Articles for Reference – First of More to Follow

Dan Katz — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:36:25 +0000

For quite some time I wanted to put up a list of good articles I have found as my own personal archive.

6 Promising And Open Source Social Networking Softwares To Create Your Own – A good list of solutions to set up social networks. I would add SocialText and MediaWiki as well.
Beautiful Drupal-Based Intranet: Open Atrium – A framework for intranets that can get a well-functioning site together in 1/3 the time you would need for development from scratch. Little if any programming needed.
Attractive Sitemaps With SlickMap CSS – A nice utility to make site maps that seems easy to use. I have been working on my CSS skills and this has been a good sample to practice.
Backup And E-Mail MySQL Databases Automatically: Backup2Mail – I hate the chore of backing up my databases. This script has made it easy. Then again my web hosting provider also has a similar utility and for WordPress I prefer the Backup plug-in.
Instant iPhone Compatible Websites: iWebKit – This is a nice set of scripts and CSS styling to make iPhone Web sites. It saves a certain amount of time if you want to design under their frameworks.
Web Elements Kit (PSD) For Designing Faster – A collection of buttons, sliders and other elements in PSD format for jump starting designs. Probably not useful for designers. Very useful for hacks like me.
Free HTML Form Builder: pForm – There are tons of free form builders. This is a nice one to add to sites that do not have a CMS for site admins or users to add their own forms. A good example of a free version that has a commercial version available with more features. Then again, rather than using this tool I would probably continue with WuFoo that is so easy to use.
I think the JNJ BTW blog is a model of corporate blogging. Here are a couple of articles that I have found useful.
- BlogHer 2008: 1,000 Women Bloggers and Me – Support for the use of BlogHer to reach women.
- A Medical Wiki – Discussion of Medpedia as a healthcare industry blog. I do a bunch of work across healthcare and also this is a good example of how industries are establishing their own Wiki’s.
Newspapers Swap Content Via Widgets with the Help of Newsgator and NewsGator’s Widget Publishing Tool – The Newsgator widget is a great way to distribute your feeds. Take advantage of the same tool major publishers use.
Scott Rafer: Facebook Platform is Dead – This article reinforces my personal findings that people on Facebook are no longer installation and using applications, widgets, etc.
Sprout Announces Fankits, Partnership with Sony – Sproutbuilder is an amazing tool to create widgets. I like to start here for widget creation and distribution because it is so easy. This article announced a commercial release and lists some competitors.
Disqus Updates – Disqus is a great third party tool to add comments to any site. Some blogs use Disqus instead of the commenting tools in the blogs because this tool has some very rich features. Definitely better than what TypePad had to offer before Movable Type came out with their own similar commenting tool.
Bootstrapped PollDaddy Kicking Ass and Taking Names – Need a poll. Try PollDaddy.
Corporate Blogging 2.0: Southwest Airlines’ Blog Re-launches and Case Study: Southwest Airlines’ Corporate Blog and Crisis Communications – Great corporate blogging analysis.
Over three quarters of reporters get story ideas from blogs – yes, blogging is important.
Social media for social good (24 days left for Parade Magazine / Case Foundation Giving Challenge) – A set of examples of how a social media campaign was run.
Don’t use a (dry) press release to promote your CEO blog – Boring press releases do not work in social media.
The New York Times’ David Pogue says corporate blogs will become "a treasured tool in your tool chest" – Blogs are a corporate tool.

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Articles for Reference – First of More to Follow