Webware100

Category: Publishing

Blogger is a Web-based blogging platform owned by Google. Users can create and customize their own blogs, and have them hosted for free. The service offers many ways for bloggers to tailor the user experience, from changeable themes to a custom domain name. Blogger also enables blog owners to add collaborators and other administrators to help them write or manage user comments.

Google has integrated Blogger into a number of services, including the Google browser toolbar. Users of the toolbar who come across something interesting can click a special button that will grab the page information and put … Read more

Category: Publishing

Drupal is a powerful publishing and content management system. Users can add all sorts of content to Web pages through a system of modules. The software itself is free and open-source; users need simply pick out which site elements they want, and then put them together.

Drupal has been used on several popular and professional sites. One of the most notable is The Onion, the satirical news publication, as well as MTV's site in the United Kingdom.

Web site: drupal.org

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Category: Publishing

Adobe's Flash was once shunned in the world of Web design, but it has since grown into a powerful and lightweight platform for delivering video and other media-rich pages to users on multiple computing platforms. Flash has two components, one is the authoring platform for developers, and the other is the Flash player plug-in, which lets users experience the Flash content in their browsers.

One of the most common uses of Flash on the Internet is by video-hosting sites like YouTube. These services encode their videos in Flash formats, and play them in customized video players. Users … Read more

Category: Publishing

WordPress is a free blogging platform available to everyone. WordPress has two components, one is a free, Web-based blog-hosting service called WordPress.com. The other is WordPress.org, which provides users with software to run a more feature-rich version of the blogging tool on their own servers.

Both services offer a very easy way to blog, with administrative options to work collaboratively on one or several blogs using the same log-in. Bloggers can write their posts on a WYSIWYG editor, or switch over to a code view on the fly.

The service is best-known for its themes and … Read more

Category: Communications

Windows Live Hotmail is the latest iteration of Microsoft's free Web-based e-mail service. The new multipane interface lets you drag and drop messages into folders, or right-click messages for a menu of options. There's also a "Today" tab of news that loads when you sign in. Windows Live Hotmail even lets you choose a color theme in case you feel like customizing it to match your tastes.

Microsoft has also rolled out some useful features like instant spell-check, a built-in audio player, an RSS feed reader, and previews for Office documents and PDFs.

Windows … Read more

Category: Communications

Yahoo Messenger is Yahoo's instant-messaging client and chat protocol. Yahoo Messenger users can chat with one another via text, voice, or video chat. Yahoo has also built in VoIP services to let its users call regular old telephones without having to leave the application. Users can also download and install a number of plug-ins that add extra functionality and features.

Yahoo recently launched a Web-based version of Messenger that runs right in your Web browser. The Web version doesn't give you access to all the bells and whistles of the desktop app, such as access to … Read more

Category: Communications

Yahoo Mail is Yahoo's free, Web-based e-mail service. The newest release feels a lot like a desktop e-mail application: there's a preview pane, and messages can be dragged and dropped between folders. Right-clicking the mouse does mail-specific things instead of performing browser actions. And there's no longer any concept of paging through your in-box. You can see all of your messages, no matter how many there are, in one big, scrolling list.

Yahoo Mail Beta also has an RSS reader built into it. It prepopulates your feeds from your My Yahoo page, and gives you … Read more

Category: Communications

GrandCentral is a catchall voice mail and messaging service that you can monitor right in your browser. When you sign up, you get a new phone number. When people call this number, the system takes their names (the first time they call; after that, it remembers), and rings all of your telephones for you at the same time--your desk, your mobile, your home--and lets you pick up the call from any of them.

GrandCentral allows you to reject calls after you hear the name of the person calling; define which of your phones ring based on who is … Read more

Category: Communications

AOL Instant Messenger, known commonly as AIM, is one of the most popular and oldest instant-messaging services around. It lets users chat with one another, send files, and have multiple conversations tabbed together in one window.

Like similar instant-messaging protocols, users get their own identities, complete with username and short profile. Users can add all sorts of links and text, which other viewers can browse. AIM users can also add their buddies with just a username instead of having to remember e-mails or real names.

AIM recently underwent an update that gave it location-sharing and the ability to … Read more