Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

Start your own question and answer site easily with free open source software at osqa.net. Use this software for homework sites, product support or as a help desk feature. This question and answer engine features a voting system, social networking functions including private messaging, search, the ability to import data from a Stack Exchange site, support for widgets, themes, the ability to embed videos, audio and images, automatic site activity reports, export data and more.

If you need a simple open source Q&A solution for your website, give Question2Answer a try. This is a dedicated question and answer solution and not just a simplified forum. It features a five minute install, easy CSS themes, search engine, e-mail notifications, voting, comments and follow-up questions, categories and tags and is scalable to millions of posts. This question and answer software is licensed under GNU GPL. According to the site the Q&A platform has been installed over 1000 times.

For a fully customizable web chat software try BlueImp’s open source AJAX Chat which is implemented in JavaScript, PHP and MySQL. AJAX Chat features:

multiple channels, private messaging and channels, invitation system, banning offending users, online users, emoticons, optional Flash sound support, clickable hyperlinks, enable/ disable guest users, possibility to define opening hours for the chat, IRC style commands, flood control, automatic adjustment of displayed time to local client timezone, easy layout customization through stylesheets (CSS) and template system, persistent client-side settings, message character counter, sample phpBB2, phpBB3, MyBB, PunBB, SMF, vBulletin integration provided, realtime monitoring and logs viewer, support for unicode (UTF-8) and non-unicode content types, bandwidth saving update calls (only updated data is sent), well commented Source Code and much more.

Developed with Security as integral part, AJAX Chat is built to prevent Code injections, SQL injections, Cross-site scripting (XSS), Session stealing and other attacks.

AJAX Chat is released free of charge under the GNU Affero General Public License.

Flash and ActionScript 3.0 user interface components can take lots of time to create, so why not use some ready-made, open source starter components, like the ones on MinimalComps.com ? The components on this site are lightweight, but extremely small and easy to use. In fact, the site is created purely with Minimal Components and comes in at about 60kb for the whole site! Choose from sliders, calendars, bar charts, numeric steppers, draggable windows, VSliders, HSliders, text areas, knobs and more. You can find more info on MinimalComps on Keith Peters’ blog at Bit-101.com.

For issues about computer hardware or computer software visit SuperUser.com to ask questions, post answers, or simply browse.

For specific programming problems, software algorithm, software tools commonly used by programmers and matters that are unique to the programming profession, visit StackOverflow.com.

If you have questions about servers, networks, ‘many’ desktop PCs (other than your own), visit ServerFault.com.

If you’re a web designer and you have questions about anything related to web and e-mail design, visit Doctype.com.

With all of these sites, if you have a specific question, it may save you a lot of time if you search first to see if your question has already been answered. Logging in is not required with any of these sites, but with registration you get to offer points to have your questions answered more quickly. These websites are collaboratively edited (like wikipedia), but all edits are tracked.

If you’re looking for a free graphics manipulation software to download, try Gimp. It’s an excellent retouching program lets you fix perspective distortion caused by lens tilt and eliminate lens’ barrel distortion and vignetting; it offers a clone and healing tool for retouching photos as well as a perspective clone tool and a orthogonal clone tool. But it can also be used as a simple paint program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP also offers various input devices out of the box, like pressure and tilt sensitive tablets, but also a wide range of USB or MIDI controllers. The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows to extend GIMP’s format capabilities with a plug-in.

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

Features are:

* Painting
o Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
o Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
o Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
o Supports custom brushes and patterns
* System
o Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
o Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
* Advanced Manipulation
o Full alpha channel support
o Layers and channels
o Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
o Editable text layers
o Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
o Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
o Foreground extraction tool
o Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
o Transformable paths, transformable selections.
o Quickmask to paint a selection.
* Extensible
o A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
o Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
o Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
o Over 100 plug-ins already available
* Animation
o Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
o MNG support
o Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
* File Handling
o File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
o Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
o SVG path import/export

If you’re a professional, run a small business or you’re simply looking for free accounting software, you might want to give GnuCash a try.

GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Download GnuCash here.

The interface is simple, but the software offers everything you’d expect from financial accounting software, like the ability to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. The site itself has in-depth tutorials and also glossaries for software and financial terms.

Features include:

* QIF/OFX/HBCI Import, Transaction Matching
* Reports, Graphs
* Scheduled Transactions
* Financial Calculations

* Double-Entry Accounting
* Stock/Bond/Mutual Fund Accounts
* Small-Business Accounting
* Customers, Vendors, Jobs,
Invoices, A/P, A/R

If it’s time to once again upgrade your latest word processor, spreadsheet or other office software, and you’re reluctant to spend hefty fees to do so, you may want to consider OpenOffice, the free and open office productivity suite. If you’re already using another office software package, OpenOffice will most likely be able to read these files. OpenOffice can be downloaded and used entirely free of any licence fees. It is released under the LGPL licence which means you may use it for any purpose – domestic, commercial, educational, public administration and install it on as many computers as you like.

If you have large documents on your site (incl. books), and you don’t want to make them available as a separate download, you could have them displayed in a browser instead. FlexPaper is an open source web based document viewer that uses Flash. It is delivered both as a stand alone flash application and as a Flex (SWC) library, so it can be integrated it into your application in different ways. Examples and use of FlexPaper.

Most of us don’t mind giving up a 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? (In repressed countries this becomes even more of an issue as one compromised e-mail can mean torture or death to the sender.)

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.” One of the ways Tor works is by sending your e-mails through several relays, so it’s impossible to find out where the e-mail originated and where it was meant to end up. 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.

More free security privacy resources…