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5 Web Apps for Twitter Addicts

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I have to admit, I didn’t embrace Twitter right away- it took me some time to really “get it”- to find a client I really liked (TweetDeck); to discover what type of people I wanted to follow; and finally, to realize that I didn’t have to tweet every minute about every mundane detail in my day to fully appreciate Twitter.

Now, of course, I can’t imagine going a day without checking Twitter. Web application developers know this, and as a result we have hundreds of Twitter-related apps available to us out there. Here are my favorite five:

Tweetwally

One of the reasons Twitter can be such a time-sucker is because you usually have to weed through hundreds of Tweets, finding those you’re interested in at any one time yourself. Tweetwally is a nifty little service that makes it easy to track specific tweets based on hashtags, usernames or keywords. That may not sound like much, but Tweetwally has some great search operators, for example:

traffic ? will find tweets containing “traffic” and asking a question.
“happy hour” near:”san francisco” will find tweets containing the exact phrase “happy hour” and sent near “san francisco”.

The Twitter Tim.es

If, like me, you’re a frustrated publisher, you’ll love what The Twitter Tim.es does: it generates a “real-time personalized newspaper” from your tweets. For example, see Tim O’Reilly’s Twitter Tim.es Newspaper.

TweetNotebook

In the same vein, TweetNotebook publishes your tweets in a whole new way- but takes it a step further, generating a real paper notebook that features one of your tweets on each of its pages. Simply submit your Twitter username, select a cover design, and it’s ready to go (cost is 12 euros). I adore this.

Tweeterate

Like to rate stuff? How about your friends’ tweets? Tweeterate lets you rate other people’s tweets as “useful, funny or lousy”- then see a list of your most “annoying” friends based on your ratings, and then choose to hide them if you like. It’s a bit of silliness, really, but I have to admit I clicked through to some of the top-rated tweeters listed here and found a few of them useful.

Tweets of Fury

This one’s even more pointless (it is, after all, brought to you by Pointless Corp.), but can be fun and is certainly one of the more creative Twitter-related apps I’ve seen. You can challenge your friends to a battle, submit “scandalous information about each other”, then play rock, paper, scissors (yay!), and- if you lose the latter- deal with having the scandalous info about you publicly posted on Twitter.

What Twitter web apps do you use?

Three Site Monitoring Services

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As someone who manages and hosts several websites for others, there’s nothing worse for me than finding out a client’s site is down from the client himself. Thankfully, that very rarely happens these days- and I have these monitoring services to thank.

Montastic

I’ve been using Montastic for several years now. I like how it’s simple to use, and does exactly what it says: monitors your sites for downtime. Its free version checks your website every 30 minutes, which is fine for most of my needs. Checking is made from many (US) locations, and the IP numbers of their checkers change “on a regular basis”. A good and solid choice.

Mon.itor.us

I only recently discovered Mon.itor.us, but have already embraced its powerful (and free!) service wholeheartedly. Its interface isn’t too pretty, but when I said “powerful” I meant it- Mon.itor.us will track your site’s uptime (including averages), response times, and visitors. You can build widgets to place on your website, as well.

LinkPatch

There are lots of similar services out there, but LinkPatch is hands down my link checking service of choice. It constantly monitors your site(s) for 404 page views, including links from external sites and out-of-date links you forgot to redirect. It also takes into consideration things like common user misspellings, then automatically emails you details on who got the error, where they came from, and what they were looking for in the first place. Plans start at $10/month, but there’s a free plan if you only need the service for one site.

How do you monitor your sites?

5 Awesome Email Marketing Services

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As a developer, I’m often asked by clients for recommendations to email newsletter and marketing services. AWeber and MailChimp are usually the first ones I mention, simply because I’ve used them both for quite some time, recommended them to previous clients, and always had good results.

Today, however, I want to show you some other choices for email marketing. Some have been around a long time, and some are fairly new- but all of them are awesome. See for yourself:

Campaign Monitor

This is another service I am constantly recommending to friends, family and clients. Campaign Monitor, the flagship product of Australian company-I’d-most-like-to-work-for Freshview, is sleek and powerful and does everything you’d expect from an email marketing tool- and then some. They have plugins & extensions for everything from WordPress to Shopify, a whole library of articles and tips on email marketing, and some of the nicest-looking email templates available. There are no setup or monthly fees- Campaign Monitor charges a flat delivery fee of $5, plus 1 cent for each recipient.

EmailBrain

EmailBrain, which was bought by Dotster two years ago, is a good, solid service that’s chock-full of features, such as some very robust reporting such as unique vs. total links clicked, or how many people chose to forward the email to a friend. Their “Periodic Plans” provide you a certain number of “credits”. The smallest plan, for example, is $9.95 a month for 2,000 credits. That means you can email 2,000 contacts once a month, or 1,000 contacts twice a month, or 500 contacts four times a month, and so on.

LetterPop

I love how you don’t need to sign up for LetterPop to try out their email newsletter builder, 289 templates (at last count) that can be dragged and dropped and edited to your heart’s content. It does seem that they’ve gone to great lengths to simplify the process of email marketing for users, with nice touches like Flickr integration. They currently have five easy-to-understand plans, starting with a free plan of 10 newsletters a year to 25 subscribers.

Mad Mimi

Of all the email services I’ve listed here, Mad Mimi has got to be my favorite- and not just because of their adorable big-haired, horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing mascot, but because it’s an absolute gem of a service. Easy to use? Undoubtedly. Powerful? Amazingly. Gorgeous themes and templates, truly useful tracking reports.. can you tell how much I like this service? They offer four monthly plans, starting at $8 for 500 contacts, as well as a free plan of 100 contacts.

Nouri.sh

Nouri.sh is a little different from the other services I’ve listed here: they offer blog-powered newsletters, which means that they basically take your RSS feed and convert it to a newsletter. Which also means that you don’t have to create separate email newsletters at all, yay! I’ll admit that at first I was worried about how the finished emails would look, but thanks to some good customization and branding options, they look just fine (note: the free plan does not include custom templates). More than fine, actually. But one of the things I like the most about Nouri.sh is their WordPress plug-in, which among other things will allow you to add a quick subscription widget to your blog and track the number of subscribers and campaign data. There are five plans available, including a Free plan that includes up to 1,000 emails a month.

What email marketing services or tools do you use or recommend to clients?

Five Free Apps for a New PC

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Did you get a new PC for Christmas? Blazing fast, with all the bells and whistles, perhaps with a shiny new widescreen monitor? I didn’t. What I do have is a brand spanking new Windows XP partition on my trusty old Macbook (thanks to Bootcamp).

Now I’ll admit: it was a fresh copy of The Sims 3: World Adventures, which runs much better on Windows than OSX, that got me here- but now that I am, I want to be able to do serious work on my Windows partition- with the help of these five apps, all fabulous and all free:

Notepad ++

A good text editor is probably the first thing I install on any new machine. Notepad Plus Plus has everything I need, from tabs to drag ‘n drop to macro recording. I love how lightweight it is, too- nothing fancy, but gets the job done wonderfully.

XAMPP

This was a no-brainer: with the heavy local WordPress testing I do, I use XAMPP on my Mac every day. That this gem of an app, which includes Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl, comes in a Windows version is something I’m truly grateful for.

WinSCP

Many people like Filezilla, a powerful and free FTP program, but I’ve always had a thing for WinSCP- it reminds me of back when I was doing all my work on a Pentium II (and paying a lot of money for 5 gigabytes of hard disk space!) It supports SFTP, has an integrated text editor, and stores your session information.

PHP Designer (Personal)

Among these apps, PHP Designer is my latest “discovery”- and now I have trouble imagining how I ever got along without it. It’s an IDE (or Integrated Development Environment) that makes PHP coding- even for non-programmers like myself- a breeze. It features a clean and simple interface, and wonderfully intuitive menus.

ScreenHunter Free

On OSX I rely on Snapz Pro X for my screen capturing needs, and was ecstatic to find ScreenHunter, a free and truly fabulous screen capture program for Windows. Installs in seconds, and does its job beautifully, allowing you to do everything from choosing what to capture, to where to save it, and more.

What are some of your favorite freeware apps?

10 Portable Apps for Web Designers & Developers

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I’ve posted before about web development freeware to download for times your workstation dies on you- and today I want to feature something even better: ten portable applications, to keep on a trusty USB drive. These are especially useful for workers who travel a lot, or even for the odd moments you absolutely must do work on a random machine that doesn’t have your usual apps installed.

  • Google Chrome (Win) and Firefox (Win / Mac)

    First up: portable browsers. Have these on your USB stick, and you’ll never be forced to use IE again.

  • Gimp Portable (Win / Mac)

    What I like most about Gimp is how easy it is to learn for someone accustomed to Photoshop. It installs easily, is very well documented, and is a powerful image editor. (If Gimp is overkill for your needs, check out my recent feature on online photo editors).

  • Inkscape (Win / Mac)

    Most designers are more dependent on Illustrator than Photoshop, which is why Inkscape, an Vector Graphics Editor, is such a killer portable app. It may not be as powerful (yet) as other Vector Graphics applications, but it will definitely get most jobs done- and it’s Open Source.

  • Filezilla (Win) and Cyberduck (Mac)

    I’m not sure what it is, but I always seem to forget to keep portable FTP programs with me- this in spite of the fact that my FTP program is probably the top third most-used application in my daily workflow. Filezilla, fast and powerful, is good for Windows- and for Mac my choice is the Open Source Cyberduck.

  • OpenOffice (Win) and AbiWord (Mac)

    Because most of my clients send me content in Microsoft Word documents, I always have either OpenOffice or AbiWord, both free apps which support MS Word docs, on hand. If you haven’t looked at OpenOffice lately, check out all the new features that make this office suite a true contender. Of course, you can always use Google Docs, although I’ve found that the latter won’t open some Word docs for me.

  • Nvu HTML Editor (Win / Mac)

    For emergency HTML editing, you can’t go wrong with Notepad, of course- but an app like Nvu is nice as well. I like to think of Nvu as somewhere in between the plainness of Notepad and the powerfulness of Dreamweaver. *Note: Apparently, Nvu Portable is no longer being updated. Try KompoZer (here or here) instead. Thanks, Uri!

  • SyncPAppX (Mac)

    Finally, I couldn’t complete this list without mentioning SyncPAppx, a nifty little app (for Mac users) that synchronizes Portable Safari, Portable Mail, Portable iCal, Portable Address Book, and Portable iChat to the ones on your local machine. It syncs user preferences for all these apps, which makes for a lot less headache.

Do you use portable apps?

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