a bunch of new tools

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve found some really great tools. Some are things I’ve wanted for a while and some are things I never knew I wanted, but am really glad to have found. So, here’s a list of some tools that you may also find cool.

1. Konfabulator – “Whatever you want it to be” is their tag line. They aren’t kidding. Konfabulator is a tool that lets you install “widgets”. These can be anything from a simple emailing tool to movie listings in your area, currency converter, games, search boxes, on and on and on I could go… Oh, and almost all the widgets are cross platform compatable so you Mac users (both of you) don’t have to feel left out. Oh, did I mention it’s totally free? Check it out!

2. del.icio.us – This happens to me all the time. I find a link while I’m at work and I want to send it to myself at home to investigate later. but, that requires sending an email or (yeah, right) writing it down… Ha! No more! Now, I have a little button in my Firefox browser that sends the current page to my del.icio.us account. Plus, you can add tags to the link so it’ll be available for searching by others who are looking for items of that category. Again, totally free. (this will be a recurring theme in this post) – Oh, one of the coolest parts, create your own “inbox” and give it a list of “tags” you are interested in. Then anytime anybody lists a new link and uses that tag, it’ll show up in your inbox. Plus, you can set up an RSS feed for your inbox and get alerted any time you get a new link. What an awesome way to get cool links to things you are interested in spoon fed to you, huh?

3. rssreader.com – OK, fine… this is just an rss reader. But, it’s free and it’s simple to use. I’ve also started using the Google home page where you can add your own content. I’ve added a few RSS feeds to that as well, but rssreader.com is the place where I have the entire list of rss feeds (and more are added just about every day lately…)

4. Spam Karma 2 and Bad Behavior. These are both plug-ins for WordPress. I have been seriously battling an issue with comment spam. If you run a blog, you probably already know what I’m talking about… comment spam is when people write tools to search out blogs that allow comments to be added to their posts. Then they send tons of fake comments that send links off to other sites in order to boost their link popularity. It got so bad, I had turned off comments all together for a while. But, thanks to my good buddy Doug who wrote about these tools in his blog, I have installed them on my blog and now all you comment spamming bastards can kiss my ass! While Spam Karma requires you use Word Press, Bad Behavior will stop spambots from attacking your blog as long as you use DotClear, Drupal, Geeklog, MediaWiki or WordPress. Probably some others, too.

So, there ya go. That’s my list of goodies for the night. Hope you find at least one, if not more, of these tools useful. Let me know what ya think!