Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

Other than Google Adsense, Banner Ads and Text Link Ads, we have another way to advertise and monetize our website very soon. Youtube has just started video advertising solution, now you can run your own video advertising soon.

For Advertisers, LiveRail is a unique online video advertising platform that lets you promote your business with measurable results and predictable costs, by only paying when someone chooses to watch your ad.

For Publishers, LiveRail can help you distribute your video content online and monetize it without signing away your copyrights. By publishing your video through LiveRail serve your video back exclusively to your own website, covering all your bandwidth costs, along with highly targeted, relevant and unobtrusive advertising, that your viewers only need to watch when it interests them.

Advertisers can see a full list of their active campaigns, with breakdowns on their views, click throughs and spending.

Advertiser’s commercials are encoded in Flash-video format, and include descripions and links to the advertiser’s website. If you want to find out more about how LiveRail works, you can request an invitation and start using the system.

Thousands of royalty free photos for websites, PowerPoint presentations, newsletters, forums, blogs, schools and homework in FreeDigitalPhotos.net. All images can also be used for artist’s reference, and video productions. All royalty free images may be used for commercial and non commercial work – If you use a free image on a website, you must place a text hyperlink on that website to FreeDigitalPhotos.net. This includes forums, blogs and networking sites such as MySpace. Many images are now available in higher resolution for $5 or $10 (depending on image size). Your photo can be downloaded instantly following secure online payment.

Requirements: Terms of Use
Demo: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
License: License Free

Democracy Ajax Poll is a WordPress plugin which adds polling functionality to your WordPress blog. It grew out of frustration with the only other WordPress polling option, WP-poll. It didn’t have valid markup, it was clunky, and it required one heck of an installation process.

This plugin uses Ajax for quick sending and loading of poll data, although it doesn’t depend on javascript to function. It is fully functional in non-javascript environments, meaning it will work in ALL browsers. The Ajax part is tested to work in Safari, Opera, Firefox, and IE6/Win.

Democracy Ajax Poll also has a full-featured admin panel, which allows one to manage their polls. You can activate, edit, delete, and add new polls from the admin panel. It uses cookies as well as IP logging to prevent users from working spamming the ballot box. It is good looking and also allows in-post polling. The most important point is that there is no linkback of author on the poll, so it looks like it is really your own poll which is better than PollDaddy polls.

Requirements: WordPress 2.0 or Greater
Demo: http://blog.jalenack.com/archives/democracy
License: GPL License

I think many people are familiar with PollDaddy which is an online tool, which allows you to create free polls and place them on your website, blog, MySpace, hi5, Friendster or Xanga account or anywhere online.

PollDaddy is simple and flexible, allowing you to customize our styles to match your website or email campaign. Deliver your poll through JavaScript, flash, direct link, widget or RSS to survey your user’s opinions.

It looks really nice as well. You can choose different themes for your polls. The only drawback is that there is a PollDaddy.com link on your polls.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://www.polldaddy.com
License: License Free

Code Central has shown us how easily one can create a lightbox using YUI’s Dialog class. The lightbox incorporated many new features, along with old features such as drop and drag, it has an image preloader, it can scale large images to fit the window, it has a maximum button that allows you to inflate scaled images. You can even double click on the title bar to switch between maximized and scaled mode (for images that are larger than browser’s window area). You can also hide the lightbox conveniently by clicking on the image.

Requirements: Firefox 2+, Netscape 8+, IE 6+, Opera 9+
Demo: http://test.thecodecentral.com/demos/lightboxrev/lightbox.html
License: License Free

Jonas Rask Design has created a set of beautiful 32 x 32 px toolbar icons. He has decided to release these free for developers and private individuals alike. You can use them in your applications, in your toolbar, on your website. It’s entirely up to you. A credit or backlink is not required but appreciated. Package includes ICNS,PNG, TIFF, Mac Icons and Pixadex iContainer versions. Enjoy.

*UPDTAE 19 July 2008
Site has been moved. You can download this set of icons on http://jonas.seph.ws/stuff/drf.zip

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://jonas.seph.ws/
License: License Free

When we are talking about fonts, we should not miss this one. Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its’ primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated. Typetester’s code structure is XHTML, styled with the finest CSS and driven by the JavaScript for manipulating DOM structures. Typetester will not work without JavaScript enabled.

Requirements: Modern Browsers with Javascript Enabled
Demo: http://typetester.maratz.com/
License: License Free

You can create screenshots and screencasts easily for your web application easily now. Jing sits nicely on your desktop, ready to capture and share your stuff at a moment’s notice. Simply select an area of your screen, capture it as an image or record it as a video, and then click Share. Jing conveniently places a URL to your content on your clipboard ready for you to paste the URL into any of your conversations. Your content is hosted on Screencast.com, for which they are providing a complimentary account to all participants during this project. Users have 200MB of space for storing screenshots and screencasts and 1 GB of bandwidth that renews monthly. The Screencast.com account will remain available to you for the duration of the project.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://www.jingproject.com/
License: License Free

I have just received an email from Peter Alguacil of Pingdom.com. They are currently promoting Firefox by offering a whole full free year of Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service to anyone signing up using Firefox. At $119.40 each (normal price) and a limit of 1,000 accounts they are potentially giving away accounts worth almost $120,000. The followings are wat you get from your FREE account.

• Monitor uptime and response time of 5 websites, servers or services
• 20 free SMS alerts
• Unlimited email alerts
• 1-minute monitoring resolution at no extra cost
• Monitoring from multiple locations around the world.
• Uptime and response time statistics

To any webmaster this should be quite a treat, since it’s a full professional service for a whole year for free. I cannot wait to make this post. Time is running out. HURRY UP! The offer is valid until Saturday !

I have got one for WebAppers already! Remember to register with Firefox Browser!

Register Now

Requirements: Register with Firefox Browser
Sign Up Now: http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=174
License: N/A