10 Sites You Can Develop With Wordpress

November 2nd, 2008 87 Comments »

Wordpress is, without a doubt, the most popular open source blogging software. But, its much more than just a blogging platform. With its 3233 plugins (as of this instant), its the most flexible platform for developing almost anything. In this post, we’ll see what all you can do with Wordpress.

Blog

wordpress logoWordpress was primarily developed to be a blogging platform and that is what it is being used for, widely. Almost every other blog that you come across today is powered by Wordpress (includes my own blog). Also, Wordpress.com hosts about 4,562,469 blogs (when I started writing this post) 4,562,720 blogs (when I finished writing this post) that are powered by Wordpress.

Static Website

If you are not going to blog and you simple wish to have a static website, Wordpress can still help you with it. Also, you can just have the static website or have a blog attached with it. You can do it without any external plugin. This feature comes packed with Wordpress. You can check out this post and this for more knowledge.

Magazine

Magazines - Lula, Nylon, Nylon by blackbiscuits.Are you a print magazine publisher ? Or, do you want to write a magazine online ? You can create your own E-Zine with wordpress. There’s a huge pile of magazine themes available for Wordpress. In my previous post, I dealt with using magazine themes. There are some very popular e-zines out there, powered by Wordpress.

 

Social Network

image All of you would have probably heard of Facebook, Bebo or MySpace. They are what we call today as “Social Networks”. The cool thing is that you can create your own Social Network with Wordpress. Either you can do it manually by editing WP’s code. Or, you can simple install BuddyPress over an installation of Wordpress MU. Also, check out this live social network which uses Wordpress.

 

Email Newsletter Manager : WordBurner

Most of the Newsletter Managing softwares out there are very expensive. But, luckily FeedBurner offers Emails Subscriptions for RSS Feeds for free. Combining that with a Wordpress installation, you can create your own email newsletter manager for free. NetTuts has an extensive tutorial on how to create this software called “WordBurner” ;)

 

Gallery

Baie-St-Paul - artist gallery by matba.

“A Picture says more than a Thousand Words”.

Wordpress has inbuilt Gallery support using the shortcode. But, there are numerous plugins available to convert Wordpress into a cool gallery. You can check out the whole list, but NextGEN gallery is my favorite.

 

Forum

imageThough softwares like vBulletin, phpBB and SMF rule the world of online forums, Wordpress has its own solution called bbPress. bbPress is plain and simple forum software, plain and simple. It’s easy to use, easy to administrate, fast and clean. It is also highly customizable just like how Wordpress is.

 

Feed Aggregator

Simply put, A Feed Aggregator is one which gets the content from various sources and puts them all at one place. A very powerful plugin called WP-o-Matic is available to serve this purpose. The plugin converts your Wordpress into a personalized feed aggregator. But, such plugins are also being used to STEAL content from other blogs.

 

MicroBlogging

image Does that word seem unfamiliar to you ? But, I bet you’d have heard about Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr etc.. They are nothing but the so-called MicroBlogging platforms. Using Wordpress, you can create your own MicroBlogging site, with the help of the Prologue theme. And, the good news is that, it comes right from the Wordpress team themselves. You can also check out the demo.

 

Membeship Directory

Do you want to create a moderated membership directory that showcases your member’s information? Do you want it to be flexible, be very little work after initial setup, and use a world-class open source platform that you are already familiar with?

Check out this detailed tutorial on how to create your own Membership directory using Wordpress.

Do you use Wordpress for any other purpose ? Or, do you know anyone that does it ? Have any new idea on how else Wordpress can be used ? Share your views in the comments…

Running Web Apps on the Desktop

October 27th, 2008 9 Comments »

There are lots of ways to run Web Apps on the Desktop. But, the one that came with Google Chrome became my favorite. Mainly because of its simplicity and inbuilt Gears support. I started creating such “application shortcuts” and as I usually do, I put up these shortcuts in the taskbar.

I prefer Web Apps for various reasons. Like, they don’t occupy any space in your hard drive. They are much more simpler to use than desktop apps and you can access your data from all over the world.

Recently, I began to use Twitter a lot and so I was searching for a desktop client. But, most of the popular ones were Adobe Air apps and I didn’t wanna install Air. So, I decided to use a web app. Since, I needed simplicity, I went around looking for “twitter for iphone” and found this website. I simple opened it in Chrome and created an application shortcut. Now, it sits there on my desktop as a simple Twitter client. Similarly, I have created the shortcuts for Gmail, Google Reader and Remember the Milk, all with Gears support. Also, I have LiteSum for quick Wikipedia look up. With the upcoming Greasemonkey support for Chrome, this Application shortcut feature will become much more useful.

Similarly, I’m looking for more simple apps to add, preferably iPhone version of sites, because they have simpler interface. Do you know any ? Do you have any such Web Apps on your Desktop ?

Check out a screenshot of my desktop running these web apps. (Click to enlarge) :

web_apps

3 Simple Screen-Color Picker Tools

October 25th, 2008 19 Comments »

Color pickers are one of the essential tools for a web designer. There were days when I hit print screen, then opened photoshop to paste the screenshot and then pick the color from this. But, now i use much more simpler tools for the purpose. Here are some free tools.

1) ColorPic

image This is perhaps the most popular color picking software. It is just 501kb and runs on all Windows systems. It has a magnifier attached. Using it, you can grab palettes of up to 16 colors at once and use four advanced color mixers to select a spectrum of possibilities.

  • Colors shown in hex and decimal
  • Adjust Hue, Saturation, Value, Red, Green and Blue values
  • Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black percentages shown
  • Resizable magnification area
  • Overlay a grid for quick colorpicker alignment
  • Use arrow keys to nudge mouse pointer
  • Save multiple palettes of colors automatically
  • Snap to nearest WebSafe color
  • Point sample, 3×3 or 5×5 pixel color sampling
  • Adjust color with four advanced color mixers
  • Edit colorpicker values after selection easily

 

2) Instant Eyedropper

image Instant Eyedropper is my choice of color picker. I use it, because of its extreme simplicity. Instant Eyedropper will identify and automatically paste to the clipboard the HTML color code of any pixel on the screen with just a single mouse click. Its just 375kb and works on all Windows machines.

Picking a color is a simple 3-step process :

  1. Move the mouse pointer to the Instant Eyedropper icon in the system tray.
  2. Press and hold the left mouse button and move the mouse pointer to the pixel whose color you want to identify.
  3. Release the mouse button and your clipboard now contains the color code.

 

3) Absolute Color Picker

image Either of the above two tools mostly suit anyone. I just included Absolute Color Picker to round of the list to 3. This also works on all Windows machines.

  • History of selected colors – up to 12 slots to save the color in
  • Screen eye-dropper – pick any color directly from screen
  • HTML color conversion
  • Customizable color selection dialogs: select only hose color models that are convenient for you
  • Many predefined color palettes
  • Compare current and previous color
  • Customize brightness, hue, saturation and other parameters separately to match your exact selection

Do you know any other better color picker that is free ? If so, share it in the comments.

At last, GotChance.com is Online

October 23rd, 2008 2 Comments »

gotchance

After a long time, I’ve finally put up my home page at GotChance.com. The basic color scheme I took from my previous website NitrogenDesigns.com which I am closing down. In this post, I’ll list down the scripts and softwares that I used in the process of making of GotChance.com

Desktop Apps :

Others :

If you wanna know how I did something, feel free to ask in comments. I’d be glad to make a write up.

Customizing Kontactr Form

October 22nd, 2008 13 Comments »

150 A week ago, I introduced a new feature over a Kontactr. It is a long awaited feature. It is the ability to customize the "AJAX Widget" with your own colors to match your website. To use this feature, you just need to login to your account and click on the "Customize this widget" link that appears near the code for the AJAX widget.

The page that appears next is pretty self explanatory. You just need to choose the colors for form text, form background, textarea color, textarea background. And, when you press OK, the required code will be displayed. To test out this without logging in, go here (note: it doesn’t give you any valid code unless you are logged into your account).

Check this out :

I’ll be implementing more features soon. Let me know what features would you like to see in Kontactr…

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