Forms are used on websites to gather information and can sometimes be a pain to put together.  The most common form we all see out there is usually somebody’s “contact me” page. For the low cost of $3, you can get a day pass which allows you to export all you can in 24 hours.  This is really a bargain in comparison to the money and time somebody would charge you and take to do the same task by hand. When you are done building your form, you have several export options too.   They’ll hand you HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP to make the form work.

When push comes to shove, FormBakery saves you a lot of time. Don’t waste your time with a lot of repetitive and laborious work.  Go visit them at their website, and try building your own form for your website today.

First things first, you can now log into the service using more than just your Twitter handle.  You can now sign in with your Google login information as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, or Windows Live.  The only thing you have to remember is once you sign in via one of these other accounts, you will need to remember how you signed in before.  (So if you log in via Twitter, always log in via Twitter) 

The also have decided to provide a little more optimized experience when it comes to video playback with their own universal player.  Whenever somebody is viewing your content for their phone (just as an example) they should get a player optimized for mobile devices. When somebody check out your videos via their desktop machines, they get delivered a version of the player that is more optimized for desktop playback.  You can also choose to publish your videos to YouTube (although, depending on the resolution of the video – this may look great or really crummy) or download the video as a .mp4 for backup purposes. 

Here is a quick video to show off some more of the new features:

If you haven’t played around with Screenr yet, there really isn’t any reason not to anymore.  They make it brain-dead simple to get your quick screencast you want to create from your imagination to the public at large.

When people ask me for my favorite way to add all those sharing buttons on a website, my answer is almost always AddThis.  They provide the most tools in the best looking way – and isn’t that what most webmasters are looking for these days?  If you need a way to add and track your social sharing buttons – AddThis is definitely the best route to take.

Just a few short years ago, I would tell you just to copy and paste the code for the button to your website.  Plain and simple, right?  Well, thanks to the fact that AddThis adds a lot of customization to how you can add these sharing buttons to your website – the best thing I can do for you is point you towards their button generator. 

From there, you select where you want to put your buttons (your website, Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress and more). Next, you select the style of buttons you wish to use.  Last, you decide if you want to enable clickback analytics, so that you can get statistics on how people are sharing your content.  Once you are happy with how things look, hit the "Get the Code" button.  The rest of the process is pretty straight forward.

I have tried just about every social sharing button website out there, and nobody beats AddThis when it comes to making the process nice and simple.  They are the best place to grab your "Share on Twitter" or "Like on Facebook" style buttons – hands down.

Having played with the script for a few weeks, I can tell you that Vanilla offers a great and unique forum package for your website.  A few weeks ago, I set it up for the forums I added to Firefox Facts and I really could not be happier with it.  It seems to almost do everything that I need, plus it keeps things really straight to the point.  Vanilla might be the best forum script for people who don’t want their forums to look like the next guy’s.

The Vanilla forums script it open-source, standards-compliant, and totally customizable to suit your needs.  They also give you all the tools you need to migrate from other forum scripts, if needed too. 

Here is a little more about the Vanilla forum script, from the developers:

Vanilla is an open-source, pluggable, themable, multi-lingual community-building solution. It is specially made to help small communities grow larger through SEO mojo, totally customizable social tools, and great user experience. Vanilla is also built with integration at the forefront, so it can seamlessly integrate with your existing website, blog, or custom-built application.

Some other neat features include:

• Embed Vanilla – Allows you to simply embed your forum installation into a website, like you would a YouTube video.  Just copy and paste the embed code in on the page, and you are done.
• Social Connect – This feature lets users sign into your community forums with their favorite social network.  It has built in support for Facebook, Twitter, Google and OpenID.

Want to see my own install of Vanilla forums in action? Go check out support.firefoxfacts.com. Who knows? I might be adding forums to Mitchelaneous sometime soon too.

Overall I would say if you are looking for a really simple forum script to add a little more functionality to your website, Vanilla is the best way to go.  You can check it out, and download it for your own hosting account from VanillaForums.org.

The best feature of this camcorder has to be that it is really simple to use.  You honestly point it in the direction you want to film and then push the big red shinny button on the back.

Here is a sample video I took of my dog a few months back, so you can get an idea of the video quality.

Here are some of the other features worth mentioning too:

• Easy-to-use, pocket-sized HD camcorder featuring one-touch recording and digital zoom
• Simple user interface lets you start capturing HD video just seconds after powering on
• Captures 120 minutes of HD video on 8 GB of built-in memory; no tapes or additional memory cards required
• Convenient flip-out USB arm plugs directly into your PC or Mac to launch FlipShare software
• Pre-installed FlipShare software lets you easily email videos, edit individual clips, make custom movies, capture still photos from video, and even upload video to sharing sites like YouTube and MySpace
• FlipShare’s advanced compression technology allows for quick and easy sharing of high-resolution HD video in compact-sized files (via email or publishing online)
• Comes with Flip Video rechargeable AA battery pack (recharges when connected to USB); also supported by standard AA batteries
• Large 2-inch anti-glare color LCD screen to play back and delete videos
• HDMI output (mini-HDMI connector) makes it simple to watch video on your HDTV
• Video: 16:9 widescreen, HD 720p (1280 x 720) at 30 frames per second (fps) progressive scan; recorded as MP4 files

Now, I can’t hold a camcorder steady to save my life – but for people like me, you can easily screw a tripod into the bottom of the camcorder for hands free recording.

Overall, it has been a few months now, and I think I made the right purchasing decision. Having recorded more than a few birthday parties, and just my nephews and niece messing around the the backyard and can really say nothing but good things about the Flip UltraHD Camcorder.

If you are looking for a powerful content management system with tons of bells and whistles, Drupal might be in your future.  Equipped with tons of great features, it makes for the perfect way to get a CMS powered website up and running.

Drupal comes in handy when you need to develop a website that you can evolve in almost any direction.  Where a script like WordPress is pretty much best suited for blogging, Drupal is more suited for a site that has many features such as blogs, maybe a shopping cart, a wiki, a membership system and more.  It is also very easy to configure Drupal to interact with other websites or technologies out there too.

Right out of the box, Drupal comes ready to deliver forums, blogs, polls, image galleries and comments.  With a little creativity and skill, you can really develop a one of a kind website with this free open-source script.

You really get the best of both world with this awesome CMS.  You get the sophisticated programming backend for developers, and a really basic website installation and administration process for those who just want to run a website.

Overall, if you need an all-in-one content management system to organize your website with, Drupal is the script you want.  It is flexible, widely supported, and is often overlooked.  You can learn more about Drupal over at drupal.org.

Feedlooks is a very interest new way to subscribe to your favorite website RSS feeds, and keep track of when they have new posts to check out.  Rather than serving as a separate webpage you visit to keep up with RSS subscriptions, Feedlooks comes with you to each website you want to visit.

Now, I know that might sound a little strange, so let me explain.  After looking in you get your standard interface that is simple, to the point and does not mess around with too much visual candy.

So where is the excitement? When you click on one of these preview links for the RSS feed you are subscribed to, it will take you directly to the page the post is on.  So how do you get back to the Feedlooks service?  It stays loaded as a web-based toolbar across the top of the page.

Want to get back to your list of feeds you need to read? Just click the “Home” section at the top and it pops back up with more headlines for you to check out.  Once you are done checking your feeds – you don’t have to mark the ones you have not checked out yet as read to get rid of them.   Simply close Feedlooks. New items added since you last checked will show under the default category “New”.

As a website publisher, this is really exciting to me because I like the idea of bringing more people in to see my content on my actual website.

Overall, I have high hopes for this great new service.  You can sign up and check it out at Feedlooks.com.  This is the first RSS reader to give Google Reader a run for its money in a long time.

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.

SMF – I had no knowledge of Simple Machine Forum till I had to use it when I used to work at Lunarpages.  Now, I really love it.  It is a free professional grade forum script with all the bells and whistles.

FluxBB – With a proven track resourced when it comes to security and stability, FluxBB is another great script to try. FluxBB was designed as a lighter, faster alternative to some of the traditional feature heavy forum applications.

Vanilla – If you are looking for a forum script that gives you a different appearance than your average message boards can provide, give Vanilla a try.

bbPress – Love WordPress?  Then you might want to try out bbPress.  This is forum software put out by the same people who brought you the blogging script WordPress.  It shares many of the same great features.

UseBB – This next choice is a light and Open Source PHP and MySQL based forum package, distributed freely under the GPL license. Developed with simplicity and usability in mind, UseBB is ideal for small to medium sized websites which need a clear and efficient forum script.

AEF – The full name of AEF is Advanced Electron Forum. This bulletin board software is free software. It is written in PHP and MySQL. AEF has a very simple and easy to use Administration Panel and installing this software is a piece of cake!

PunBB – There is nothing funny about this suggestion.  PunBB is one of the fastest and most lightweight PHP-powered discussion board scripts out there.  It is written to be less graphically intensive too.

IceBB – IceBB is a powerful, fast, free, and open-source forum solution powered by the free PHP and MySQL. IceBB scales well, no matter how many users or posts, due to it’s clean and efficient code.

NinkoBB – Last, but not least this script is an open source forum script written in the PHP language and uses a MySQL Database. Small in size, big in features, and still simple as can be.

BONUS – miniBB – This small, yet powerful forum script is perfect for when and where you need just a simple forum without 1,000 extra bells and whistles your users don’t want or need.  Might be the best simple forum out there.

Now this is no nock to phpBB, which is a perfectly fine forum script for some people out there. It is time though some of the other choice out there got some time in the sun too.  Did I miss your favorite thread starting online tool?  Let me know in the comments.

Need to share a screencast in a hurry?  Have a Twitter account?  Screenr will help you create and share your own mini tutorials from your desktop with the world.  The benefit here is that you can use a web-based recorder, on Macs or PCs to share how to do something or how something might look.

Here is the video tutorial I created, while testing out the service:

Screenr is simply the easiest of the online desktop screen capture solutions out there to use. All you have to do is hit the record button, choose the size you want to record and start capturing.  While I did not, you can also record a video track if you want to do commentary as you record. I like the fact that you can also download the video (as a .mp4 file) or publish to YouTube too.  I wish the video screen was a ‘bit more customizable, but hopefully that will be a feature to come in the future.

Once you are ready to publish, you can instantly share it on Twitter – or wait, and publish it elsewhere first.  You can tell the target for this tool is to be another Twitter companion, however you don’t have to use it that way if you don’t want to.  The developers have kept that part of the equation very free and open.

When push comes to shove, I could see myself using this tool again to create more quick tutorials.  Screenr is simple, to the point, and doesn’t waste your time with fluff.

Free file sharing sites are a dime a dozen out there, however every so often one catches my eye.  S4ve.as allows you to upload any tile of any size for free and get a link back to it that remains good for 24 hours.  So if you need to quickly send a big file to a friend, this offers itself up as a great solution.

Once you get the link, copy and past it anywhere and share it instantly via e-mail, web page, instant message, status update, tweet, etc. Links are automatically shortened using bit.ly.

The only catch that some people might not like is the link is only live for 24 hours, after that the files in question are removed.  However, if you need a quick way to share anything – S4ve.as is an option better than most.