This is a website that uses a Java applet to generate rather artistic word clouds with ease. You can either type/copy and paste text or pull text from a website to give the generator a word set. Then it will take that word set and create a random word cloud, which you can customize by changing colors, fonts and layout. The best way to understand what it does is to try it for yourself.
Here is a link to one that I generated from the text on this blog.
Try it out for yourself at the link below.
http://wordle.net
HyperCard was a development platform on the Mac that featured some of the ideas that were used in the foundations of the web (things like the hyperlink and element scripting). It also was the first platform that I really got into developing for. The programs you write for it work kinda like a slide show that can be improved by scripting elements you place on each slide (things like buttons or fields to switch slides or do lookups and calculations).
Anyway, this website is implementing a web based version of it. It looks pretty interesting and they are making the scripting for it (called Speak) to be almost fully backwards compatible to HyperTalk (HyperCard’s built-in language). I signed up for the beta but haven’t got my invitation yet to try it out. Looks like it could be fun.
http://www.tilestack.com
This is a simple website that I came across yesterday that aggregates rental information from across numerous rental searching sites. You tell it where you live, a little bit about the property and how much you are currently paying in rent each month and it will give you a report about the area and how your rate compares to comparable listings in the area.
I really like this site because it has a clear, simple and useful purpose and it is very easy to use.
Check it out and find out if you are paying too much in rent.
http://www.rentometer.com
This is a Javascript based password strength tester. It works really well and the code is available under the GPL.
http://www.passwordmeter.com
This is a website that you can use to both format and optimize your css code. It can expand code so you can read and edit it or reduce your code to reduce size and increase performance. When optimizing it can even rewrite commands into the shorthand version, which is particularly nice.
http://www.cleancss.com
I found this really good website for information about managing website crawlers using a robot.txt file (and meta tags). Really nice website with great information.
http://www.robotstxt.org
Came across this on digg today. It is another reference sheet for common Linux/Unix commands and programs. It has a lot of good common uses of good programs like scp, rsync, svn, psql and mysql.
http://cb.vu/unixtoolbox.xhtml
This site is collection of free ebooks that are entirely written and maintained by the general public. It is an interesting ideas and some the books I perused through were quite well developed. Two nice things about this site is that all of the books are under a GNU license and a lot of the complete works offer pdf downloads (which is great for printing and taking the document with you).
It have texts on everything from language learning, to cookbooks, to children’s books. It is a part of the Wikimedia Foundation (which is best known for its Wikipedia project).
http://www.wikibooks.org
This is a nice site that allows you to convert a file into a number of different formats. Can come in handy if someone sends you a file you cannot open because you do not have the right software.
I supports a lot of file formats including the Open Document standards. The one thing I didn’t like about it was that you couldn’t switch a file between type of document. For example, you can’t take an image (jpeg) and turn it into a document (Word) or vise versa. I don’t see why they couldn’t do it, it just seems like something they overlooked.
One other drawback is that they email you the converted file and sometimes it doesn’t come right away.
http://www.zamzar.com
This is a site that I have had on my list to checkout for a while. It is a site that is designed around searching for information on people by name.
I don’t know what is scarier about this site; how accurate it is at finding someone or how defaming inaccurate results can be.
Who would of thought that my brother has a MySpace page that he has never updated.
http://www.spock.com