Robin Good: The New Hive is a new, free web service which allows you to create custom web pages on an ad-free empty canvas, while making it very easy to add text, images, video and audio clips and to size, style it and position it anywhere on the page.
Newly create web pages can be set to private or public access, and their content can be easily shared to all major social media networks.
"The New Hive is your radically simple, drag + drop, blank canvas + self publishing tool."
Robin Good: Thimble is a new web editor from Mozilla that makes it very easy for anyone to create and share their own web pages.
From the official site: "It’s an intuitive visual editor that lets you write and edit HTML right in your browser, preview and correct your work, and then publish and share fully functional web pages with a single click.
Thimble removes many of the barriers for novice users trying to learn code, and includes a series of starter projects and templates to help anyone get started quickly."
"Write and edit HTML and CSS right in your browser. Instantly preview your work. Then host and share your finished projects with a single click."
From Mashable: "Facebook announced sweeping integrations for WordPress.org and WordPress.com VIP users on Tuesday morning — allowing you to add your blog content to the social network in one click.
The integrations are accessible through a Facebook for WordPress plugin and allow bloggers and administrators of WordPress-based sites to cross-publish content to WordPress, their own Facebook Timelines and the Facebook Pages they oversee.
Robin Good: Breezi is a new free web app which allows you to design and create web sites with pixel-precision control while providing editing-in-place and collection of great content modules to customize your pages.
Free for everyone who signs in before the end of June.
Robin Good: If you are looking for a simple solution to your need for integrating or embedding an image gallery in your web site, Juicebox provides a great set of ready-made HTML5 solutions available both in free and premium versions.
"Use Juicebox to create and manage image galleries on your web site, blog or portfolio."
Key features include:
-> Light and Fast – lightweight and fast to load, giving your users a great viewing experience. Smart image pre-loading means images display faster
-> Responsive Layout – resizable interface, which adapts to the browser size. Gallery UI adapts to fit any size screen.
-> Auto Generated Thumbnails – no need to create thumbnails for your image galleries. Juicebox handles this for you.
Pro (paid) versions include additional features include advanced customization options, including autoplay, watermarking, image randomization, direct linking, image fading and scaling options among others.
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.
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.
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.
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": a) a text quote,
b) an article
c) video,
d) images
e) slideshow
f) countdowns and
g) streetviews. Instagram-like effects can be added to the images you upload and you can ahve as many containers on a page as you want.
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.
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.
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:
Drag and Drop Site Builder
Professional Themes
No Ads
Hosting by Amazon.com
Photo Gallery and Slideshow
Video and Maps Support
File Uploads
Contact Forms
Traffic Stats
Lifeyo starts at $8/month for one website and unlimited pages.
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."
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.
Robin Good: TalkTyper is a web-based app that allows you to talk into any microphone connected to your computer and to have your words immediately typed and ready to copied and pasted into any traditional document.
TalkTyper goes beyond simple real-time transcription by offering you:
-> alternative words and interpretations
-> the ability to edit the transcription on the fly
-> the option to immediately save the transcribed text in a special editable area, and to then send it out via email, Twitter, or to translate automatically into another language.
I have personally tried the app, which is extremely simple to use, and I must say that as long as you do not use fancy words, and keep your pace rather slow, TalkTyper does an impressive job of capturing and transcribing your words into actual text.
It is possible also to insert punctuation marks while you talk by calling them up specifically during dictation.
TalkTyper works in over 16 different languages including English (US and UK), German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Russian.
Robin Good: Overblog is a new web service which allows anyone to create a website automatically built around the content you are already posting and sharing on your favorite social media channels.
In addition you can also post directly via Overblog any kind of content by using a modular, add-the-content-type you want into unique, rich media posts.
Overblog also provides the ability to video-live stream on your site straight from your mobile phone as well as over 100 of nicely pre-designed and fully customizable templates that can be utilized to personalize your "social media blog".
Analytics for traffic stats are included as well as the opportunity to monetize your "social media blog" by optin-in for it.
It is also possible to launch as many blogs as you want with a single ID and to grant access to as many contributors as you want (and to define what you want to give them permission to do: write, review, or post.)
N.B.: Your newly created "social media blog" works and can be seen properly across all kind of devices, from desktop to mobile.
Robin Good: SocialGimme is a web app which allows you to easily create as many websites as you likes by utilizing a unique approach.
You add content by selecting first the "type" of content you need among over 14 different alternatives including: video, subscription box, article (with or without an image), RSS feed, Social feeds from Facebook and Twitter, and several more.
Content components can be dragged and dropped on your web site canvas, and can easily be rearranged.
A great use for this tool, easpecially for news journalists and curators, is one of personal monitoring dashboard, where you collect and can easily browser your custom-created RSS and social feeds.
Here is a simple and illustrated tutorial on how to install WordPress on your own computer.
Doing so can have many advantages: modify themes, build your own theme or just write new articles and see how they look before publishing them on the Internet.
Robin Good: If you are looking for a series of tools and services that can allow you to publish slideshows and video clips on your web site while using personalized skins and templates Cincopa provides such resources.
The Cincopa multimedia platform allows you to enhance your web site with video, photo galleries, slideshows, podcasts and music by providing a large set of plugins and templates for all major web publishing systems dedicated to these tasks.
"Cincopa is the most complete rich media kit for WordPress, Joomla, Blogger and many other CMS systems. Cincopa includes many videos players, slideshows, galleries, podcast, music players in many different shapes and sizes, in total over 40 skins."
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.
The basic service is free to use and the Plus version costing $39/year allows you to: a) add up to 40 feeds,
b) use your own domain name,
c) mix'n'match colors to make your own custom theme, and
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:
text block
signup form
product listing
photo gallery
video
image
blog
input form
donation
evite
calendar
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.
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."
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, 2 Offers, Loyalty Program and Mobile Payments (soon), Custom Look & Feel and Full Technical Support
Higher priced plans include also - Custom Domain - Analytics
- the ability to add more content items and offers.
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.
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.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
