geeky tutorials, tips, guides and reviews
The forum script phpBB might be the king of kings when it comes to free forum scripts. However, the script itself if often susceptible to security problems and hacks due to its success. So, with that said you might be looking for an alternative to this message board suite.
There is nothing wrong with have a few more scripts to choose from, and there are many great forums scripts in the sea. Here are some of the best phpBB alternatives out there.
Over on the Web Hosting Show, I have been talking all week long about our good ‘ol departed friend, Geocities. After looking back at what went wrong, and what was or was not done, one thing can be said for certain. The main reason Geocities fell is because they failed to innovate.
If you too want to follow the rise and fall of this free hosting giant, check out these articles and be sure to download the accompanying podcast too.
You might have heard of Geocities in passing, however if you are new to the Web, or the way things once were – all this concern about a free hosting service might be a little confusing. So I figured, what better way to pay tribute to the web host that once was, than to give you a history lesson in Geocities.
Saving Geocities for Future Generations
In an effort to save the content that was on Geocities, a group calling themselves the Archive Team is working hard to save the Web that way it once was. Time to pack away the animated gifs, blinking text, and web rings into their own individual boxes, so that someday we can look back what was once considered, “cool” in web site design.
Alternatives to Geocities Hosting
With the word that Geocities would be closing, “sometime in 2009” many of the Geocities users are looking for other places to host their content. Even though Geocities is closing the door on it’s free hosting, there are still many free hosting alternatives to Geocities.
The reasons as to why Yahoo! dropped the ball with Geocities will be a great debate over the next year or so. However, I feel the main reason Geocities ended up fading off into the sunset is that Yahoo failed to evolve the product into what people needed.
For more web hosting podcasts, interviews, tips and more be sure to check out WebHostingShow.com. It is tons of fun!
Looking to setup a new wiki, but don’t know which script you should pick up to do the dirty work? Many might say that MediaWiki is the best and the most popular, since it is what is used to run Wikipedia. However, there are some great alternative wiki scripts you might have (or might not have) even seen before.
DokuWiki – Aimed at creating documentation of any kind, DokuWiki is a standards compliant wiki with more than a few nice features. It has anti-spam controls, all the basic editing features, supports over 30 languages and has built in page caching for quicker page rendering. It also features a number of plugins and themes to try too.
BoltWire – A small and easy to use alternative wiki script, Boltwire is still able to deliver with surprising flexibility. The neat thing here is that it has database-like storage and retrieval of form input values. But no database! You can also restore a deleted page at any time, and customize ever site action from within the browser.
WikyBlog – So it is a blog and a wiki? Well I wouldn’t say it is both as much as it tries to fuse the best of both worlds. WikyBlog brings in the user friendly publishing characteristics of blogs, delivered with the easy to use wiki syntax. Designed with speed in mind, it is a groupware application that is a nice alternative to the more traditional wiki scripts out there.
WikkaWiki – I promise this wiki script has nothing to do with voodoo or magic. The WikkaWiki is a script that was forked from WakkaWiki. With speed, extendibility and security in mind, this wiki script deserves your attention. They are also working on better ways to integrate WikkaWiki into other content management systems like WordPress, SMF, phpBB and more.
PmWiki – Taking a different approach to content management, Pm wiki looks and acts like a normal web site. The only difference is that each page inside of the site has an “edit” link to make modification of the page easier. You can limit the editing to just one person, a team of people or the entire world. This script would be for people who want a web page, with some wiki-like features.
Which wiki script is your favorite? Is MediaWiki still the hands down winner to you? Would love to hear more about your own experiences with any of these top alternatives to MediaWiki.
Want to share your art, your photos or your digital creations via Twitter? There are a lot of ways to get the task down, however here are the seven best image sharing sites that aim themselves at the tweeter on the street.
Know of another you love to use, but didn’t make it on the list? Leave it in the comments.
For some unknown reason, Google Browser Sync decided to go wacky on me yesterday. Kept getting disconnected and 502 error codes. The browser sync had never done me wrong before – but I can’t afford not to be connected between my machines. So I set out for a long search to try to find an alternative and a replacement.
Meet the contenders…
Foxmarks – There is no tool out there that does everything GBS does, but the main thing I need is bookmark syncing. Foxmarks did do the work – only problem was it was confusing to setup. I wasn’t sure if I was uploading or downloading, syncing or unsyncing. I’m sure if I spent time with it – it might have made sense, but if I can’t figure it out in five minutes – I’m probably not going to use it.
Online Bookmark Manager – This is another Firefox extension solution with a free hosted space. I would say if folks like the idea behind Foxmarks but want a different route to go, OBM is worth a shot. Still didn’t do what I needed it to do though.
Bookmarks Synchronizer – This is a Firefox extension that let you connect to an FTP/WebDAV server and synchronize your bookmarks that are stored in an XML file. Nice, but still did not cut the cake for me. This is yet another solution like Foxmarks and OBM – but no free hosting for the backups.
If not these, who did you go with for bookmark syncing?
All of these were good solutions, but I decided to give the del.icio.us Bookmarks extension a shot. I moved all my PC bookmarks over to del.icio.us and I have to say I like it thus far.
All the “secret” bookmarks I have set to hide from the public – and it was easy enough to setup on both my desktop PC and my notebook computer. This extension totally replaces your standard bookmarking and replaces it with del.icio.us.
The whole thing is very fast as well – they much cache some of the results, because I can hardly even notice this is “integrated with the Web” at all.
I played some this afternoon with Eurekster Swicki. I have been looking for an alternative to Google search for searching my own Web sites. Seeing that some big Web sites have been using Eurekster Swicki for a while, (Lockergnome and Tech Crunch come to mind) I thought I would give them a shot.
As far as set up and the first configurations go, that all went fast and smooth. No complaints there. Now in the department of customization?
I would rather poke myself in the eyes with sharp sticks than try to tackle that again.
I might give them a shot once they have advanced the style customizations (like the search results Web pages), but right now I would say stay far away unless you want to waste a few hours trying to figure out how to hack around with overlaying your CSS and code on top of the basic Web page results they give you.
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Mitch Keeler is nothing more than your average Joe trying to leave his mark on the world though both his professional work and his online projects, articles, podcasts and more.
