Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

Most of us don’t mind giving up a small part of our privacy for our personal protection (airport scanners), or a good deal (loyalty shopping programs). We even voluntarily sign up for social networking sites that track every move we make and then sell aggregate information to marketers. But what about all the times we’re on the web and are not really sure about what search and browsing activities our ISP, or other company or agency is tracking?

(Let’s be realistic: the only way to not be tracked in any way online is to not go on online at all. Actually, you’d better leave your computer turned off, because many applications and programs on your computer automatically check for software updates and also track and record meta data. )

Tor is free software and an open network that claims to help you defend against a form of network surveillance that “threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships. It prevents your traffic from being analyzed by distributing your transactions over several places on the internet, so no single point can link you to your destination.” Maybe not every ISP uses traffic monitoring services – do you know if yours does? Even if you think it doesn’t, it’s a good idea to never search for your social security number and name, or passwords with any personal info. And if you’re a Tor user, please let us know how the service is working for you and what you had to give up to use it. In other words, what are the pros and cons of using Tor?

More free security resources…

Search millions of conversations from social networks, blogs and other social media channels with BackType.com. You’ll also see what’s currently popular and being talked about on the web. This is not the only search engine for social media websites, but one more useful tool when it comes to tracking trends and brands.

Internet user statistics and language statistics from around the world can be found at the InternetWorldStats.com website. There are internet statistics from each of the seven continents and the countries within each continent. The website also offers population numbers per country, internet users and number of broadband connections within each country. Statistics are kept up-to-date and compared to year 2000 numbers. What an incredible growth the internet has had since then!

Create your own social news website with the free service at SlinkSet.com. Add feeds from your favorite blogs (or your own website) and allow people to add their own items as well. You get a custom URL and within your settings you can decide to make the site public or private, who gets to post and have admin privileges and more. You can also ustomize layout and colors to your liking, add a logo and off you go!

Search for keywords inside Twitter bios is made simple with the search feature on TweepSearch’s website. Native Twitter search covers lots of types of searches already, but if you’re looking for specific keywords within Twitter accounts’ bios, it’s impossible to get clear results. For example, try a Twitter search for ‘webdesigner’ and you’ll see that unless you use the keyword ‘webdesigner’ as your actual name, you won’t come up in the search results at all. TweepSearch lets you search within the bios of the followers of a specific user, or all the bios on Twitter in general.

Track your website’s keywords throughout the social media world with SamePoint. It pulls up results from user generated content such as blogs, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Wikipedia, Simpy, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, Facebook and other sites. Use this site to see what people are publishing in real-time and what’s trending. What makes this different from simply going to the usual search engines for results, is that these results are in real time. Even though the major search engines are also adding real time results, their main results still come from data bases. SamePoints’ results are not just useful for marketers, but also for finding new sites for back links and to track what people are saying about your brand.

Experiment with different colors and images with the easy to work background designer tool at BGPatterns. Scale, rotate and change the opacity of the images, as well as the overall background texture and color. The tool works in ‘real time’ and there is no need to refresh the page with each change. You can choose from BGPattern images, or download your own.

Browse through thousands of pre-colored seamless pattern backgrounds at PatternCooler. All artwork on this site can be used freely for web and graphic design projects, blogs, Twitter, scrapbooking, MySpace profiles, mobile phone wallpapers etc. The site offers some great retro and modern designs:

Find beautifully done realistic paper and cover textures at DesiznTech. These textures are scanned from real papers, then edited in Photoshop for color balance and effect. You get old paper texture, notebook cover texture, grunge paper texture and even textures with an old gummy price sticker on it. The torn spiral bound papers, wrinkled and three hole punched ones are also very realistic and fun to work with.

For all textures click here.

You can register up to 5 websites for free at AreMy SitesUp.com, which will send you an SMS alert to your cell phone if your site is down. You can add and delete sites with an iPhone app, but more frequent monitoring and more advanced features like RSS checks and Twitter integration required a paid plan.