Hot Scripts website:
There are a lot of positive elements to this website, ranging from the excellent contents to the pleasing design. First, the color scheme, red with off-white and white for the content areas, combined with a few bright pops of green, is pretty perfect for conveying the theme of the website. The logo of a pepper enclosed in angle brackets is simple and clever, and that heat theme is translated to the rating system used to rank the quality of the resources available. Not that using a pepper scale to indicate whether something is super hot is unique, but I haven't necessarily seen the heat theme carried through an entire design quite like this. The designers definitely paid attention to the small details on this site and it makes for a pleasant browsing experience.
As for the contents, there is a blog section, design templates, and over 48 thousand scripts that can be searched. Realizing the magnitude of the site, the designers have helpfully offered up "top rated," "most popular," and "new" sections to wade through the scripts if you aren't really sure what you're looking for. The secondary navigation on the side has specific categories to browse for those that have an idea of what they need. The results present a mixture of free and for-purchase resources, so the only possible drawback is that if a user is looking for a free resource they might be disappointed to find the perfect script and then discover it costs money. Sometimes, though, you just have to pay for that perfect resource. I myself found what seems to be a good free script for incorporating a search feature into a website. I haven't tried it out yet but it was highly rated. The comments also indicated that it works well and allows you to create a search section that fits in with the look of your website. I'm actually excited because it seems simple enough to add to the code. One additional feature that I like on this site is that once you identify a script you like you can click a link on the page to see more by the same publisher. Kind of like tracking font manufacturers, you can predict that someone that created one quality product is very likely to have a lot more.
Check out HotScripts here:
http://www.hotscripts.com/listing/free-search-engine/
Trellian software:
The Trellian website provides access to both free and purchasable software packages. In the latter category, they have a Search Engine Optimization package that combines a bunch of different tools, including their site promotion software and some link checker and analytics tools. It actually sounds like a good package because it brings together some resources that you would otherwise have to use separately; at $300, however, locating and manually running analytical tools freely available on the internet seems like a comparatively good deal. The free software packages include InternetStudio and Trellian Webpage, which are web creation tools. I didn't download the resources, but they seem as though they would be good tools to replace more complex systems and that they would be quite user-friendly. It's always good to have free alternatives to the expensive professional software packages. I might have to grab a trial of the SEO software, though, because I'm interested to see how well it performs. Stay tuned for that description at a later time.
Check out Trellian here:
http://www.trellian.com/index.html
Self Seo:
This website is mostly of note for a simple how-to article on streaming audio. In fact, it is almost unbelievable how easy it is to set up, since all it really requires is creating a file with an m3u exitnsion, uploading and linking. Ok, that was a little simplified, but read the article and you'll see it truly isn't much more complex than that. The text itself is clearly written, and the clutter-free site design mimics that simplicity; it works well. A number of SEO tools are also worth noting. My favorite is the keyword suggestion tool, which shows the popularity of an entered term as compared to others that might wind up being more useful. Similarly, the misspelling tools provide insight into how adding common misspellings to keyword tags might your website easier to find. Interesting and useful stuff here. I found that "hot sauce" had a high daily ranking, for instance, but that "hot sauce recipes" was also popular, so would be worth adding if the site has relevant contents. Cool way to keep in touch with what people might be searching.
Check out the streaming audio story here:
http://www.selfseo.com/story-13698.php
Audacity:
Audacity is a great open source audio editing program. I have used it several times in the past because it has sophisticated features like the ability to mix multiple channels and record or import files for editing, and so forth. Most notably I used Audacity recently to edit sound files for a cell phone tour pilot program at the art museum where I worked. A collegue and I recorded audio and I then imported it and laid in music and intro tracks. I was also able to clean up the voice files quite a bit. The only hitch is that WMA and AAC files are not supported, so when I incorporated existing audio recordings of gallery talks into the files I was creating I found I had to convert them first. This was a pain because it added an extra step, but really it is a very small inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. I am not a musician or anything, but I found this to be great audio software for a number of projects. So basically this is great software, easy to use and available completely free of charge; its very existence means I should never again have to suffer through an informational video with unedited sound!
Download Audacity here:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/
Music:
Pandora and Musicovery are both worth mentioning here, although I prefer the former (maybe out of habit though). What is notable about Musicovery, however, is the ability to define a playlist by mood (calm, dark, etc.) or dance matrix (tempo) and then refine it by choosing an era from which the music should be drawn. Cool concept. Even better though, is that you can download an iTunes plug-in to impose this structure on your own music library, thus ensuring you match your mood with music that already presumably like. Pandora, on the other hand, offers what I feel is a more sophisticated approach to assessing your musical tastes. Because of the extensive analysis that has gone into each song, the stations generated by inputting an artist or title are pretty much dead on. I don't skip much music when listening to Pandora because it assigns music with similar qualities so accurately that it really can pinpoint taste. Even better though, it learns. Skipping a song results in ban from the channel and skipping an artist twice results in a musician ban. The channel just gets increasing specialized not to a type of music, but to a type refined by your own tastes. It's great. People sometimes lament not being able to skip enough songs because of the limits they place, but I really think if you use the program correctly excessive skipping becomes unnecessary anyway. I've discovered more good music that way than I ever could have located on my own. And much like free fonts, scripts, templates, etc., you have to love a free resource that is based on little more than the enthusiasm of developers to create a community and share something they are passionate about. Fantastic stuff.
Check the sites here:
http://musicovery.com/
http://www.pandora.com/
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