I came across this list a couple of weeks ago, but it is a really interesting one so I will share it with you guys. Basically the Telegraph (a British newspaper) compiled a list with the 101 most useful websites around the net, divided into technology, entertainment, advice, house and home, social, shopping and travel.
Here are the 10 websites included under technology:
The family that prays together stays together. Isn’t that cute? You see pictures of families going to church, celebrating the holidays. There are even a few of these photographs where the whole family went on a beach, had some fun time in Disneyland, and threw in a party for Junior. These and a lot of other stories are worth remembering.
Well, surprise, surprise. The Internet not only allows you online photo-sharing, blogging, and video-posting, but also brought these three (and other online features) together to bring you a revolution in online networking. Let’s meet some “Family Websites,” shall we?
First in line is FamilyLobby, where you can create your own family’s private website. Family friendly and easy to use, FamilyLobby has one goal in mind: to “help keep you and your family together, no matter how far apart you may be.”
Browsing through its sample websites, I can say that it can be easily personalized. For one, the website can contain links such us your family tree, journal, chatroom, and of course, photos and videos. Also, you can add in news and calendar of events of what your family might be into, and further remind them that you will be holding a party if the schedule slipped off their minds. Further, you can allow registry of other people who happen to pass by, acting as an online networking website, too. And lastly, it’s free!
Next up is MyFamily. Similar to the one above, MyFamily has these following features among others: What’s New (updates on the website), Photos, Videos, Trees, Events, and People (or contacts). Added to its long roster of features are Discussions, SnapGenie, and Files. Discussions seemingly act as the family’s online dinner chat, where stories and opinions travel across from different ends of the table. SnapGenie is a storyteller in a way. It allows recordings of people’s voices (via phone and Internet’s technology). You just type in your phone number as well as the number of the relative you are calling, and MyFamily will store your conversation for the rest of the family to hear, be it reminiscing the love between your grandparents, or a greeting from a loved one who happened to travel to a different country. The Files section is just it. You can store files for your family to download or look at.
MyFamily has three membership levels. First is, of course, the free level. After a year of using the website, you can see your videos and photos. However, it will take a while before you can access them. Paying $29.95 a year gives you a Gigabyte per month of storage for your files, be it a photo or a video, while paying $99.95 a year maximizes your storage to 10 Gigabytes per month, plus options to customize your website.
Third that I found is TheFamilyPost. It allows you to build a very flashy family website in an instant! It has a tabbed interface with contents like the other two, from photos to videos, calendar to history, to even a directory. To liven things up, it also included a My Kids tab to display personalized websites of your children, and a Newsletter and a Message Board tab to discuss things and update other relatives of the latest family info.
After a year of free trial, TheFamilyPost can allow you unlimited photos and videos once you become their premium member, for only $5.50 a month or $60.50 a year.
There are other family websites around. You can just go look for them in any search engine and see if it fits your need (they almost always allow photos, videos, calendar or events posting, and a journal). But please hear my advice. Don’t be blinded by showy or cleanly laid out pages. You should always check for the privacy policy of the website you are to register your family into. After all, it’s your family’s private memories that will be shared through it. Check user comments and demo sites of these websites, as you can get information on their privacy levels from them. And putting up family memorabilia doesn’t always mean that those will stay on the site forever. Try knowing how to take them down or delete them. This might help in cases where you don’t want to share things even with your relatives.
Finally, the Internet has a way to put your whole family in the virtual world. Just be a little watchful and secured, because it is your family that’s being registered in the cyberspace, not just you.
Here’s a quick news from Internet Explorer 7 or IE7 this year. Some time last year, the Internet Explorer team released an add-on, named IE7Pro, for their latest browser software. Some of the features that this add-on offers include management of your tabs, a new drag-and-drop option for opening links, proxy switching option, spelling check as you type on text boxes, and blockers of advertisements and Flash applications.
Last January 2, the IE team has released the 64bit IE7Pro Version 2.0. It feels more flexible being fully modular than the past versions, in which the creators hope for stability of the software lie on. Also, they team claims that “you can customize not just Internet Explorer, but even your favorite website according to your need and taste using IE7Pro.”
Further, there are Language Packs that IE7Pro boasts of, although only Chinese and English are the only complete translation options as of the moment. However, this can help in customization of your browser, as you can translate the entire IE7Pro to your own native language.
Also, despite the name, IE7Pro 2.0 works for IE6, too. It can transform your dusty IE6 browser to a hippy and modern look and feel. That’s great news for both the multiple-window-browsing fans and the tabbed-browsing fans alike. You can get the add-on from their official download site and see if it fulfills its goal to make your IE browser “friendlier, more useful, secure, and customizable. See for yourself.
The gaming niche is characterized by its haves and have-nots. You’ve seen Kotaku, IGN, GameSpot, Joystiq, 1UP and the others, but what about the great, lesser-known gaming sites?
This post introduces 18 great gaming sites you might not have seen before. Whether you’re looking for freebies, music, laughs or oddities, there’s something here for occasional and hardcore gamers alike.
1. Overclocked Remix is a community hub of users who painstakingly remix and arrange video game music. There are thousands of tracks available for download. If you like the soundtrack to your favorite game, you can bet it has been remixed and reworked here.
2. The Freeware Indie Games Database offers just under 1,000 play-tested freeware titles from independent game developers. The games here are innovative and unique. Some of them are bound to be re-developed as Wii titles.
3. POKE is a light-weight utility that allows you to cheat in almost any single player game, whether it’s already published or to be published in the future.
4. The Daedalus Project gets into the minds of MMORPG players. The website’s author has surveyed over 35,000 gamers and provides a detailed break-down of his findings in areas such as the player life-cycle, making friends and status reversal. It’s fascinating stuff.
5. Gaming Magazines of the Pre-Internet Era is a treasure trove for retro gamers. It links out to .PDF databases of old and out of print gaming magazines.
6. The Grand List of Role Playing Game Clichés is a list of 100+ painful clichés any RPG fan would have encountered before. My favorite? The No! My beloved peasant village cliché: “The hero’s home town, city, slum, or planet will usually be annihilated in a spectacular fashion before the end of the game, and often before the end of the opening scene.”
7. GameCakes is the website for people who love cake and video games. These game-themed cakes run the gamut, from the bizarre to the majestic. The scrumptious photos will have you baking your own cupcakes in no time.
8. CrazyPC is the hardcore gamer’s place for computer accessories. All the neon, case mods, plexiglass, tubes and coolant fluid you can poke a memory stick at.
9. VGMusic is host to 24,000+ midi versions of video game tracks from all your retro favorites: Megaman, Mario, Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, et al.
10. Build Your Own Gaming Computers is a website dedicated to helping you… well, you can probably guess. Gaming rigs sell for thousands of dollars and learning to build your own can save you lots of cash. This website provides advice on the entire process, from choosing parts to installation.
11. Abandonia offers thousands of abandonware DOS downloads. Abandonware essentially means games which aren’t sold anymore, prompting their release into the public domain. They’re the games you might have owned and loved as a child or teenager. Chances are you’ll find some old favorites here.
12. Jay is Games sources out the best casual games and brings them directly to you. The blog’s authors sure know their stuff and their opinions are worth listening to. Subscribe to their feed for a daily stream of gorgeous, idle distractions.
13. Old Grandma Hardcore is the blog of a foul-mouthed, lovable gamer grandma (with the pictures to prove it!). No, we’re not talking Brain Training and The Sims — we’re talking games like Bioshock and The Darkness. This grandma really is hardcore!
14. Insert Credit is a multi-author Japanese games and culture blog specializing in breaking news from the land of the rising sun.
15. Replacementdocs is an online archive of .PDF game manuals for thousands of popular games. If you’ve experienced the frustration of losing the manual to your favorite title, replacementdocs should have a solution for you.
16. Wonderland is an odds-and-ends gaming blog mainly known for its cool gamecrafts. From Darth Vader backpacks to Quake coasters, this blog is proof that gamers are an arty bunch.
17. The Speed Demos Archive is host to hundreds of videos documenting the efforts of those dedicated individuals who’ve conquered games in the shortest time possible. Watch epic games like Half Life 2 and Icewind Dale beaten before your lunch-break is over.
18. The System Requirements Lab analyzes your computer, benchmarking it against the minimum requirements of a specific product. Ever wondered if your computer can handle that gorgeous new release? Now you’ll know.
Update: Here are some more great websites that you might not have seen before, suggested from our readers:
Web designers and developers are always looking for new ways to improve their sites and make them more interesting and useful for visitors. In some cases this can easily be accomplished by adding something to your site that you don’t even need to create. There are a number of large websites that contain free DHTML, Ajax, JavaScript, and more that can be added to your site very quickly (and for free).
My favorite source for scripts is DynamicDrive, which has hundreds of free scripts that are conveniently categorized to help you find what you’re looking for. Their tag line is “DHTML scripts for the real world,” and that’s a pretty good description of the site. Even if you are relatively new to web design you’ll find plain and simple instructions with most scripts that make them little more than a cut and paste.
Some of the categories of scripts found on DynamicDrive include form effects, menus and navigation, XML and RSS, image effects, and more. The menus and navigation section includes CSS-based menus as well as multi-level menus. In fact, DynamicDrive even contains a CSS Library that provides some of the best CSS navigation scripts you’ll find anywhere.
One of my favorite resources on the site is RSS Display Boxes, which allows you to easily include RSS headlines, excerpts or full posts on any website. In addition to the scripts, DynamicDrive also has several useful online tools such as an image optimizer, favicon generator, gradient image maker, button maker, and a few others.
With over 2,500 scripts, The JavaScript Source has one of the largest collections available online. On this site you will find many of the same types of scripts as you will on DynamicDrive, but there is a bit more selection. Unfortunately, sometimes more options also makes it more difficult to find what you really want.
From the home page you’ll see the latest additions to the script library, which can be really helpful if you are a frequent visitor or if you are just looking for the most current and up-to-date scripts. There really are so many scripts here that you have to just browse through to get an idea of everything that is available.
Much like DynamicDrive, The JavaScript Source also has a navigation section, which is always in demand by web designers. The naviagtion section isn’t limited to just navigation menu scripts, it also includes scripts for add-to-favorites, breadcrumb links, popups, dropdown boxes and more.
A third great source of scripts is JavaFile.com. Here you’ll find slideshow scripts, text effects, email forms, audio effects, plus many of the same types of resources that you’ll find at DynamicDrive and The JavaScript Source. One of the most useful sections of the site is ticker tapes category. If you’ve been looking for an easy way to scroll news, events or any kinds of updates and important information, a ticker scripts is a simple solution.
If you’re working on a new website or trying to improve an existing one, you may just find something at one of these sites that puts your design over the top. One caution: be sure not to go crazy and add too many scripts to your pages. Not only will it slow down the load time and affect the performance of the site, but it can create an overwhelming look for your visitors. Find the scripts that would bring the most benefit to your site and stick with them.
