Silicon Chisel

Meebo

At its core, meebo is a multi-protocol, AJAX-based instant messaging client. It handles all the major IM channels through on a web page. No ad-infested bloat-ware application to load. This month they also added the “Meebo Me” widget which lets you see visitors on your site as chat clients in your Meebo page. This kind of functionality opens up a lot of possibilities - community building, customer support, making things like mySpace more interactive, and so on.

Meebo

At its core, meebo is a multi-protocol, AJAX-based instant messaging client. It handles all the major IM channels through on a web page. No ad-infested bloat-ware application to load. This month they also added the “Meebo Me” widget which lets you see visitors on your site as chat clients in your Meebo page. This kind of functionality opens up a lot of possibilities - community building, customer support, making things like mySpace more interactive, and so on.

Mint

One of the slickest web statistics packages I’ve seen is Mint. It has a modular architecture, and the most easy-to-read and understand console I’ve seen. You won’t get the same complex analytics as with something like WebTrends, but it’s only $30/domain and you can actually use this.

WordPress 2.0

One of the best things to hit 2006 was the release of WordPress 2.0. Word Press was already a good blogger; maybe the best available. But the 2.0 release has made it even better. So good, in fact, that Yahoo! is now offering it as part of some of their hosting packages.

So what is so great about the new version? For starters, they restructured the admin console so it is cleaner, works better, and even looks better. A nice subtle use of fade effects around status messages so you are sure to notice the information confirming any updates you made.

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TraceWatch

{mosimage}If you run a web site at one time or another you will want to get statistics on your traffic. There are, of course, a lot of commercial scripts which range from cheap to very expensive. And there are even more free (open-source) scripts. Unfortunately, with most of the free offerings are rather poor. Either they are too complicated to install, don’t integrate well with heterogenous site frameworks, or aren’t very pleasant to look at. Or all of the above.

TraceWatch is different, though. To begin with, it is easy to install. Un-zip the archive, set up a database, run a simple install PHP file and it’s done. Overall it has a flexible installation scheme which allows for multiple instances of the script to co-exist, handy when running multiple sites off a root folder.

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SlideShowPro

{mosimage}Publishing image galleries is a typical duty of web sites. While most CMS’s have gallery modules they don’t compare to the elegance of SlideShowPro. For a mere $20 you get a Flash gallery component with smooth transitions, image labeling, XML-driven albums, a gallery browser, per-album sound tracks, customizable everything, and lots of great URL integration features.

The product is supported by the devleoper, Dominey Design by email and a forum on their web site. There is plenty of well-written documentation both in a PDF format manual and on the web site. The online documentation includes several examples implementations, how to animations, FAQ’s, There is also a nice little community of people who use the product who have contributed to the offering with back-end scripts, desktop applications and applets, and more to help make using SlideShowPro easier and more effective.

» Read the rest …

SlideShowPro

{mosimage}Publishing image galleries is a typical duty of web sites. While most CMS’s have gallery modules they don’t compare to the elegance of SlideShowPro. For a mere $20 you get a Flash gallery component with smooth transitions, image labeling, XML-driven albums, a gallery browser, per-album sound tracks, customizable everything, and lots of great URL integration features.

The product is supported by the devleoper, Dominey Design by email and a forum on their web site. There is plenty of well-written documentation both in a PDF format manual and on the web site. The online documentation includes several examples implementations, how to animations, FAQ’s, There is also a nice little community of people who use the product who have contributed to the offering with back-end scripts, desktop applications and applets, and more to help make using SlideShowPro easier and more effective.

» Read the rest …

Simple Machines Forum 1.0

A good bulletin board or forum is pretty much the cornerstone of an online community. Selecting and deploying one is a game of trade-offs. Do you go for something with all the great features, or something smaller and quicker? Do you go for something established that may be difficult to administer but has reams of plug-ins and skins, or something newer which may not have the add-ons, but will not consume a hours of time installing enhancements.

Simple Machines Forum more or less breaks the rules. It’s new, still on release 1.05, and not all that well known as compared with the flagship BBS’s packages like phpBB, vBulletin, and ikonBoard. But they got a lot of things right the first time. Enough to warrant serious attention by anyone looking to install a forum.

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