No doubt that WordPress is the king of the hill when it comes to content management these days. It seems like in a lot of people’s eyes they can do no wrong. There have to a few other choices out there though right?
Now don’t get me wrong, I am totally happy with Wordpress - but, there are several cool alternatives that might be worth checking out for your next web project.
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.
