Free For Your Site

Finally, an application that allows you to create great looking textures without having an ounce of artistic prowess. Too good to be true? It’s not hard to imagine with a program like Texture Processor.

The Texture Processor is exactly that: it creates textures. Since it’s freeware, you can create great looking texture without the need to shell out for a high-end image processing tool or even the expertise to manipulate images. Just download the zip file, extract and run the installation. After a few clicks, you’re on your way to creating eye-catching textures that can be used on your web site, your blog, or even as the wallpaper for your computer.

The mechanism behind the Texture Processor allows for an unlimited number of textures that you can create, even if you lack the artistic eye. Creating your own texture is just a point and click affair. Sliding bars to adjust settings are available for each setting. Use blobs, points, lines, curves, and a plethora of other available commands. Use a combination of settings and what do you get? Unlimited possibilities.

Despite the fact that exporting allows only for BMP files, the Texture Processor is a great addition to the arsenal of tools for any blogger or web designer.

The Texture Processor is compatible with Win9x/ME/2000/XP

Go to Texture Processor

You’ve been looking at the same icon for years. You’re tired of seeing the same boring animation in your web site over and over again. Need something new to look at? How about a lively addition to your site? Adobe Flash can help you in that department.

High quality icon sets from Adobe Flash are all yours for the taking. Just choose what format you’d like to download, then extract and customize away. Adobe Flash provides downloads for both PC and Mac users.

You can download the icons for personal use, such as replacing the ones you have in your desktop. But if you need icons for a website, icon sets under the PNG format are also available. These icon sets can be imported in your Flash stage to create stunning animations. Take note though, you have to ask permission from the artist if you want to use the icon sets for commercial purposes. In exchange for free, high quality icon sets, the deal is still a bargain. Whether you are a web designer, a blogger, or a simple PC or Mac user, a new look is just a download away.

Adobe Flash works on most browsers and offers downloads both for PC and Mac systems.

Go to Adobe Flash

It might be easy for big businesses to invest in advanced mailing lists software that sends thousands of e-mail everyday. But for the small entrepreneurs, it’s still the old-fashioned way of manually sending to multiple recipients. Tired of the old type-the-address, click-on-the-address-book routine? Then you might want to check out Vallen E-Mailer.

Vallen E-mailer is exactly that: a freeware e-mailer. The simple interface of Vallen gets the job done without the fancy visual frills. You can choose to send an e-mail written in plain or HTML text. You can even attach files if the need arises. To use Vallen, you just need to have in hand a list of e-mail addresses written on a text file. (You remembered to get their permission, right?) Create your e-mail, choose the text file containing the e-mail addresses, and press “Send.” You can send e-mail to hundreds or even thousands of recipients with a single click of a button. Need categories? Then create as many lists as needed and choose which list is appropriate for your e-mail. This is perfect if you want to publish a newsletter about new products and services.

If personalized e-mail isn’t much of an issue, then Vallen E-mailer can do the job for you.

Vallen E-mailer is compatible with Win9x/2000/XP.

Go to Vallen E-mailer

Baffled by the mystery of broken links? Then hire your own private eye to check it out. Xenu Link Sleuth is available anytime of the day and will accept any web site to investigate… for free.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a freeware application designed to check your web site for broken links. It spiders your site to create a comprehensive list of links and it alerts you if any broken ones are found. Finding where the break is also easy as you can sort the list through its multiple columns. It even provides an explanation why the link broke down. Downloaded as a setup file, just a few double clicks and you are ready to launch your private detective. Just key in your URL and wait for the process to be finished. Thanks to its multi-thread feature, the time to map the site is greatly reduced. It took the program just 4 seconds to check-out 45 URLs. The number of threads as well as what to output can be configured for greater speed and efficiency. Once you are done with the spidering, you can save the output as a text file for later evaluation. With Xenu Link Sleuth, cases of broken links are easily closed.

Xenu Link Sleuth is compatible with Win9x/2000/XP.

Go to Xenu Link Sleuth

Joining the ranks of free code editors, PSPad Editor is in a class of its own. Rivaling even some commercial software, this freeware packs quite a number of features to satisfy most editors’ hunger for usability. Downloaded as an installer file, getting to work with PSPad won’t take long. Just a couple of the usual setup pages and you’re good to go.

Pre-configured to highlight syntax from most of the popular programming languages such as PHP, SQL and VB to name a few, you won’t need a separate code editor for each of these languages. PSPad Editor can read, analyze and highlight them. Another nifty feature of PSPad is the integrated FTP client. No need to open another application once you’re done editing your codes in PSPad. Send them directly to your web server via FTP without even leaving the PSPad interface. While the usual Help tab will bring you a sort of tutorial for the software, PSPad’s Help tab gives you more than that. It allows you to check and validate your code without typing the URL of the validator in your browser. W3C, RSS as well as CSS validators are available to make sure that your page complies with the standard.

PSPad Editors’ many features and easy to understand interface makes code writing a real breeze.

PSPad Editor is a Windows application.

Go to PSPad Editor

Marketing your web site via the Internet is the most logical way to go for most online businesses. After all, your target audience is online, isn’t it? However, a little bit of offline advertising surely won’t hurt, especially if it’s targeted to netizens like in an Internet café and such. For some people, this sort of traditional ad placement may give a stronger of impact, especially if you plan to sell your products or services within your community. But before you go dashing out of the door in search of a seasoned graphic artist, check out Posteriza.

Posteriza is freeware that brings poster-making to a whole new level. Downloaded as a stand-alone program, no setup or installation whatsoever is required. Just unzip, double click, and you’re ready to create your posters. Converting a single image to poster size is as easy as 1-2-3. Just open the application, choose your image, type in the text you want to be seen in the poster and you’re done. No need for special paper because the software can print on regular sized sheets such as letter-sized and A4. To choose the size of your poster, just adjust the number of pages to be used and the calculations for the image will be done automatically. No need to compute height or width dimensions, the software automatically does that for you. To print, simply put the number of sheets needed in your printer and glue the edges together to create your whole poster. With Posteriza, posters just became a lot easier to create.

Posteriza is compatible with Win9x/2000/XP.

Go to Posteriza

Answering comments and questions of customers shows that you care for your clients. However, the hurdle is how to get the questions or comments of your customers. Having your email address in the web site is nice, but often ignored due to the additional effort of creating an email just for a single question. So if you want to ease the burden of your clients and look professional at the same time, try Hesk, your personal help desk software.

Hesk is a free PHP help desk tool that allows you to setup a ticket based support system. It makes use of MySQL server to store pertinent information regarding the ticket. To answer a customer’s ticket, a simple user interface where you can view new, pending, unanswered or reopened tickets is available. Canned replies are also available for those questions that seem to be asked over and over again. Installing Hesk is just a matter of unzipping the zip file on your web server and supplying the needed MySQL information. If you have Fantastico, then the process becomes even simpler. In a short period of time, you will have a professional looking support system that’s guaranteed to take any question or query from your customers without batting a single eyelash.

Hesk requires a web server with PHP 4.3.2 or newer installed, a MySQL database and an FTP client.

Go to Hesk

Having the right Flash menu in your site creates the impression of professionalism. With its smooth effects, it becomes a joy to navigate your site. FlashExtension is aware of this, that’s why they introduced the Picasso Flash Menu Builder.

Picasso Flash Menu Builder is designed to ease the creation of Flash menus. All you need to do with the Menu Builder is draw your buttons that will blend in with your site. Not into drawing? Then choose one of the ready made buttons available with the download. To use, just open up your Flash program and install the extension. Once installed, the component is now available and ready for editing.

A free copy is available as well as a paid version. The free copy has a small ad, located in the roll over. If you buy the product, you get the Flash object, as well as bonus themes. This expands your repertoire of possible flash menus. And whether you have the paid or the free copy, the amount of flash menus available to you is almost limitless. You can choose a menu that goes vertical or horizontal. Choose between pop-up submenus or drop downs. With the Picasso Flash Menu Builder, anyone can be an artist for their own site.

Picasso Flash Menu Builder v 1.0 is compatible with Win98/WinME/WinXP/Vista and requires Flash MX, Flash MX 2004, Flash 8 with the Extension Manager installed.

Go to Picasso Flash Menu Builder

Having a naming convention for your work files is always good practice, and Limagito makes it easy for you. Designed to automate the process of moving, copying and renaming of files, it’s your personal file manager that works constantly.

Limagito works with “threads” which are copy, move, or delete rules that tell the software what to do with certain files. Setting up different rules can range from being easy to moderately complex as it utilizes regular expressions. By default, Limagito scans the input directory every 5 seconds to check for any file changes or additions. Once a rule is triggered, it automates the move or copy process of the file. You can move files on another local directory, an FTP directory or if you are using a paid version, send it via email. With Limagito, you can rename files as they are moved. This feature is very useful for backup purposes as system time and date stamps are available. The lack of an extensive documentation is offset by the online basic tutorial available that can get you started with the basics easily.

The free copy of Limagito allows for a single moving rule but with all options available. The paid copy will allow for unlimited rules and the option to move the file via email. Limagito is a Windows application.

Go to Limagito

SEO is all about the battle of rankings, and one of your weapons to get on top is keywords. Checking how well you do for each keyword, however, can be very time consuming or expensive. If you want an easy way to check your ranking without paying an arm and a leg, you might want to consider Google Monitor.

Google Monitor is a freeware tool designed to check your site’s performance on a given keyword. It works by querying the Google search engine and it will return your web ranking. It can show you rank changes over time. Another feature of Google Monitor is the ability to check multiple keywords. Just add all the keywords relevant to the site provided and press OK. Once you have saved all the keywords, checking them is just a matter of point and click. Click on Search and it will return the top hits from Google. By default it lists the top 10 but you can check up to the top 500 sites.

Getting a clue from the name, it checks only Google rankings, foregoing other important sources such as Yahoo! and MSN. However, the results provided by Google Monitor are enough to give you a glimpse how well you are doing in the SEO race.

Google Monitor is compatible with Windows 9X/2K/XP/Vista.

Go to Google Monitor