Since I am currently working on several (count eight) web development projects at the same time, life has been hectic but very productive. With my improved energy levels, I’m better motivated to learn and do more things at one go, but I felt that I needed to use more new arsenals in the form of web development tools that I hope can speed up the development process and the project as a whole. Preferably those arsenals are free and goes hand-in-hand with my prototyping methods of finishing my projects.

One of the things I don’t really enjoy doing is designing forms. I have to think about client-side validation, and making the fields more appealing and user-friendly with tooltips and whatnot. However, since forms are an integral part of data entry in a web application, I can’t get away without it. And then, there’s the wireframing for layout and functional visualization, very important for documentation. I prefer pencil-sketching. It’s easier to control where everything goes, rather than using my mouse to navigate the precise location of a certain text within Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks. I have wireframing sheets printed out and hand drawn, and I would clip them into my handy-dandy notebook, which, at some point will be overflowing with stuff that it just won’t be practical to drag about.

I’ve just discovered and worked with at least two spiffy apps these past week that made project visualization and forms development much faster and easier for me.

JotForm is not only a form builder, but it also hosts the forms and data for you. I personally like the smooth design that comes with the form. It has the ability to not only get those validation and tooltips in, but it highlights the section of the form you are selecting. Once I’m done, I can either just use the embed code, or if I want to integrate the form with my database, I just copy the whole HTML layout with its CSS and JavaScript codes intact into my app, and voila, pretty form. Happy days.

And wireframing using a computer isn’t as bad as I thought after all. Or maybe it’s just Mockingbird making it easy for me. The widgets and forms that are available for me to use are just enough for me to design a nice website wireframe, and I particularly like the align grids that shows automatically every time I insert a new object in. Once I’m done, I can share the file with anyone I want without having to generate the file as another format and upload it elsewhere. Mockingbird is fast for a web application, most probably because it’s programmed with Cappucino / Cocoa, a relatively new open-source programming framework that runs on a client, giving itself the feel that you’re running a software that’s installed in your computer. Very impressive and very nice.

Evolus’s Pencil and Appnitro’s pForm deserve a special mention here; both look promising and worth a try when I have the time to spare. Pencil is a free prototyping/wireframing tool that to me looks even more powerful and richer than Mockingbird, and runs either as a Firefox addon or standalone app. The free AJAX-powered version of pForm provides a simple click-and-drag way to create forms from a variant of design sets available in the site; the commercial version, in the meantime, has MySQL, e-mail and autoresponder integration for unlimited amount of sites.

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I admit that I’m so far off when it comes to social networking sites — I just can’t keep up. So you can’t imagine how crazy I went when, while in my mood to listen to David Foster’s songs, I searched and found a site that’s not only a social networking site, but also a music sharing portal!

Imeem! (I can already hear the guffaws coming out of most of you)

If you haven’t heard of the site, though, then I sympathize with you and understand your plight.

Anyways, the site is filled with all sorts of music you can imagine. You build your playlists from the assortment of songs already in there, then share it out with others in your network. The streamed songs are amazingly fast, and extra options such as linking to your Twitter status makes Imeem fun to use.

But if you just want to download some MP3s, MP3Raid is the place to go. You have the option to purchase and download full albums for darn cheap prices, going for as low as 90 US cents per album. I think that’s an awesome deal. They even accept PayPal, which is very convenient for me and I’m sure is for you, too.

Do you have any free music sites that you know and would like to share with me (the legal ones of course)?

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Alright, so I kind of lied about the getting a date part, but being a social networking site, Wakoopa does get you connected with other people. But wait, there’s more.

The twist to Wakoopa is that it also keeps track of the software and sites you use, as long as you install and run its lightweight tracker as soon as your computer is on.

You might think it sounds a little lame. But just wait till you see the stats it collects, as per my Wakoopa profile:

According to Wakoopa, “So far webgrrrl has used 157 different applications for 298 hours in total.” The stats even breaks down the type of tasks I was doing most of the time based on the software I was using. From the looks of it, here’s the 5 top tasks I’ve been doing on my computer:

1. Surf the web
2. Is social (it means I’m spending a lot of time on social networking sites)
3. Word processing
4. Present (not “exist”, but as in doing presentations)
5. Search the web

Pretty darn scary — and accurate!

Another cool thing about Wakoopa is the ability to discover new software, sites and tools that friends in your network are using. Leo Laporte was the first person I added into my network (I actually found out about Wakoopa through his FriendFeed update and I have him to blame for my Wakoopa addiction), followed by the creators of Wakoopa. You won’t believe the myriad of software I found just by following their usage.

Enough said. Try it yourself. And remember to add me as your friend while you’re at it.

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Since my last post concerning WordPress as a content management system (CMS), I’ve seen a few more sites that showcases this type of setup. Even WordPress.org has jumped on the bandwagon by highlighting sites that are deemed to be well-designed CMSes, and if any WordPress-powered site should aspire to look like a CMS, this is the place to go for inspiration.

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One site in the list is definitely noteworthy, like the New School University Student Senate web site. Golf Royalty is another nifty site and should have been ranked up there in the top 10, not those vote-rigged sites you see right now. Need more inspiration? Here are 10 more fantastic-looking WordPress CMS that Adrian from Rubiqube recommends.

A few tips to make your WordPress site less blog-like and more CMS-like: don’t go for the boring ol’ header-topnav-post-post-post-sidebar-footer layout. Get user interactivity into it (polls and such). Highlight important content and group them well (highlights, news, announcement). Snazzy graphics are welcomed, but not required. There are so many themes and plugins out there that can help your WordPress site stand out and not look like a blog.

If you’re still at a loss, you can always hire me

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I was this close to buying a book called Rhythm Programming at the local book fair this afternoon, but my guts told me to hold off the purchase. After reading the reviews in Amazon.com, I’m glad I did. After all, it was printed in 2002, and I’m sure a lot has changed since then.

So here I am back on the Net, doing a small research on how to set up a PC recording studio at home so I could achieve that lifelong dream of composing my own songs. The few sites listed below should be good enough for a beginner like me:

Digital Trends’ Setup a Recording Studio on Your Computer: This article tells you exactly what kind of hardware and software you need to have in order to set up your PC for recording music. This is perfect for me since I plan on playing a few instruments myself instead of relying too much on synths that are built into the computer. I especially like their software recommendations which are almost always focused on the freewares.

How to Configure a Recording Studio Rig: Oh, this one is excellent. It shows you the different recommended setups you can do depending on your budget and computer hardware needs (PC/Mac). Very detailed. My rig will probably be no more complicated than this:

DrawMusic’s How to Write Music: This is actually the site of a music composition software called ChordSong, a very bare-bones version if you’d like to dabble with one, but without the hefty cost. The tutorial is good enough that it may even allow you to compose your very first song within hours. It’s not so flexible when it comes to the beats, but it does its job alright. Here’s what I got after playing with it a bit for 10-15 mins (guess what song it is).

How to Write a Love Song: You can never go wrong with a love song. A guy named William Brooks converted his book into electronic form and shared them out for free in Scribd. I haven’t read it yet, but I will. “It doesn’t matter if you are brand new to songwriting or hammering out your 100th tune, there is something for everyone in this book. You will be walked step-by-step through the process of writing your first love song. It’s just as if I was sitting next to you and just hanging out and showing you what to do next. ” Ooooh….

More Google Book Search results for my reference and future reading.

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Before I go further, I’d just like to show off to you a pathetic snapshot of my first ever AdSense cheque which I’ve received earlier this month (and a wonderful New Year’s surprise it was!).

I was in a rush preparing for my son’s first day of school for the year, and only managed to take this picture while I was driving to the bank to cash it out. It takes a month for that US$124.15  cheque to clear. Why not use Western Union? That is a story for another day. Anyway, I’ll be getting another cheque at the end of February just from that one arts and crafts site I mentioned and yet to reveal.

Apart from paid posts and playing forex, making money online takes hard work, action, and patience. I’ve bought e-books and implemented the advice of  many Internet guru programs, both locally (in Malaysia) and internationally, that promise you to make money online, and I ended up getting frustrated each time. As many have claimed, they are mostly crap. More annoying is the fact that, at one point, I bought some e-book on profit blogger from one of those Malaysian Internet marketing “experts”, only to find out that I actually knew all the techniques he pointed out during my first month of blogging. What a bunch of bull.

Luckily, my early days of blogging introduced me to RT at Untwisted Vortex (who also happens to be one of the first people to comment on my blog), who, through his many posts, introduced me to two most invaluable web sites on making money online. Best of all, they’re totally free!

I based my niche site development through the advice I get from Court Tuttle’s Internet Marketing School and his new site called The Keyword Academy (co-run by Mark Butler). Due to their advice, I was able to increase search engine visitors to my web sites triple-fold. I started using Court’s techniques since late August 2008, and my traffic at that time was 900 unique visits a month. By end of November that year, traffic surged to around 3,000 uniques a month, and as of January 2009 is now close to 6,000. More importantly, my visit-to-clicks conversion for my ads are steadily improving. I realize I was in a low-paying niche, but it doesn’t stop me from getting that $1.50/day AdSense earning (and it continues to increase — imagine if I had 20 of those sites…). You need to subscribe to Court’s two sites right now, as he and Mark are currently releasing a series of very critical posts on how to improve keyword content on your sites. One of his recent posts featured a demo web site which you can follow exactly to the dot for your next niche site.

The other site I refer to for specific AdSense advice is Grizzly’s How To Make Money Online For Beginners. Don’t let the blog title and fugly design fool you — no matter how seasoned you are in AdSense, you’ll always benefit from Grizzly’s insights on making money with AdSense and other programs and methods. He continually convinced me that we should be chasing organic (a.k.a. search engine) traffic instead of social traffic if we’re seriously into the making money online business. One of his recent eye-opening advices is that you may make more money by not posting. It makes sense, and this seems to be true for my case. My subscribers have jumped more than triple in the last couple of months, mostly obtained through organic traffic, and 80% subscribed via e-mail (the rest are RSS aggregators and search engine updaters). I only spend one hour a week updating my niche site, posting 3 original content at the most per update. Yet, by doing so, I still get more search engine visits every day. The nice thing about it is that even during my month-long hiatus in December, traffic is constantly increasing without me updating the site. Chasing organic traffic also helped me increase my ads earning from Chitika, AdBrite, and shockingly, Amazon.com! I’m not eligible for eBay affiliate for some reason, but I’ll keep trying to apply until I get it. I’d hazard a guess that revenue from eBay could burst through the roof In any case, enjoy Grizz’s long and valuable posts, and for those who’d like to get started making money online, he has a set of tutorials for you to refer to. Just scroll down the navigation bar on the right until you see the sections called “Make Money Blogging” and “AdSense Lessons”.

I’m checking out another program to see its effectiveness, but I’m taking my time on this fella. I’m going to work full-time starting next week, so I’m sure there’s a lot of things going on for me soon.

Besides, I’m starting two more blogs. Yeah, can you believe it? As if I’m not busy enough with my 30 other blogs! WebGrrrl.net (this site) will focus more on technology, the Internet and WordPress. Blogging Fu is going to be my space for exposing my techniques on how I actually update my 30+ blogs, as well as tutorials on how to start a blog. Lastly, Looking For Niches is a site that tells you how I go about researching and making money from my niche sites, as well as the tools I used to do my research. Both Blogging Fu and Looking For Niches will be launched as early as mid-Feb, so stay tuned!

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1. A personal discourse on blogging

It’s that time again for me to dump a few of my bookmarked sites for your viewing pleasure. These links are pretty old, and you might already be familiar with all, if not most, of these sites.

• Girafa: Similar to Snap It, you can use their service to provide thumbnail views of sites that you link to. In other words, when your visitor mouses over a link, they’ll see a small pop-up of the web site that the link refers to. Girafa also has a toolbar you can install in your browser, which allows you to see a web site’s thumbnail before you decide if you want to visit it.
• Fauxto: This is a online photo editing site that does a lot of the things that Photoshop can. JohnTP.com calls it the online Photoshop alternative. If you’re used to Photoshop, you’ll find that the interface is very intuitive of PS as well. Great if you have a stable and fast Internet connection. For now, I’m fine with my (licensed!) PS CS2.
• Torrent Scan: Absolutely love this torrent search engine. I like the fact that I can do the same search to multiple torrent search engines with just a click.

Hm. Weird. That’s all the useful online tool links I have. The other links in my bookmark are actually references on how to make money online. I’ll share that one later.

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A fellow Giuk.net member Joan gave a heads-up on a simple but nifty online Japanese game that attempts to guess the age of your brain. You don’t really need to read its Japanese-written instructions to know how to play it.

Mm… maybe you do.

1. Once the Flash game loads, click Start.
2. It will count down from 3 to 1.
3. In just one second, you’ll see a set of number placed randomly, and you need to memorize it.
4. Once it’s blanked out, you need to click the number in sequence, from the smallest number to the largest number.
5. When you get 3 incorrect attempts, it will finally give you your score, i.e. the age of your brain.

I was scored 4 years younger than my actual age, woohoo!

Nah, don’t take it too serious, it’s just a game. Even if you scored 44 when you’re actually 25, so what? *runs away and guffaws*

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I’ve just finished having fun after a friend in Facebook shared with me a site called YearbookYourself.com. The Flash-enabled app takes your uploaded photo and transforms it into a yearbook-like pose that you can select, ranging from the 1950s up to the year 2000.

I downloaded the snapshot of every one of the photos I generated through the site.

Original photo for YearbookYourself.com

Here are a few of the yearbook photos generated which in my opinion are as hot as real ol’ me (in other words, laugh your head off):

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1998

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1996

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1994

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1982

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1978

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1976

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1972

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1966

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1960

YearbookYourself rendition of me in 1952

And if I were a dude in 1956, I’d be a damn fine looking one:

Have a look at my Flickr to see the whole set, or see some scary photos of countless of other people who have used YearbookYourself.com.

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No one really bothers reading a product’s EULA until it’s too late, and that includes me. A good thing that Wil Wheaton gave a head’s up on a particular term of service on Google Chrome, which read as follows:

11. Content licence from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

Matt Cutts has clarified this with their legal team, and pretty recently retracted the few lines I have bolded out, citing that those lines were taken from their standard TOS. Wait, really?! I should be checking the TOS at Google Docs and GMail in that case!

Here’s another good related post I found highlighted at WWdN: In Exile.

Beware the Google God.

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