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When you design a new web site or add pages to an existing site, it's a good idea to build a mock-up first. This prototype lets you see how it's all going to look when it goes live; you can adjust colors, font size, layout of the page, and all that good stuff. Usually you aren't going to add your text until the last minute. But your page isn't going to flow right—and is going to look downright silly—unless you've got something in there as a placeholder for where your inspiring words are going to land eventually. That mocked-up text can go by a number of different names—Greeking is a favorite—and often includes a Latin passage that starts "Lorem ipsum….

While it's handy to have a stock chunk of text to use as a placeholder in your mock-ups, it might be nice to be able to be a little more specific with it. For example, you may want to specify a particular number of characters or words or paragraphs to use. That's where a tool like Dummy Text Generator could come in handy.

A free online service, these guys let you choose from a number of different text passages. Having chosen the placeholder text, you can further select the number of characters, words, and paragraphs to break it into. Its preview feature even lets you see what your passage will look like at different page widths. How many lines long will your text be on the page when your 200 word passage goes live? Advanced options let you experiment with different text styles, helping you to make your prototypes even more accurate.

You should be able to use Dummy Text Generator with just about any modern web browser.

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It's a pretty simple concept: you and your stuff are right here, but you want to be over there. Okay, so get up and walk across the room. Or drive across the state. Or fly across the continent. Pretty easy. You can do the electronic equivalent with the technology available: fax machines, email, and blog posts make it easy for your stuff (if not you) to move around at will. Depending on what you are trying to move around, these may all be overthinking the problem. Here's an example: you are surfing the Web on your Windows box and run across a cool Mac app that you'd like to try out. The easiest way to get that info from here to there is to fire-up your email program, create a message with the download URL copied-and-pasted into it, and send the message to yourself—on the other machine. Now move to your Mac, start-up Mail, grab that message, open it, and stuff the link into your browser. That's about eleventy-three steps for a rather simple operation. So how about a clipboard you can share between those machines?

Cl1p (see-ell-one-pee) bills itself as The Internet Clipboard. It's a pretty simple concept. Go to their site and paste any text (no images unfortunately) you want into their web form. Now from any other machine you go to that same page and grab what you pasted just a minute ago. It's quick, it's easy, and (of course) it's free. Your clipboard stays live for a week (or other period you choose), so you've got plenty of time to do what you need to do. You could also use this tool to share stuff with yourself if you've got a dual-boot system. Heck, you could even maintain an ongoing discussion here, although there are probably plenty of tools that would do a better job with that.

A free online service, Cl1p should be compatible with any recent web browser.

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Sometimes, it's what remains constant that's interesting to us. Other times, we're more interested in what's different. RSS feeds are built with this in mind: any time there's a new blog post or breaking news story, we can find out by subscribing to the right feed. But sometimes we're interested in things that we can't get through a feed. In situations like this, it's handy to have a tool that monitors a website for us, letting us know when something has changed there.

ChangeDetection.com is a website monitoring tool like this. All you need to do is give them a URL and an email address. They'll monitor that page, and whenever it changes, they'll shoot you an email letting you know about it. Conversely, if you've got a website that people are interested in (that's why you have it, right?) but don't supply an RSS feed, these guys give you a snippet of code you can paste into your page that will let your visitors monitor your site for changes. They go out and check pages about once a day, so this isn't a viable substitute for any kind of real-time information, but for stuff that changes less often, it might be just enough to keep you in the loop.

These guys have been doing this for free since 1999, so they must be doing a pretty good job. You don't need to sign up to use the service, although you can, and it should be compatible with just about any web browser. And of course, you'll need an email address if they're going to send you a note about what is going on.

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John Donne wrote No man is an island, entire of itself….. If he had been alive today, he might notice that computers are pretty much that way, too. Sure, there still are un-connected machines out there—maybe at 35,000 feet while flying across the country, for example—but for the most part, we're all connected, whether it be via a local network, or worldwide via the Internet. Either way, while this affords us great opportunity to work together, it also means that it's just that much easier for bad things to happen as well. Computer security is a pretty big deal.

VirusTotal is a service that can help you keep an eye on your system's security. Got a questionable file? Maybe it's something you downloaded, or maybe it came as an attachment to an email. No problem; just upload it through their web form. Or you can send it as an email attachment—you actually submit the file via email. In addition, for Windows users they've even got an uploader tool you can install on your system, allowing you to upload files via context menu (right-click on the suspect file). They'll scan it for you, using a whole bunch of different tools, and then report on what they found (or hopefully didn't find).

A free online service, VirusTotal should be useable by anyone with an Internet connection and a web browser.

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Back in the day—and we mean way, way back—families, organizations, and important folk had a crest, coat of arms, or seal to help identify them and show just who they were, what they were about, and all that. I guess maybe that role is played now by the wallpaper you use on your Twitter page.

If you want to go old school, check out the Official Seal Maker. This free service lets you design and create a seal that you can use to identify yourself, or just have fun with. You get to choose a border shape and style, text to include (in Latin of course), images to use in your seal, and more. Make it as official or silly as you like. Click the button, and your custom seal is assembled before your eyes. Download your seal and stick it on your website, add it to your email signature, or whatever. They're also happy to immortalize your handiwork on magnets, keychains, t-shirts and more (for a price), but you certainly don't have to.

Official Seal Maker is a free online service. You should be able to access it with just about any web browser and an Internet connection.

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It never ceases to amaze me, the wide variety of tools and applications available out there. Like all tools, some of them are for general use: a screwdriver can be used by a carpenter, an electrician, or even a painter to pry the lid off of a can of paint; a word processing app can be used to write a report or send a letter to mom. Other tools are more specialized in what they can do: a pair of hose clamp pliers can pretty much clamp hoses, or the program your accountant uses to do your taxes doesn't really do anything else. AccidentSketch falls into this latter category.

When you get into a fender bender, you usually need to sketch a picture of what happened. Whether it's for your insurance company or the DMV, everybody wants to know what went down. If you are artistically-challenged, your diagram may not be nearly as enlightening as those folks would like it to be. AccidentSketch makes it easy to show what happened. Go to their site and build your diagram by just dragging and dropping widgets on the screen. Choose the type of road you were on: straight street or highway, four-way intersection, three-way "T", or whatever. Drag your car and the other vehicle onto the diagram. Add directional arrows, traffic signs, and you're good. While a pretty picture isn't going to fix all your problems, this diagram is going to help you start to put this whole nasty incident behind you.

AccidentSketch is a free online service. You should be able to use it with most any recent web browser.

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It can be fun to add cute little widgets to your website or blog. One of the more favorite things to add are countdown clocks: Only 27 Shopping Days 'Til Christmas; Only 2389 Days 'Til the Summer Olympics After Next; that sort of thing. Or you can add fun clocks to your site just to dress it all up.

You can choose from a whole bunch of different clocks to put on your site from ClockLink. They've got oodles of Flash-powered clocks that you can use for free. Just browse to the one you like—we're partial to the fake-UPC clock that updates the time and corresponding barcode every second—click the magic button, and copy-and-paste the code necessary to embed it on your page.

ClockLink is a free service. When you grab the link code to put it on your website, you'll need to agree with their Terms of Service, but there's really nothing else involved beyond that.

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There are bunches of email services out there. Some of them give you a "disposable" email address, useful for sign-ups, that then go away to protect your privacy and in box. Others like Gmail give you real email on the web.

Fast forward now. You're setting up an account and have to give an email address. You work through the form, enter your email address, and all of a sudden they tell you that free mail services like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and all aren't acceptable. Now what do you do?

How about a good old fashioned POP mail account? You know, the kind you need a desktop app to use? This is a job for HotPOP. These guys give you a real POP3 email account for free. If you've got a desktop email app like the Mac's Mail application, all you need to do is go in and configure it for the POP and SMTP servers the service uses and you're golden. Or, they offer the option of automatically forwarding all your mail to a different address. Like that Gmail account you use. Now you can sign up for that new service, give them a HotPOP email address, and still get mail to your Gmail account. There; that'll show 'em!

HotPOP is a free service. There are some restrictions on free accounts and you'll need to fill out a survey that they'll use to send you some ads, but such is the price of a "free" account.

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You know the scenario: you've just slaved away for hours—or days—on a project, report, spreadsheet, or some other complicated document containing tons of data. You've checked and double-checked all the facts and figures, You've formatted it just so, and now you're ready to go. All of a sudden, something breaks. Maybe it's hard drive problems, maybe something got munched while zipping it, maybe it got munged while being emailed. No matter what the cause is, you've now seen all your hard work go straight down the tubes. So how do you propose to get it all back?

Well of course, it would be nice if you had a backup. But what if it's a document you received but didn't create? Check out the free online Corrupt Office Suite Text/Data Extracting Service. Submit your broken Office 2007 (DOCX, XLSX, or PPTX) files and chances they'll be able to stitch them back together and give you something useful once again. It's supposed to work with OpenOffice documents as well. Older-format Office files, while not completely repaired, can at least have their content extracted, saving you the huge amount of typing necessary to put your life back together.

This service as available online for free. And thanks to Paul for giving us a heads-up on this tool.

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Most anything that you create that's supposed to do something online requires that you work with plain text. Whether it's a Java class, an HTML web page, or a PHP script, you don't want to be using Word to write your code. While word processors make your next business proposal or that letter to Mom look pretty, they put a bunch of extra stuff into your documents, making them useless as source code for your next online app. What you need is something that creates files as plain text.

Once you move beyond the simplest snippets of code, a plain vanilla text editor like Notepad or TextEdit, things start to get pretty complicated. Sure, it's easy to dash off a dozen lines of code and see what you've done, but once you start calling functions from other files or writing some gnarly nested conditionals, you really need an integrated development environment (IDE) to work with. Along with creating files of just text, these tools typically add functionality like syntax highlighting, the ability to group individual files together into projects, and other programmer-friendly features.

PHPAnywhere is an online service that gives you an IDE to write PHP code in your web browser. Instead of downloading a big clunky app to your desktop, all you need to do here is log into your account and start coding. And since it's an online tool, that means that you can access if from anywhere you have Internet access. Take your work project home without having to bring your laptop along or set up tricky remote networking stuff. It features syntax highlighting, a zillion levels of undo, and a robust find-and-replace functionality. It may well become your go-to tool for writing your PHP.

PHPAnywhere is compatible with Opera and Gecko-based web browsers (Firefox, Camino, SeaMonkey) running on any supported platform. They claim that soon they'll support IE, Safari, and Chrome as well.

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