The Free Website Project

This has almost nothing to do with free hosting or any of that, but I’m excited to let you all know that I won the Vista Rewired contest at Problogger. It’s a real honor to have my comment chosen, there were so many amazing contributions. This comes with 1,700 visitors and a link from Vista Rewired. I am saving the stumbleupon credit until the redesign of this blog is complete, but couldn’t resist posting about it .

Lesson learned: You don’t need to have thousands of visitors each day to give sound advice, you just need to take the time and thought required to offer meaningful suggestions.

Photo by Pierre J.

Last week’s blogging experiment, using fresh words, was an interesting way to try to vary your vocabulary. This week, I will be trying something different, aimed at increasing the significance of each word and freeing up more time. I will write useful, full-fledged posts in 120 words or less. I have chosen this number because it seems to be a good benchmark, but also because it is the average speed of spoken conversation. This means that, if read aloud, each post should fit into one minute.

Because of the changes over the next week, there will be exceptions, but 120 words will be my target for most posts. Opinion? Why not leave a comment!

Photo by Tracy O.

Setting up a good website without paying for it is the whole focus of what I’ve been writing about here, and it works well for many different uses. Personal pages, blogs, and some small businesses are fine with a subdomain, and most other sites can use free hosting as long as there is a real dot com domain pointing to them. There are, however, a few exceptions to this rule. Here are 3 situations in which you should be using a reliable paid hosting plan:

You accept payment information

I’ll let you in on a well-known bit of knowledge: tech-savvy people don’t buy from sites that aren’t https://. That rules out your free host, which means that people will be rightfully afraid of giving out their personal information. Not only that, but you have no guarantee whatsoever from the host that what you are collecting will remain private and secure.

You store massive multimedia files or hotlinked images

If you haven’t been booted by your host for this by now, you should be. It’s a wonderful thing that the internet allows us to store and share high quality videos, but they belong somewhere like blip.tv. If you must have them on your site, or if you’re hosting content that will be hotlinked, you are abusing the hospitality and bandwidth that you are being offered.

You are running an MMORPG

Or any other hugely processor-intensive script for that matter. MMORPGs are great, but they also suck resources like nothing else, and people will start to notice the difference. I understand the temptation to run your own server, but it’s one that requires responsibility and carries with it certain expenses. Most hosts will not accommodate you anyway, and good luck trying to get that illegal Runescape server online.

… and one more thing

Before I end this post, I would like to make it clear that there are good paid hosts and bad ones, and that some paid hosts are actually worse than those that you can get without paying. So, even if you do end up spending the cash for a paid plan, be sure that you’re getting your money’s worth.

Photo by Stefan Linecker.

Taking and resizing screenshots can suck up a lot of time. These services will capture any thumbnail for you, and serve them up as an image that you can hotlink into your own pages, forum posts, or articles. I have included only those that work reliably and are easy to use here, along with a summary of the size of thumbnails, the code used to embed them, and my general impressions of the service. There is a thumbnail next to each service, so if it is not showing up, that service is not functioning properly.

In addition, you will notice that there are bookmarklet links for many of the services, which you can drag to your browser’s toolbar for quick snapping. Simply open up a webpage, click the bookmark, and you have yourself a thumbnail of that page from your service of choice. Credit for this idea goes to TechLifeBlogged for the first Websnapr bookmarklet, I simply modified the code to work with the other systems.

ShrinkTheWeb
	ShrinkTheWeb is simple and reliable, with good speed and uptime. It requires a quick registration to use, and offers both HTML and JavaScript APIs to get you started. The most unique feature this service offers is a PHP script which allows caching of your thumbnails on your own server, speeding things up and acting as a good safeguard should the main system ever go down. Unfortunately, bookmarklets cannot be created due to the way ShrinkTheWeb displays images, but the service does work, as you can see on the left.
Sizes: 109x82 200x150
API: XML: <img src="http://www.shrinktheweb.com/xino.php?embed=1&u=d26ad&STWAccessKeyId=[access key]&Size=[lg or sm]&Url=[yoursite]" border="0" alt="A preview image"> -or- XML: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.shrinktheweb.com/xino.php?embed=2&u=d26ad&STWAccessKeyId=[access key]&Size=[sm or lg]&Url=[yoursite]">

SnapCasa
	SnapCasa is a popular thumbnail service, and one that I have used in several of my blog posts. The nicest feature of SnapCasa is that it loads images quickly when you request them, rather than giving a “thumbnail queued” notice. Registration is required, but it’s very quick and painless. One unusual feature of SnapCasa is that the thumbnails are a little on the small side, the largest size being 280x210. This can be an advantage, especially because the images are not obscured by an attribution watermark like the one used by Websnapr.
Sizes: 100x75 140x105 200x150 280x210
Bookmarklets: SnapCasa (T) SnapCasa (S) SnapCasa (M) SnapCasa (L)
API: XML: <img src="http://SnapCasa.com/Get.aspx?size=[size]&code=[code]&url=[url]" />

iWebtool
	iWebtool has been around for a while, and offers a simple rollover preview option in addition to their thumbnails. Both options are very easy to implement, and there is no registration required at all. The only drawbacks are that there is only one size available, and the service does not seem to support certain types of media like flash. Also, the shots tend to have a strange looking border around them.
Sizes: 200x150
Bookmarklets: iWebtool
API: XML: <img src="http://www.iwebtool2.com/img/?r=<Your-Website-URL>&domain=<Target-URL>" border="0" alt="A preview image">

Picoshot
	Picoshot is about the simplest thumbnail provider you could possibly ask for. There is no registration required, and you can start using it almost instantly without much trouble. There are 2 ways to encode the URL you want to capture, but the only difference is whether you include the http://. I would not recommend Picoshot, however, because it is too simple. There is only one size available, and thumbnails take quite a while to load. Perhaps most importantly, though, is the fact that they only support taking shots of the front page of a domain, which rules out several potential uses.
Sizes: 120x90
Bookmarklets: Picoshot
API: XML: <img src="http://image.picoshot.com/thumbnail.php?url=http://www.example.com"> -or- XML: <img src="http://image.picoshot.com/thumbnail.php?domain=example.com">

thumbalizr
	Thumbalizr looks fairly new, and the features are a mixed bag. On the positive side, there is no registration, the API is simple, and it takes far bigger shots than any other service. They’ve served 500,000 thumbnails, so you’d think the site would be working by now, but unfortunately there are parts that don’t behave like they should. These do not, thankfully, affect the thumbnails. My main complaints with the service itself would be the speed of capture (very slow), and the box that says “by thumbalizr.com". That box is distinctly uglier than any other that I have seen, and, although I understand the temptation to have attribution, it is better off removed.
Sizes: Any width <1024
Bookmarklets: (coming soon)
API: XML: <img src="http://www.thumbalizr.com/api/?url=http://freewebsiteproject.com&width=120">

Websnapr
	Websnapr is always a reliable choice, and it has a very nicely done preview bubble option that you can install on your website. There is a nice selection of sizes, and I have never know it to go down. There is a registration required for the developer key, which takes almost no time at all. On the downside, there is a little attribution text in each image. It is not as ugly as thumbalizr, though, but can ruin the look of small images. Also, Websnapr shows an ad when your thumbnail is still queued, which doesn’t add much to the look and feel of your site. For more information about websnapr, you can read my in-depth post about it.
Sizes: 90x70 202x152 400x300 640x480
Bookmarklets: Websnapr (T) Websnapr (S) Websnapr (M) Websnapr (L)
API: XML: <img src="http://images.websnapr.com/ ? size=[size] & key=[key] & url=[url]">

Everything is finally coming together for the redesign, and I have set a date for it to be moved to the new domain at freewebsiteproject.com. Next Wednesday, the site may be experiencing some downtime while everything is moved. I thought I’d let you all know now to force myself to make that deadline .