Free Download A Day

Okay, so you need to create a website. That may not seem too daunting a task. Unless you have no artistic sense. Or you don't know HTML. Or you don't have a copy of Dreamweaver or some other WYSIWYG web editor. Maybe it is too daunting after all. Or maybe not.

Doodlekit may be the answer to all these problems. It's an online website builder that helps you to get the job done, without losing your mind in the process. Choose from among multiple layouts and color schemes, add stock photos, background images, and more. Pretty quick, your new website is up and running without your breaking a sweat. Pretty slick. And since everything is done online, you don't need to worry about downloading and installing (and paying for) complex software on your system. Need to include a blog? It's done. Create and RSS feed? All taken care of. It really is just that easy. The price is easy too: free.

Doodlekit is a free service. It should be compatible with most modern web browsers.

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Are you a creature of the Web? Over the course of the day, how many sites do you suppose you visit—dozens? hundreds? more? If you're on the move, you probably don't stop to read them one at a time; chances are you set a bookmark for each of these sites so that you can come back later and browse through them. The problem there, of course, is that now you have hundreds of bookmarks set, but you really only plan to use each one only once. If you want to maintain any semblance of sanity, now you have to dig through that pile to weed out the one time only bookmarks, while leaving your real bookmarks intact. What a mess.

Read It Later is a Firefox extension that lets you save these use-once bookmarks and deal with them in a way that makes sense. When you run across a site you want to get back to, just click the button, and it's added to your list. When you go back and read through your list, you can choose to delete entries once you've read them, or upgrade them into real bookmarks in Firefox, posting them to Del.icio.us, or any other service.

Read It Later works with Firefox 3. They have an older version that is compatible with earlier releases of the browser.

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SQL (Structured Query Language) is the lingua franca of the database world. While there may be proprietary languages used by different applications, most of them speak SQL, and certainly the most powerful ones use this. When constructing SQL statements, it's possible to be very precise in getting what you want from a database. Unfortunately, sometimes the syntax can get pretty complicated, and it's easy to know what you want and maybe a little harder to get the result you're looking for. There are tools out there that can help you with some of the more complicated queries, or to give you a hand if you're only an occasional SQL user and can't put your finger on just the right syntax.

SQL Buddy is a web-based tool that lets you easily manipulate your databases. With an intuitive interface, you don't have to memorize tons of arcane commands to get work done. Add and drop tables, Add a column. Tweak an entry. There now, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Install SQL Buddy on your web server and you're ready to go. You need to be running PHP 4.3 or later, with MySQL 4 or better. It's compatible with Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer, so you'll really be in control of your database in a jiffy.

SQL Buddy is a free download.

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Maybe you're a web designer, and you've created the World's Best Site. Or maybe you're a business owner and you've just taken the plunge and staked out an online presence. You might be a blogger, and you've just started up the killer blog. Okay, so who cares?

Unless you've just built a site for a school project, one of the most important things you're looking for now is traffic. It doesn't make any difference how great it is, if nobody's looking at it, then it doesn't really mean anything. Your server access logs will tell you a lot about who showed up, what they did while they were there, and all kinds of other information. Unfortunately, you really can't read through raw server logs and make any sense of what's going on with them. You need a tool to help you digest and analyze all that raw data.

Webalizer is one such tool. It understands most commonly-used log formats, and it can work with archived files, so you don't have to keep a huge pile of files on your server. Configure it to generate the reports that help you to measure what you need to know about traffic coming to your site.

Webalizer is a Linux app, so if you're running an Apache web server, you probably already have everything you need to use it.

Download Webalizer

Proxy servers are a pretty slick way to connect to the Web. Whether it's because you are trying to maintain some semblance of anonymity by shielding your IP address from your destination, or just because you're relying on caching on the server, lots of people use them. If you use multiple proxies—maybe one at work and another at home—it can be a pain in the neck to keep tweaking your system to activate one or the other of them, depending on where you are.

SwitchProxy is a tool that makes it easier to switch the proxy server you're using at any given time. A browser plugin, it's designed to work with the Mozilla-based family of web browsers and tools, including Firefox, Mozilla, and Thunderbird. (It's a couple years old, so you may want to check to see how it works with SeaMonkey, Camino, or other more recent Mozilla-based browsers.) You can set up your list of servers and access them to select or change via Toolbar, Context Menu (right click menu), or as a Toolbar Element. You can choose "regular" proxies, or select from a list of anonymous servers to use, even setting it to change servers automatically from time to time to really mix things up.

SwitchProxy is compatible with all systems running Firefox and supported Mozilla-based browsers.

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Can't get enough YouTube? Whether it's the latest viral video, some slick "how-to" program, or any of a zillion other types of content, we've all grown addicted to YouTube. Here's a tool that helps you download YouTube videos to your machine, so that you can enjoy them again and again.

Free YouTube Downloader does exactly what the name suggests: it enables you to grab those videos and save them locally. Just copy and paste the URL of the content you want, and press the button. It couldn't be easier. It supports multiple downloads as well—just type several addresses into the box, each on a separate line.

Free YouTube Downloader is a Java application, which means that it will run on Linux, Macintosh, Windows, or just about any other platform that has Java Runtime Environment Standard Edition, with Java version 1.5 or better.

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Need to do serious work, but you're trapped behind a firewall? In some corporate and other environments, security constraints necessitate locking down all inbound- and outbound traffic except for ports 80 and 443, the standard ports for HTTP and HTTPS traffic. If you need to use services like FTP, Telnet, or SSH to talk to a remote server, you're out of luck. What to do?

Web Console is one solution for this problem. Using only these allowed ports, you can now execute shell commands on your server, edit files using vi or Emacs, and all the other stuff you'd do if only you could access your server.

Installing Web Console on your server is pretty straightforward. It works on both dedicated servers and shared boxes. It's written in Perl, so your server is sure to support it. Once you're up and running, the web interface uses AJAX technology, so you are really interacting in real time.

Web Console will run on any web server that includes Perl.

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Transmission is a free BitTorrent client with a difference. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, it just has what you need and none of what you don't. Its clean interface lets you work the way you want to. You're in control, with the ability to speed your torrents up or down, depending on bandwidth availability.

It supports Growl notifications, so you can do what you need to do, knowing that when Transmission is done, you'll be the first to know about it.

Transmission is available as a Universal Binary for Mac OS X (10.4 or later), or you can grab a tarball and roll your own for Linux, FreeBSD, and others.

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Collaboration can be a real challenge, especially if your team is scattered around the office or the world. Keeping in touch with everybody can be a challenge, and running a handful of apps just to stay in contact can quickly exhaust your screen space, to say nothing of your system resources.

Spicebird is a collaboration tool that helps people work smarter together. It integrates all the tools necessary to make sure that everybody's on the same page: calendar, tasks, contacts, email, and chat are all represented. Built on top of Mozilla's Thunderbird (email), Sunbird (calendar), and SamePlace (chat) platforms, you have access to all these tools in a single application.

Individual tools are accessed via applets that sit on the desktop. You can choose which applets to activate, and customize their content, adding, for example, your favorite news feeds to the RSS applet.

Each of the individual tools boasts the standard functionality you would expect: the calendar allows you daily, weekly, or monthly views, for example. The email tool will examine incoming messages and if it spots time information, it will ask you whether you want to schedule an event that corresponds with that time. The email and chat tools let you know in real time whether your contacts are online, making it easier to ping them right now if you need to communicate with them.

Spicebird is a free download, and is available for Windows and Linux.

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Virtual Private Networks (VPN) allow you to use a public network as if it were a private one. Imagine being able to send your sensitive data across the Internet, for example, without fear that your privacy will be compromised.

While there are a number of VPN applications available, Hamachi is different in that it allows you to create a tunnel even between hosts that are behind firewalls or NAT routers. Unlike other VPN setups, Hamachi's servers help to facilitate communication between machines that use non-routable private IP addresses. Once the connection is made, the server steps out of the way, so none of your data actually flows through their network, guaranteeing you the privacy and security you're looking for.

With the ability to create up to 64 networks with 16 nodes each (or 256 networks with 256 hosts each on the paid version), you can connect a sizable number of machines even though they're spread all over the world.

Hamachi is available for Windows systems running Win 2000 or later. A console version (no bells and whistles) for Mac OS X and Linux can be downloaded also.

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