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2008: Web Apps I Couldn’t Live Without
By John | January 2, 2008
TechCrunh has done a “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” for the past few years. It is interesting to see what someone can’t live with one year vs. another. Since I have just crossed my first calendar year for this blog, I thought that it might be cool to put one in a time box.
1) Wordpress
I have said this before: Wordpress is probably the easiest software product I have ever worked with. You can set up an image and manage your own web sites in minutes. It has a great community of plugins for all sorts of applications. I currently run the johnmwillis.com site on Wordpress.
2) Drupal
Drupal is not for the faint of heart, but it is an extremely powerful Content Management System (CMS). I run a few web sites on Drupal, including zabovo.com. In 2008 I plan on building my opensourceinthehood.com site using Drupal. IMHO, Wordpress does not have the strength for sites that need to be more than just a blog site. That is were Drupal comes into play.
All of the web sites that we manage are currently on AWS. We use the EC2 for virtual hosts and S3 for storage. In 2008, I am going to do some prototyping with SimpleDB. Clearly, cloud computing is key technology and in 2008 AWS is my on ramp.
4) Google Mail
My zabovo.com email server is run by Google. Talk about SaaS. This was really simple to setup and it works wonderfully.
5) Google Talk
It took me forever to get on IM. I tried to hold out as long as I could. I decided on using Gtalk and no other IM tool. I guess that I am too lazy. In 2008, however, I am going to look in to using Jabber.
Every blogger’s dirty little secret.
Everyone has to have an RSS reader and, since I am using Google for almost everything else, why not Google Reader?
This is my primary tagging software. I tag everything that is even remotely interesting. I often find that something that has little interest to me at one point and time later can be a great resource for something new I have discovered. It’s my memory.
9) emusic.com
Every month on the 23rd, I get 75 downloads. After the first week of each month I start to shake a little and by the 15th I am having withdrawals. I now listen to all sorts of music I never listened to before. I just love this site.
10) Firefox
I am sad to say that I used IE way longer then I should have. The good news is that I am too far gone to ever go back.
Here are some technologies I could live without but would prefer not to
11) Flickr.com
A really nice place to put pictures. It is also nice that you can easily link your blog entries to your uploaded pictures. In fact, sometimes I like to link to other people’s pictures on Flickr just to add a nice theme to my blog entry.
12) Twitter
I love to twitter. It’s fun. It’s also fun to see other people twitter as well. I wish more people in the Tivoli community twittered.
13) Google Maps
Need I say more.
14) Wikipedia
How did we ever get around before Google and Wikipedia?
15) Stumbleupon
Ok, I’ll admit it: I love just stumbling around on the Internet sometimes. It’s not a complete waste of time, though, because I have added at least 5 new sites from Stumbleupon in my RSS reader of the past few months.
If you have any sites that you use please let me know. I am always on the look out for new things to add to my “I can’t Live Without” list.
Topics: amazon, cloud computing, cms, drupal, ec2, google, other, wordpress |
