Just input the URL of your blog, Twitter channel, and any other site or feed you may want to include (up to 8) and Feeed will automatically aggregate and display all of the incoming content into a neat visual page. "Take everything you like to read – blogs, news, art and more – and get it all delivered to a site designed especially for you, by you." Feeed.co can also be utilized as your personal news dashboard by making it easier for you to check and monitor your favorite RSS feeds on Feeed visual display. It is possible to see both all of the feeds aggregated into one as well as any individual feed alone.
b) use your own domain name, c) mix'n'match colors to make your own custom theme, and d) mark items as favorites Example: http://robingood.feeed.co/ Try it out now: http://feeed.co 
Robin Good: LightCMS is a website builder that makes it easy for anyone to create an online presence while integrating full ecommerce capabilities. LightCMS, which starts at $19/month for a 10-page web site provides over 200 pre-designed professional templates, that can be edited and personalized. LightCMS makes it easy to add any type of content "module" to any existing page and to choose from a large array of options which include:
My comment: Editing on page elements is not as easy and immediate as I expected it to be, as each time you need to edit a content component on the page a new "editing page" needs to be loaded. Features: http://www.lightcms.com/features Design gallery: http://www.lightcms.com/gallery Pricing info: http://www.lightcms.com/pricing More info: http://www.lightcms.com/ 
Robin Good: If you are looking for a way to inject new life in your Wordpress log, stimulate commenting, posting and interaction with your fans, you may want to look into Wordpress own P2 theme, which transforms your Wordpress into a Twitter-like, real-time blogging solution that it's more easy and immediate than Twitter itself. "P2 is a theme for WordPress that transforms a mild-mannered blog into a super-blog with features like inline comments on the homepage, a posting form right on the homepage, inline editing of posts and comments, real-time updates so new posts and comments come in without reloading, and much more." (Source: http://p2theme.com/) Here's Matt Mullenweg story of how the P2 Theme came to be: "Almost everyone at Automattic is a blogger, but for the first couple of years of the company we didn’t blog much internally. Everything happened over IRC, Skype, and email. ...There was a disconnect we couldn’t reconcile: even though our internal blogs didn’t work out most of the company was active on Twitter every day. We found a solution in Prologue... but there was still a problem, Prologue was great for status updates but terribly awkward for conversation. P2 solves all this by moving the conversation inline on the homepage. Conversations can be fully threaded using 2.7′s new comment features." See the P2 Theme: http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/p2/ Video introduction to the P2 Theme by Michael Pick: http://bit.ly/P2ThemeIntroVideo More info: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/p2-the-new-prologue/ 
Robin Good: Roveb is a web-based service that makes it easy for anyone to create a simple but professionally-looking mobile-optimized website which integrates offers, items on sale and incentives for social sharing activities. How it works: 1) Define your products or services, along with complementary offers and deals. 2) Include a JavaScript code to your full website which will enable mobile detection and redirects. Mobile visitors to your full website are automatically redirected to the mobile website. Non-mobile users, even search engines, continue to see your full website. 3) Visitors can access special offers by performing an activity in exchange. Activities include social sharing which help create virality and awareness for your business. Chosen activity is verified through click-tracking on a referral link and the visitor is notified to simply visit the business on-location to redeem the offer. The basic "Starter" account which costs $29/mo provides integrated hosting, 10 content items, Higher priced plans include also - the ability to add more content items and offers. Pricing info: http://roveb.com/pricing More info: http://roveb.com/ 
Robin Good: If you are looking to enhance your web site with a new look and a unique typographic look, you may want to look into Fonts.com, a one-stop resource for all of your web fonts needs. Fonts.com, powered by typographic foundry Monotype, integrates also font offerings from Linotype and ITC, for a total of over 20,000 different fonts that can be easily integrated on any web site. The fonts can be used for free, in exchange for a posting on your pages a Fonts.com badge that links back to them. The free account gives you access to over 3000 fonts and supports a maximum of 25,000 monthly page views. Above that you need to pay. Pricing info: https://webfonts.fonts.com/en-US/Subscription/SelectSubscription More info: https://webfonts.fonts.com/ 
Discover these 12 *unusual* uses of the popular WordPress platform and build a plethora of creative websites using simple plugins.
WordPress is the preferred blogging platform for over 35 million bloggers, and this WordPress Tutorial will show you some very interesting (yet uncommon) ways to use WordPress. Although the majority of users choose WordPress’ easy-to-use software for blogging, its power extends far beyond building blogs and static websites. In fact, with over 12,000 plugins available today, you can make your WordPress site do virtually anything you can imagine (well…. except for maybe cutting your grass)!
Not only is it dynamic and capable of doing what you want, WordPress plugins do exactly what they are described to do and “plug right in to your WordPress blog”. This means that with simple configurations a world of opportunity is open to even the most basic user. To get your creative juices flowing, we’ve put together a list of our favorite uncommon uses of WordPress.
Read more: http://blog.freeblogfactory.com/12-websites-you-can-build-with-wordpress/ Via Martin Gysler 
Robin Good: Here's a useful guide by Martha Rotter to 10, among many others not listed here, tools and "frameworks" that can be utilized to create slick online digital magazines. Useful. 7/10 Full guide: http://www.netmagazine.com/features/top-10-ways-create-digital-magazines 
Robin Good: Speechpad Transcription is an online service that provides professional text transcriptions of video and audio files at reasonable rates. You can either a) upload an audio file, b) record a phone call with the service or c) call-in and record a text that you want to be transcribed. Pricing starts at $1/min with a 3-5 day turnaround time and goes as high as $2/min for a 24-hr transcription time. Find out more: http://www.speechpad.com/ 
Robin Good: If you are looking for an easy and fun way to generate and customize your own QR Codes, QRhacker.com provides a simple interface just for this. With QRhacker.com you can decide whether your QR Code is a text, a url, a phone number, a VCard with your contact details or a gateway to provide WiFi access.
Once you are done you can save and download your ready-made QR Code and start sharing it with the world. Try it out now: http://www.qrhacker.com/ Robin Good: OnSwipe is a great service that allows anyone to easily generate an iPad-compatible version of their blog, that is beautifully designed and extremely easy to access and navigate. OnSwipe provides a free online dashboard in which, after you have registere yourself, you can set up any number of content sections based on RSS feeds or other content channels you have access to. What you need to do on your end is to place a tiny JavaScript snippet into your web site home page HTML code and from that moment on, iPad-based visitors will be served your web site "special" version, organized around the sections and feeds you have previously provided. To get an idea of the final results looks like check also this other video clip:
Try it out now on any site. I have tested it and it does work flawlessly. Impressive. 9/10 Try it out here: http://onswipe.com 
Robin Good: If you are wondering which service to use to get your content out into an eBook in a professional-fashion, you may want to check this very informative comparison table that FoliumBookStudio, a new service in this space, has published on its site. Comparison table: http://www.foliumbookstudio.com/price-and-compare/ The FoliumBookStudio is an interesting new solution providing the option of a free trial, and a number of extra features that the other services do not offer. Find out more about FoliumBookStudio here: http://www.foliumbookstudio.com/ |
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