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Juice Receiver is all about podcasts. Those little media-rich RSS feeds are a way of like for many of us. Juice plays the part of the aggregator of content.

You can set Juice to receive podcasts the way you want to collect them. Whether it's once or twice a day, or even every 30 minutes, you get to call the shots. You can also configure it to grab all back-episodes that you might have missed along the way.

Juice doesn't incorporate a media player, so you can use it in conjunction with your favorite player. It interfaces automatically with iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Winamp, or you can choose "No player" and have it use your default media player, or you can even handle the details yourself. Either way you will know that you have the latest and greatest and that you will get to listen and view the latest podcasts on your own terms.

Power users can even set Juice to run a command, batch file, or shell script after each download, making Juice even more useful as you get your fix.

Juice Receiver is available for Linux, Mac (OS X 10.3+) and Windows (Windows 2000+).

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RSS has made everybody's life easier. Rather than having to run around the Web to see what's going on out there in the world, you can let the world come to you. Whether it's news and politics, social networking, or the musings in the blogosphere, the world literally beats a path to your door through RSS syndication of content.

RSSOwl is a free newsreader that lets you read news the way you want to. Along with the expected subscribe and read functionality, there are extras that deserve a good look. Enhanced search capability allows you to find just the posts you are interested in.

You can also search for newsfeeds you haven't discovered yet, helping you to cover your interests even better. Once you find a site you like, RSSOwl will scour the site, looking for every feed that they feature.

There's an internal browser, so HTML content will be rendered correctly for your viewing pleasure.

You can minimize the app to the System Tray, keeping it out of the way until it detects new unread items. It lets you new when you have new stories to look at, keeping you right on top of things.

A new Version 2 is currently under development. It promises to add Usenet capability, allowing you to go old school and keep track of Newsgroups as well.

RSSOwl is a Java application, and is available for Linux, Macintosh, and Windows systems.

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VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) is one of the bigger deals out there for taking advantage of the Internet. Instead of using the phone company and its network of wires and switches, you use the Internet as the conduit for your phone calls to travel from here to there. Commercial services like Vonage allow you to make calls this way, although you still get to pay for the privilege. Free providers like Skype are out there, allowing you to call other members for free, while paying to call numbers that aren't part of the network.

The Gizmo Project is another free VoIP service. Like Skype, you can call other members for free, or for an additional fee you can call and receive calls from phones that aren't part of their network. There are differences, however, between Gizmo and Skype.

Based on the open SIP standard, Gizmo allows you to also talk with Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, and Windows Live users, as well as IM your AIM and MSN buddies. file sharing is available through the IM window. Free voicemail and conference calling further enhance your options.

If it's time to tell the telco to take a hike, you may want to hike over to Gizmo and take it for a spin.

Gizmo is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows, so just about everybody can use it.

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Sometimes you're online, and sometimes you're not. Suppose you're not, but you really need to confirm some important info you saw on your favorite website just the day before. You're out of luck–until now.

Proxy Offline Browser is a slick little tool that lets you take the whole Web with you. Running in the background as a proxy server, Proxy Offline Browser keeps a copy of all pages that pass through it. That means that you are building a store of pages while you surf. Now when you need to re-examine that page from yesterday, you've already got a local copy of it. That means you can visit it again even when you're nowhere near your network, or your modem is sound asleep. When you're back online, visiting that page again will update the cached copy you have on your system, so you always have the latest and greatest.

Proxy Offline Browser Private Edition is a Java app, so it'll run on anything that supports the Java runtime or development kit, including OS X, Windows, Linux, and other flavors of *NIX as well. Best of all, it's free for personal use.

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According to Chevy Chase, new Shimmer was both a floor wax and a dessert topping. While WikyBlog won't make your floor shiny or go down well after dinner, it does combine two different functionalities into one product.

WikyBlog takes the collaboration and revision functionality of a wiki and combines it with the threaded comments of a blog. The result is an app that allows users to work together in ways not possible before. Create a wiki page, edit it–or allow others to edit it–start a threaded discussion, and so on.

The WikyBlog site is itself built using WikyBlog, so you can take a look and see what the app has to offer. A guest account lets you go in, move around, make a page or two, and try it on for size.

WikyBlog uses MySQL on the back end for its database, and requires PHP version 4, or make it easy on yourself and sign-up for an online account, and let the gurus at WikyBlog do the heavy lifting in terms of sysadmin stuff.

WikyBlog is available as both a download and a hosted service.

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It's important that web pages be coded correctly. Not only can incorrectly written pages cause problems for your human visitors, but in some cases, this can cause problems for search engine robots in getting your pages indexed for Google and the other search engines. If you can't serve your visitors well-formed pages, there's no telling what benefit they'll receive from visiting your site, assuming they can find it or see it at all.

RightWebPage is an HTML validator, but it's a validator with a difference. Not only will it examine and give feedback on the coding for your pages; it will also fix many of the problems that it finds on those pages. RightWebPage uses W3C standards, so you know its validations are valid. It can add missing height and width attributes for images, for example, which in turn helps your pages to load faster, as well as missing attributes for meta tags as well.

The app will also verify links from your site, looking for broken hyperlinks to missing pages–the dreaded "404″ error. It's smart enough that it will even recognize missing page errors that are trapped and redirected to custom error pages.

RightWebPage is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

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Among the challenges facing webmasters and search engine optimization consultants, is that of understanding how you rank on the various search engines for your all-important keywords. If knowledge is power, then understanding where you show up in search results is the ultimate power. Digging manually through page after page of search results can be a big drain on your time. Automated tools can be expensive and have a steep learning curve.

Rank Tracker will let you track an unlimited number of keywords for an unlimited number of websites. You can see how your rankings move over time, with change records for daily, weekly, and monthly fluctuations. Progress graphs make it easier to understand your ranking and trends over time. Rank Tracker currently supports over three dozen different search engines, so the ones you are most interested in are probably included.

Available through a free license for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Rank Tracker can be an important part of your website promotion strategy.

Download Rank Tracker

While there are many free web browsers available out there, Flock is a browser with a difference.

Built on Mozilla technologies, Flock combines the best of web browsers with a social component. Flock comes with a built-in blog editor, RSS feed reader, and del.icio.us tagger. Run across an interesting web site? Grab images and text and post them to your blog without having to leave the page. Share your photos with built-in support for Flickr and Photobucket.

The search feature allows you to search through your browser history, looking for terms in the pages you’ve visited, not just their titles, as well as your favorites and the Web.

There are some application-specific extensions available, but Flock also appears to support many Firefox extensions, or you can build one of your own with the instructions and API reference available on their website.

Flock is still in “pre-1.0” release, so there may be a few bugs along the way. The good thing, however, is that since it is a project still in active development, you can help to make it even better by reporting back your user experience.

If the social component of the Web is important to you, you may want to give Flock a try.

Download Flock

It's easy to acquire hundreds of website bookmarks over the years, but it's difficult to keep them organized in a useful manner. It's even more problematic to know if the bookmarked sites still exist if they haven't been visited in a while. AM Deadlink is a handy freeware program which detects dead links and duplicate links in browser bookmarks and text files. Once you've verified that a link is indeed no longer useful, you can delete it permanently. It will be easier to find the important bookmarks when the dead ones aren't cluttering things up.

AM Deadlink works with bookmarks/favorites in many of the most popular browsers, including IE, Netscape, Firefox, and Opera. It can also work with urls in tab delimited and comma separated text files. One other nice feature of AM Deadlink is that it can download the favicons for bookmarked sites, and display them in IE, Firefox, and Opera. The software author maintains a support forum on his website.

Download AM Deadlink

Cooliris is a nifty browser plugin which allows you to preview the content of hyperlinks without ever leaving the current webpage. If you're faced with a page full of links, you no longer have to pick and choose which ones to click at random. Cooliris will give you a glimpse of each links' webpage, so you can easily filter out the sites which look junky, and go straight to the sites which are of obvious interest. Cooliris will also show you previews of search results, Del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos, and YouTube videos. It can be a real time saver.

The Cooliris plugin is currently available for many popular browsers, including IE, Safari, Firefox, and Flock, although the IE7 version is still in beta testing. The software's website has excellent documentation and support features if you run into any problems or have questions.

Download Cooliris