Toon

Blogger - Free Blogging Platform

(Only allowed to include 4 images)

I know, it's simple but it suits me down to the ground. Wordpress amazes me the way it's advanced over the years but I never needed any of the addons and bonuses that Wordpress offers.

I first used blogger for a client I had to set them up a blog that was nice and simple to use, easy for me to skin and wouldn't get too confusing and it amazed me how easy it was and I now use it for my own blogging platform.

Ma.gnolia - Free Social Bookmarking Tool

(Only allowed to include 4 images)

I started off using del.icio.us as my first social bookmarking tool and although it works very well I was dissatisfied with the overall aesthetics of the site. When I discovered how nice Ma.gnolia was (even though it has just as stupider name) I decided it was much nicer to work with overall.

Social Marker - Multi bookmarking and news submitter



The more and more site's I use to share stories, news and links the harder it gets to add to them all so I was selecting a chosen few until I found Socialmarker. You can submit to over 30 sites all in one go. If gives you a taskbar top and bottom and the site submission screens in a frame in the middle and you can drag and drop your titles, descriptions and tags.

Stumbleupon - Discover and Bookmark New Sites



You can waste hours 'Stumbling'. Install the taskbar, type in a phrase or search terms based loosely around your interest and click the stumble button and it will give you site and site of interesting stuff. The most interesting part is you find things that are maybe at the bottom of googles rankings and you may never come across any other way.
Also exchange links with other users and join groups about your interests. The only let down is the massive amount of Photoshop Tutorial sites, there's way too many to be healthy.

Scribe Fire - Instant Blog Posting.



This little Firefox Plugin has given me the ability to increase my graphic design blog posts by making it faster and easier to post directly to my blogger site.
With a pop up from the base of the browser you can even drag and drop pictures and titles into the window to post.

The most impressive thing is the ability to all in one, bookmark stuff in del.icio.us (wish they'd add Ma.gnolia). You can also add your Technorati Tags, Blogger Tags and even pingbacks all in one menu.

Netvibes - Free unique homepage and feed reader.



My fave web freebie is Netvibes, it gets me through the day at twice the speed. So many times I get asked, what's so great about it? I don't get it isn't it just a jazzed up google page? how can you possibly read all of those feeds?

The point of it is when you work in an ever changing industry to remain on top you have to be aware of all the new advancements and changes as they're happening so what better way than to be notified by feed when a new story/article etc. has been added to a site you follow.

The art of Netvibes is you don't even have to visit that site to read the story as it's great layout of feed windows is enough to see the actually story in it's entirety or to even just read a clip of it to get the gist of whether it's worth reading the full article.

One of my favorite things about Netvibes is I can even subscribe to foreign blogs, although not many of the languages I can read, with the images etc. I can still follow links of interest and to translaters if needed.

AccessDisplays

Interesting post. I'll have to check out some of these sites.

Quite rare to find a post with interesting sites where most of them I heaven't heard of!

Cheers.

Tastemodern

This is very useful, recently had to make a similiar decision regarding these sites, if only I had read it before. I found that Magento works very well, although I was close to using Wordpress, both are excellent services, I think it depends on the type of site you have as to which to you use.