Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

If you’re looking for an image management solution for your WordPress blog, you may want to give NEXTGen by Alex Rabe a try. It features sortable albums, watermark function, support for popular image effects, multiple CSS stylesheets, slideshow and a sidebar widget. Here’s a live view of this image gallery plugin.

‘Lorem Ipsum’ is dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry and with the random text generator Lipsum you can create some for your website in progress. You can define the text by number of paragraphs, words, bytes and lists. You can also create dummy banners with it. Even though lorem ipsum is referred to as dummy text, it has its roots in a piece of classical Latin literature written by Cicero in 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old.

Making all external links on your blog open into a new window is easy with the help of the SEM External Links plugin for WordPress. This plugin will also change your links to rel=”nofollow” or add an external link icon.

Create a color palette from any picture with Pictaculous. It creates a color palette from your image (5 swatches) and also offers ten suggestions for color themes to go with the image. You can then download the palettes as an Adobe swatch file, or e-mail it to yourself. You can also use the service from your cell phone.

We’ve tried Pictaculous with a photo taken on PhotoBooth – see results below:

Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality. Optimizing images for the web will drastically cut down page loading time.

After Smush.it runs on a web page it reports how many bytes would be saved by optimizing the page’s images and provides a downloadable zip file with the minimized image files. Smush.it is part of YSlow Firefox add-on and can be downloaded here.

Submit the lamest, stupidest, funniest or weirdest posts you come across on Facebook to Lamebook. Nervous about your own posts showing up? Don’t worry, images are blurred and links are not clickable Lameness is rated by the lamemeter up to 5 thumbs down.

If you regularly work with different programming languages, you might like using the free open source Komodo Edit; it supports PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and Tcl, plus JavaScript, CSS, HTML and template languages like RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django. It features autocomplete and calltips, multi-language file support, syntax coloring and syntax checking, Vi emulation, Emacs key bindings. Additionally, Komodo is available for Linux, Windows, Mac.

W3’s link checker tool is very simple, but works well. There are lots of link checkers out there, but many have limits on how many pages they’ll check, or you have to create an account and log in to use it. Depending on how big your site is, this free tool will take several minutes to check your site’s links. It will also generate suggestions on how to fix issues it uncovers.

Photos from Picapp have been collected from major companies and ‘cleared’ for free use by the public. A very useful feature is that you can search ‘creative’ for generic pictures of a turkey dinner for example, or search ‘editorial’ for news related pictures, which brought up our troops in Iraq eating a turkey dinner. You can choose the size of the picture and also get a thumbnail. Picapp recently added a plugin for Wordpress that let’s you choose images from within your admin.

The downside is that code you get from Picapp automatically includes a link named ‘Gallery’ which takes your visitor away from your site for more related pictures. The related pictures are presented on a page with a short snippet about the picture and advertising:

The editorial search for ‘turkey dinner’ yielded this photo:

A creative search for ‘turkey dinner’ brought up this picture:

If you’re simply trying to record a brainstorm session of yours, or you’re creating a presentation for your next project, you may want to give Mapul a try. The presets are intuitive and let you get right to work. You can also customize colors, font, size and more. Basic editing tools are available within the map or within the toolbar at the top. Requires installation of Silverlight (Mac or PC).