This is one of those programs you just happen to stumble upon but you know you have to at least give it a shot. Mario Paint Composer allows you to create your own Nintendo inspired tune using the old SNES Mario Paint-ish layout. Even if you don’t have a musical skill in your entire body, it is fun just to drag and drop things onto the board and then hit play.
It is both Mac and Windows friendly too. Just download, unzip and you’ll be off on your own music creating adventure. Here is an example video I found via the ‘ol YouTube:
When looking at your basic FTP file listing in a browser, it can be a ‘bit on the dull and boring side. Why not spice that up with a custom user style? If you have Stylish for Firefox installed - and pick up the “FTP pages were awful” style you could even make them look this pretty…
No more ugly black and white boring listings for me, I like this much better. Not only does it look better but it is also much more functional too.
If you are looking for free software that makes creating an RSS feed as easy as filling in a few blanks inside of a program, then look no further than RSS Builder. This simple program will make it easy to generate an RSS feed for your web site.
It provides an easy to use interface that gives you the ability to add, edit and customize topics, links, headlines and more. Once you are done generating the feed you can upload it to your server with the built in FTP tool. It also supports podcasting feeds too.
All in all, RSS Builder does a great job at making the confusing world of XML and RSS make sense, by wrapping it all in a blanket of easy to understand freeware goodness.
If you need an alternative to RSS Builder you might check out FeedSpring - another free solution to generating RSS feeds.
Ok, maybe I am a little behind the times - or am very careful before I give Microsoft the fair shake. Whatever my reason was, I never tried Windows Live Writer till the other day. I figured it would be like every other blog updater I’ve seen out there. It would do everything but (insert feature here). Well, I am happy to say that Windows Live Writer does it all - and does it well.
I am damned impressed with the entire product. I hate to sound like an anti-Microsoft goon, but it is a little hard to believe they developed such a nice product. (Just in case any of the Microsoft guys are reading, really don’t mean that as a back handed compliment) It worked with WordPress right off the bat too with no problems at all.
Inserting pictures into posts is as easy as dragging the image from the desktop of folder into the main editing window of Live Writer. It gets automatically uploaded, just as any other image would to my hosting account. The in-dept draft feature is nice too. I can save as a draft here on my machine, or on the server.
The only downside I have found (and this might be more my fault than Microsoft’s) is the Web Layout preview doesn’t work that well with all of the various places I write. Other than that though I would highly encourage any and all to go check it out if you haven’t. Windows Live Writer is definitely worth your time for sure and won’t cost you any money.
I was searching for a way I could view media files recorded on my Vista machine (through Media Center) and found this beauty of a freeware program. The Windows Essentials Codec Pack gives you the an easy way to play just about any audio or video type in Windows Media Player.
After installing it, just try to open the file in question via Windows Media Player and it should work. If it isn’t already the default player for that type of file, just dragging and dropping the media file into there should work too.
Want to see how popular you are on the Web? I recently found a pretty neat program that checks your popularity against some other web sites that you might be competing against for eyeballs out there on the Web. Link Popularity Check does an alright job and giving you the facts and figures you need.
Once you get Link Popularity Check installed, this is the type of readout they deliver to you:
The positive of this program is it gives you a nice visual representation of where you stand out there with some of your competitors. It searches Google, HotBot, AllTheWeb and MSN search. The downside is that you have to put up with some advertisements and be careful not to give your e-mail address to their “newsletter”. As you can see a lot of information there to comb through to find out what is working and what you might need to work on.
This is one of those programs you just happen to stumble upon but you know you have to at least give it a shot. Mario Paint Composer allows you to create your own Nintendo inspired tune using the old SNES Mario Paint-ish layout. Even if you don’t have a musical skill in your entire body, it is fun just to drag and drop things onto the board and then hit play.
If you are looking for free software that makes creating an RSS feed as easy as filling in a few blanks inside of a program, then look no further than 
