There are some great ones that have a monthly subscription attached, but I think they are too expensive.

5pm comes to mind. I love, love love it but don’t want to pay almost $50 per month for the number of projects I’d need.

I don’t know if SantexQ are going to start charging anytime soon, but if they do I hope their subscriptions are lower cost.  In the meantime they offering task management free.

Currently unlimited projects and tasks are allowed for zero cost.

It’s works by allowing you to select a boxed area on the page, and then either expanding or narrowing that area once selected.

You can removes images with a single click, and backgrounds (although I think it’s true to say most browsers allow for automatic removal of background images when printing.)

One downside is that the site won’t work if the site you want to print takes too long to load.

The Good News

Almost too good to be true – it promises to make programmers out of us all, by enabling us to not just build web sites, (there are lots of point and click tools for those already), but to build web applications.

If you are a small business, you can use the tool for free, for up to 5 users assuming you have the right software and hardware platforms available.

There is a  hosted version (I could not find any obvious reference to it on the website FAQ, but the co-founder Wayne Byrne said in a blog comment that it existed – so where is it Wayne???!) which eliminates the need for a platform of your own, but costs $10 per month per user.  So not much good for that new social marketing killer app you’ve been designing for the last few months. But it would be OK for a small number of users in your company.

The Bad News

Well, it’s bad news for me.

Iceberg runs on Microsoft Windows server with SQL Server and is itself an ASP.NET application. Iceberg supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista and is compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The cost per user is too high even for the hosted version. If you have the skills to code a large application using PHP say, and any associated framework, for large numbers of users, you’d be better off doing it that way.

As a long time software engineer, programmer and web developer I do wonder how accurate these claims can really be.

All my experience of productivity tools is that you substitute having to learn to code for having to learn the tool. And when you think you’ve done that, you realise you ‘ve also learned how to work around all the things the tool does badly. Then a whole support industry is created on the back of the tool’s idiosyncrasies.

The people running Iceberg say their offering is something else altogether.

Ever seen a font you’d like to use in a logo or graphic and not known it’s name? Enter Identifont – a site that helps you identify fonts.

You answer a series of questions about the font you’d like to find and Identifont will try to find it.  

The good thing is that even if you do not precisely identify the font you are looking for, you will find many that are of a similar quality, style and type.  The site tells you where to go to buy any fonts you may find (some are free), and you can shop around for the one that suits your needs and your budget.

They provide open source alternatives for popular programs like Camtasia, Photoshop, Flight Simulator,m Microsoft Word and Dreamweaver, to mention a few.

The site lists many popular commercial programs, and by clicking on the one that you are interested in, a list of open source alternatives are displayed.

Great idea – support the site by adding any new open source programs that you know of.

When you bookmark a site, the favicon appears next to the name of the site in your bookmark list. Most sites have a favicon now, but when they don’t they stand out for the wrong reasons.

You can generate your own favicon by using an online tool, very easily.

Just pick an image you want to use – maybe an icon or your logo and then submit the image to a favicon generation tool.

When you get your favicon returned to you, simply put it in the root directory of your web site.

I used this service from favicon.co.uk to generate mine. You can also add your icon to the gallery – I did, and five months later they wrote to me to say the icon had been accepted.

Even if it is only an email conversation, you may end up wondering when they might get back to you with the answer to the last question you asked.

I am currently having a WordPress Theme designed for me by someone from elance who lives in Singapore. He is 7 hours ahead of GMT and communication is tricky.  I write an email and he writes back, what seems like 2 days later.

My partner often works in San Francisco – he is there now and so is 8 hours behind GMT.

At the moment I am using the WorldClock to make sure I know what time it is in San Francisco, Atlanta (I am working with someone there too) and in Singapore.  Here is my Personal World Clock. You can set one up to suit your needs.

All you need is a Google Account and you are set. Just go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and log in using your existing Google account, or create an account if you don’t have one.

Once you have logged in you can add all your web sites to the Tools dashboard.  You can then verify each of the sites belongs to you by uploading a special file to the root directory of each web site, or by modifying the home page to include a special META tag. Full instructions are given as soon as you add a new site.

Your Google Webmaster Account Will . . .

• Indicate the number site pages included in the Google index
• Allow you to specify a XML sitemap to help Google locate all your pages
• Allow you to remove pages any that are in the index, but shouldn’t be there
• List any pages that are specified in the site map but not found
• Tell you about any internal links on your site that couldn’t be found
• List any duplicate meta descriptions (not good as these are the first indication of a duplicate page)
• Mention any meta descriptions and title tags that are either too long or too short
• Lists any title tags it thinks are totally useless
• Tells you about content Google tried to index but couldn’t
• List the top search engine queries used to find your site in the Google SERPs AND the position you were at in Google’s SERPs for those queries, AND the ones people actually clicked
• Tell you what Googlebot sees when he looks at your site – i.e. does your site have a real theme according to Googlebot.
• Lists all the anchor text used to link to your site – i.e how others see you. Very important as this is also consequently part of how Google sees you.
• A graph of the pagerank of your site’s pages in Google
• Any subscribers to your feed via Google Reader
• A list of all pages with external linsk pointing to them, and how many links each has
• A list of all internal links (now you might wonder why this is interesting – it is because Google has mentioned it here so get internally linking)
• The date of the last time your sitemap.xml file was downloaded.
• A chance to notify Google of the existence of a sitemap.xml file. If you haven’t got a sitemap.xml, get one.
• Ability to use a number of small tools to further enhance Googlebot’s willingness to peruse your site.
• The code to add a Webmaster Tools Gadget to your home page.

And One Last Point

Finally, copiously scattered around Google Webmaster tools pages are links saying thing like “How to Use this data”. Click those links, they contain precious clues.