The last 2 months, I became a member of the Smowtion ad network. This is by far the best alternative to Google Adsense imho. Not only it pays well, it also has a very nice and easy publisher’s panel, with a great reports section and it serves ads for every piece of code you insert in your pages.

It supports nearly all kinds of sites:

• Homepages
• Company Sites
• Adult Sites
• Blogs

Some inside info

Smowtion has a rather strange way of attracting new publishers. To explain how smowtion works, we must first point out some interesting things. Lets have a better look at the image posted above (now some info added):

Todays Income

This is where you can see how much money you earned during the day. Nothing special here but what comes after that point is really useful to know.

Revenue Share

This is where I really blabe myself for being to suspicious to click on a referal link. The case here is that:

If you go and register for a publisher’s account and you have not been refered by another member, you get only a 60% share. On the other hand, if you have been refered to smowtion by another publisher, you get a 80% share!!!
This is how Smowtion rewards affiliates. The referer gets a 5% plus to his revenue share for each publisher he refers to Smowtion and the refered member will get an 80% share for being refered!

Simple and fair! You click on my referal link, you get 80% instead of 60% and I get a 5% plus to my income :)

Affiliates Tab

This is where you can see how many publishers you have refered to Smotion, edit the link that you will use to refer them and many more options are available there time by time. My link by the way is:

https://publisher.smowtion.com/users/signup/for80percent

Approved Sites

Here, you can track each site and get a very good idea on how your sites do money.

General Statistics

A place to have a general idea for your stats.

The publisher’s panel :

Great reports

Reports by country

I would also like to state that I might have missed some events and it would be great if you add your favorite ones in the comments.

Here is a list of what I found:

2000

• Official Launch of Windows 2000 – Microsoft’s replacement for Windows 95/98 and Windows NT.
• Be Inc. released BeOS R5 for PowerPC and x86, which was the first release of BeOS for x86 to have a freely downloadable version which could be fully installed on a user’s hard drive.
• eDonkey2000 client and server software is released by Jed McCaleb, introducing hashing into decentralized file sharing.
• Netscape6, K-Meleon and Galeon web browsers born from Mozilla. This was also the year for Konqueror.

C#

This is the year where C# was born. C# is intended to be a simple, modern, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. Its development team is led by Anders Hejlsberg, the designer of Borland’s Turbo Pascal, who has said that its object-oriented syntax is based on C++ and other languages. James Gosling, who created the Java programming language in 1994, called it an ‘imitation’ of that language. The most recent version is C# 3.0, which was released in conjunction with the .NET Framework 3.5 in 2007. The next proposed version, 4.0, is in development.

2001

• Apple released Mac OS X. At its heart is Darwin, an Open Source operating system based on BSD.
• Microsoft released Windows XP, based on Windows 2000 and Windows NT kernel.
• BitTorrent released by Bram Cohen.

Drupal

Originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board, Drupal became an open source project in 2001. Drupal is an English rendering of the Dutch word “druppel”, which means “drop” (as in “a water droplet”). The name was taken from the now-defunct Drop.org website, whose code slowly evolved into Drupal. Buytaert wanted to call the site “dorp” (Dutch for “village”) for its community aspects, but made a typo when checking the domain name and thought it sounded better.

Drupal is now considered one of the most sophisticated content management systems in the world with millions of installations and thousands of people involved in it’s development.

Visual Basic.NET

Visual Basic.NET is the evolved Visual Basic. Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) is an object-oriented computer programming language that can be viewed as an evolution of Microsoft’s Visual Basic (VB) which is implemented on the Microsoft .NET Framework. Microsoft currently supplies Visual Basic free of charge.

2002

• eMule is released and soon becomes the eDonkey2000 network’s most popular client.
• Suprnova.org torrent index goes online.
• Blogs go popular
• Camino, Firefox and Epiphany was born.

2003

• The Pirate Bay (TPB) bittorrent tracker is founded by Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, and Peter Sunde. It is based in Sweden.
• The Safari web browser was created.

Wordpress

WordPress is an open source blog publishing application and can be used for basic content management. It was first released in May 2003 by its co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as the successor to b2/cafelog. It is powered by PHP and a MySQL data back-end.

As of September 2009, Wordpress is used by 62.8 million websites in the US and 202 million websites worldwide. It won the best overall CMS award from Packt publishing last month.

Delicious

The precursor to Delicious was Muxway, a link blog that had grown out of a text file that Schachter maintained to keep track of links related to Memepool.

In September 2003, Schachter released the first version of Delicious.  In March 2005, he left his day job to work on Delicious full-time, and in April 2005 it received approximately $2 million in funding from investors including Union Square Ventures and Amazon.com.

Yahoo! acquired Delicious on December 9, 2005.

Scala

The design of Scala started in 2001 at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) by Martin Odersky, following on from work on Funnel, a programming language combining ideas from functional programming and Petri nets. Odersky had previously worked on Generic Java and javac, Sun’s Java compiler. Scala was released late 2003 / early 2004 on the Java platform, and on the .NET platform in June 2004. A second version of the language, v2.0, was released in March 2006.

2004

• Mozilla Firefox 1.0 released, Microsoft Internet Explorer’s biggest competitor since Netscape Navigator.

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg invented Facemash on October 28, 2003 while attending Harvard as a sophomore. The site represented a Harvard University version of Hot or Not, according to the Harvard Crimson. That night, Zuckerberg was blogging about a girl who had dumped him and trying to think of something to do to get her off his mind.

Today, Facebook has reached 350 million registered users, it worths more than 5 billion us dollars and is one of the most searched keywords on Google.

Flickr

Flickr was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver-based company that launched Flickr in February 2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp’s Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Flickr proved a more feasible project and ultimately Game Neverending was shelved.

Today Flickr is the place for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository.

Groovy

Groovy is an object-oriented programming language for the Java platform, and is the second standard language for the Java platform, the first being the Java programming language. It is a dynamic language with features similar to those of Python, Ruby, Perl, and Smalltalk. It can be used as a scripting language for the Java Platform.

2005

• The social browser “Flock” was born. It integrated many web services (blogger, Flickr etc) built into the browser.

Joomla

Joomla! came into being as the result of the fork of Mambo by the development team on August 17, 2005. At that time, the Mambo name was trademarked by Miro International Pvt Ltd, who formed a non-profit foundation with the stated purpose to fund the project and protect it from lawsuits.

By October, 2009, the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report reached the conclusion that Joomla! is the web’s most popular open source content management system. That conclusion was based on an extensive analysis of rate of adoption patterns and brand strength and was backed by a survey of users.

Zend Framework

The Zend framework was PHP’s reply on frameworks like Ruby on Rails and the Spring Framework. Today, Zend framework is one of the most used and powerful PHP frameworks. Zend framework’s libraries can be used as separate libraries without using the rest of the framework.

Symfony

Symfony is a web application framework written in PHP which follows the model-view-controller (MVC) paradigm. Released under the MIT license, Symfony is free software. Yahoo! used Symfony for it’s bookmarks and answers services. Delicious uses Symfony and Dailymotion also ported it’s code to use Symfony.

F#

F# is a strongly typed language that uses type inference. As a result, data types need not be explicitly declared by the programmer; they will be deduced by the compiler during compilation. However, F# also allows explicit data type declaration. Being a .NET language, F# supports .NET types and objects. But it extends the type system and categorizes types as immutable types or mutable types.

2006

• AmigaOS 4 was released by Hyperion Entertainment (VOF) under license from Amiga, Inc. for AmigaOne registered users.

jQuery

jQuery was born that year. jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML. It was released in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig.  jQuery managed to become the de facto tool to use, to perform complex Dom manipulation and website behavior varying from animation effects to form validation and Ajax.

Hundreds of jquery plugins are available in the official plugins directory and every day more plugins are created from jQuery users.

Twitter

Twitter began in a “daylong brainstorming session” that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo in an attempt to break out of a creative slump. At that meeting Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group, a concept partly inspired by the SMS group messaging service TXTMob.

Today Twitter is the SMS of the Internet. It is one of the most promising social networks and many start-ups use it’s API for offering services based on Twitter.

2007

• Microsoft Corporation launches Windows Vista

Clojure

Clojure (pronounced like closure) is a modern dialect of the Lisp programming language. It is a general-purpose language supporting interactive development that encourages a functional programming style which enables simplified multithreaded programming.

Clojure runs on the Java Virtual Machine and the Common Language Runtime. Clojure honors the code-as-data philosophy and has a sophisticated Lisp macro system.

2008

• Netscape dropped support for “Netscape Navigator”.
• Google’s web browser, Google Chrome debuted. It will later be used as the base for Chrome OS.

YQL

Yahoo! query language (YQL) is an SQL-like query language created by Yahoo! as part of their Developer Network. YQL is designed to retrieve and manipulate data from APIs through a single Web interface, thus allowing mashups that enable developers to create their own applications.

Initially launched in October 2008 with access to Yahoo APIs, February 2009 saw the addition of open data tables from third parties such as Google Reader, the Guardian, and The New York Times. Some of these APIs still require an API key to access them. On April 29th of 2009, Yahoo introduced the capability to execute the tables of data built through YQL using JavaScript run on the company’s servers for free.

2009

• Microsoft releases Windows 7, two years after Windows Vista was released.

Opera Unite

Opera Unite is an extensible framework that allows for several web services to be hosted from the user’s computer, including a web server for hosting a site, file and photo sharing, chat room, and streaming media. Opera ASA has given the Opera Community the API to create new or improved services for the Opera Unite Platform, and many have already done so. An Opera Unite user’s running services can be accessed from a dedicated web page hosted on the user’s Opera Community account, and can be accessed by any browser (though the host must use Opera).

Chrome OS

At November 19,  Sundar Pichai, the Google vice president overseeing Chrome, demonstrated an early version of the operating system, which included a desktop that closely resembled the Chrome browser, but with tabs for frequently used Web-based applications. The netbook running the operating system booted up in seven seconds, a time Google is working to improve.

Chrome OS is an open source operating system based on Linux kernel and uses Chrome as it’s UI.

Google Wave

Google Wave is a self-described “personal communication and collaboration tool” announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.

Closure

The Closure Library is a broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library. You can pull just what you need from a large set of reusable UI widgets and controls, and from lower-level utilities for DOM manipulation, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, and more. The Closure Library is server-agnostic, and is intended for use with the Closure Compiler.

The Closure Compiler compiles JavaScript into compact, high-performance code. The compiler removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what’s left so that it downloads and runs quickly. It also also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about common JavaScript pitfalls.

Google Go

The initial design of Go was started in September 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, building on previous work related to the Inferno operating system. Go was officially announced in November 2009, with implementations released for the Linux and Mac OS X platforms.

What events occured in this decade that are your favorites? Please drop a comment and tell us!

Topsy defines influence like this:

Topsy Influence measures the likelihood that, each time you say something, people will pay attention. Influence for Twitter users is computed using all historical retweets: millions of real, public statements indicating who’s listening to whom. On our website, roughly the top 0.2% most influential of all Twitter users are tagged “Highly Influential”, and “Influential” tags appear for the top 0.5% most influential Twitter users. So if Topsy says you are influential, you are part of a pretty small group!

Topsy provides plugins for Wordpress, web browsers and bookmarklets but the most useful thing that Topsy provides is it’s API. The Otter API provides access to topsy search results, URL information and author information along with the intermediate data (like author influence) that is used in creation of search rankings. Topsy has been created using the Otter API, and almost everything available on the site is accessible to developers.

Using Otterapi is plain simple! If you read this helpful resources page, then you will be able of using the API in minutes. Topsy’s API helped me create the widget I needed and I would like to share it with you.

The Widget

What I needed was a way to display the recent links posted by a particular Twitter user. The widget went far above that. At the end of this post, the widget will be able to :

• Display Author Links
• Display Author Information
• Display a list of authors talking about something we want
• Display a list of related links about a specific URL
• Search Twitter

You can go on reading to learn how it is done or Download it and use it in your Wordpress.

Creating the Widget: The Skeleton

I used the skeleton provided by Automattic for creating widgets using the Wordpress Widgets API. The skeleton after the changes required for our widget looks like this:

class topsy extends WP_Widget {
 /** constructor */
 function topsy() {
 parent::WP_Widget(false, $name = 'topsy');
 }

 /** @see WP_Widget::widget */
 function widget($args, $instance) {
 extract( $args );
 $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title']);
 ?>
 <?php echo $before_widget; ?>
 <?php if ( $title )
 echo $before_title . $title . $after_title; ?>
 Hello, World!
 <?php echo $after_widget; ?>
 <?php
 }

 /** @see WP_Widget::update */
 function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {
 return $new_instance;
 }

 /** @see WP_Widget::form */
 function form($instance) {
 $title = esc_attr($instance['title']);
 ?>
 <p><label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>"><?php _e('Title:'); ?> <input id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('title'); ?>" type="text" value="<?php echo $title; ?>" /></label></p>
 <?php
 }

}

This is all we need to add our code and create the widget.

Creating the Widget: The Options

Adding options on your widgets is very easy. All you need to do is output the fields needed to update your widget inside the form() method. In our case we need 3 fields:

• The Widget’s title
• The Otterapi method to use
• The parameters passed to the API call

The code is:

function form($instance) {
 //Defaults
 $instance = wp_parse_args( (array) $instance, array('title'=>'', 'method'=>'links', 'author'=>'thyclub') );

 $title = htmlspecialchars($instance['title']);
 $method = htmlspecialchars($instance['method']);
 $author = htmlspecialchars($instance['author']);

 // Output the options
 echo '<p style="text-align:right;"><label for="' . $this->get_field_name('title') . '">' . __('Title:') . ' <input style="width: 250px;" id="' . $this->get_field_id('title') . '" name="' . $this->get_field_name('title') . '" type="text" value="' . $title . '" /></label></p>';
 // Methods select field
 echo '<p style="text-align:right;"><label for="' . $this->get_field_name('method') . '">' . __('Topsy Method:') . ' <select style="width: 200px;" id="' . $this->get_field_id('method') . '" name="' . $this->get_field_name('method') . '"><option value="' . $method . '" selected="selected">'. $method .'</option><option value="authorinfo">Author Info</option><option value="authorsearch">Author Search</option><option value="related">Related</option><option value="search">Search</option><option value="links">Author Links</option></select></label></p>';
 // Parameters field
 echo '<p style="text-align:right;"><label for="' . $this->get_field_name('author') . '">' . __('Parameter:') . ' <input style="width: 200px;" id="' . $this->get_field_id('author') . '" name="' . $this->get_field_name('author') . '" type="text" value="' . $author . '" /></label></p>';
 }

Creating the Widget: Otterapi implementation

We need to add a function call where we want our widget to display the results it gets from Topsy. So, we will alter the widget() method so that it calls our function.

What the method does, is to switch method cases and call a different API method each time. As you might have noticed, Otterapi’s response is JSON but you can choose from XML, JSON or TXT formats also. It is your choice which format you will use and why. I prefer JSON because it is an easy way to parse it.

function widget($args, $instance) {
 extract( $args );
 $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title']);
 ?>
 <?php echo $before_widget; ?>
 <?php if ( $title )
 echo $before_title . $title . $after_title; ?>
 //Here we place our call and we pass the $instance var
<?php $this->topsy_start($instance); ?>
 <?php echo $after_widget; ?>
 <?php
 }

And we create our topsy_start() method:

function topsy_start($options){
//decide what to do based on desired method
 switch($options['method']){
 case "links":
 $url = 'http://otter.topsy.com/linkposts.json?url=http://twitter.com/'.$options['author'];
 $contents = file_get_contents($url);
 $contents = json_decode($contents);
 foreach($contents->response->list as $value){
 echo "<li><a href='".$value->target->url."' title='".$value->target->title."'>".$value->target->title."</a></li>";
 }
 break;
 case "authorinfo":
 $url = 'http://otter.topsy.com/authorinfo.json?url=http://twitter.com/'.$options['author'];
 $contents = file_get_contents($url);
 $contents = json_decode($contents);
 echo "<li>Twitter Name:<a href='".$contents->response->url."'>".$contents->response->name."</a><br />";
 echo "Description:".$contents->response->description."</li>";
 break;
 case "authorsearch":
 $url = 'http://otter.topsy.com/authorsearch.json?q='.$options['author'];
 $contents = file_get_contents($url);
 $contents = json_decode($contents);
 foreach($contents->response->list as $value){
 echo "<li><a href='".$value->url."' title='".$value->name."'>".$value->nick."</a><br />".$value->description."</li>";
 }
 break;
 case "related":
 $url = 'http://otter.topsy.com/related.json?url=http://'.$options['author'].'/';
 $contents = file_get_contents($url);
 $contents = json_decode($contents);
 foreach($contents->response->list as $value){
 echo "<li><a href='".$value->url."' title='".$value->title."'>".$value->title."</a><br />Trackbacks: (".$value->trackback_total.")</li>";
 }
 break;
 case "search":
 $url = 'http://otter.topsy.com/search.json?q='.$options['author'].'&window=auto';
 $contents = file_get_contents($url);
 $contents = json_decode($contents);
 foreach($contents->response->list as $value){
 echo "<li><a href='".$value->url."' title='".$value->title."'>".$value->title."</a><br />Trackbacks: (".$value->trackback_total.")<br />Hits:(".$value->hits.")<br />Score:(".$value->score.")</li>";
 }
 break;
 }
 }

Creating the Widget: As a Plugin

In order for Wordpress to recognize our widget, we need to place some headers in our file so that we will be able to install it, activate and deactivate it as we would with any other plugin. You can then use it as plugin or you can even drop it into :

WORDPRESS_DIR/plugins/widgets/

and it will work again.

The code needed is :

/*
 * Plugin Name: Topsy Search Widget
 * Version: 1.0
 * Plugin URI: http://jeez.eu/2009/12/02/creating-a-useful-wordpress-widget-using-topsy/
 * Description: This will create a widget that you can use to display various Twitter search results using <a href="http://topsy.com">Topsy</a>.
 * Author: Kerasiotis Vasileios
 * Author URI: http://jeez.eu/
 */

and we must place the code at the beginning of our file, just beneath the starting PHP tag.

One more thing that we need to do is register our widget. 4 lines of code is enough and we place this code outside our widget class:

function topsy() {
 register_widget('topsy');
 }
 add_action('widgets_init', 'topsy');

Spice it Up

At the moment, our widget is working as we expect it to but how can we tell the user viewing it what it actually does? The visitor will just see a static title that we should change each time we choose another API method. I never liked being forced to change static text each time I decide to change something else. I would like to have the widget understand what it does and, to display a title based on the method used. This is a personal opinion about this widget and you can skip this step.

This is how to do it:

function widget($args, $instance) {
 extract( $args );
 //we can change the title to a more related title
 switch($instance['method']){
 case "links":
 $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title'].": Links posted by ".$instance['author']);
 break;
 case "authorinfo":
 $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title'].": Information about ".$instance['author']);
 break;
 case "authorsearch":
 $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title'].": People talking about ".$instance['author']);
 break;
 case "related":
 $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title'].": Related Tweets for ".$instance['author']);
 break;
 case "search":
 $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title'].": Search Results for ".$instance['author']);
 break;
 }
 ?>
 <?php echo $before_widget; ?>
 <?php if ( $title )
 echo $before_title . $title . $after_title; ?>
 <ul>
 <?php $this->topsy_start($instance); ?>
 </ul>
 <?php echo $after_widget; ?>
 <?php
 }

Finished Widget Code

This is the finnished widget code:

<?php
/*
 * Plugin Name: Topsy Search Widget
 * Version: 1.0
 * Plugin URI: http://jeez.eu/2009/12/02/creating-a-useful-wordpress-widget-using-topsy/
 * Description: This will create a widget that you can use to display various Twitter search results using <a href="http://topsy.com">Topsy</a>.
 * Author: Kerasiotis Vasileios
 * Author URI: http://jeez.eu/
 */

class topsy extends WP_Widget {
 /** constructor */
 function topsy() {
 parent::WP_Widget(false, $name = 'topsy');
 }

 /** @see WP_Widget::widget */
 function widget($args, $instance) {
 extract( $args );
 //we can change the title to a more related title
 switch($instance['method']){
 case "links":
 $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title'].": Links posted by ".$instance['author']);
 break;
 case "authorinfo":
 $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title'].": Information about ".$instance['author']);
 break;
 case "authorsearch":
 $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title'].": People talking about ".$instance['author']);
 break;
 case "related":
 $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title'].": Related Tweets for ".$instance['author']);
 break;
 case "search":
 $title = apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title'].": Search Results for ".$instance['author']);
 break;
 }
 ?>
 <?php echo $before_widget; ?>
 <?php if ( $title )
 echo $before_title . $title . $after_title; ?>
 <ul>
 <?php $this->topsy_start($instance); ?>
 </ul>
 <?php echo $after_widget; ?>
 <?php
 }

 function topsy_start($options){
 switch($options['method']){
 case "links":
 $url = 'http://otter.topsy.com/linkposts.json?url=http://twitter.com/'.$options['author'];
 $contents = file_get_contents($url);
 $contents = json_decode($contents);
 foreach($contents->response->list as $value){
 echo "<li><a href='".$value->target->url."' title='".$value->target->title."'>".$value->target->title."</a></li>";
 }
 break;
 case "authorinfo":
 $url = 'http://otter.topsy.com/authorinfo.json?url=http://twitter.com/'.$options['author'];
 $contents = file_get_contents($url);
 $contents = json_decode($contents);
 echo "<li>Twitter Name:<a href='".$contents->response->url."'>".$contents->response->name."</a><br />";
 echo "Description:".$contents->response->description."</li>";
 break;
 case "authorsearch":
 $url = 'http://otter.topsy.com/authorsearch.json?q='.$options['author'];
 $contents = file_get_contents($url);
 $contents = json_decode($contents);
 foreach($contents->response->list as $value){
 echo "<li><a href='".$value->url."' title='".$value->name."'>".$value->nick."</a><br />".$value->description."</li>";
 }
 break;
 case "related":
 $url = 'http://otter.topsy.com/related.json?url=http://'.$options['author'].'/';
 $contents = file_get_contents($url);
 $contents = json_decode($contents);
 foreach($contents->response->list as $value){
 echo "<li><a href='".$value->url."' title='".$value->title."'>".$value->title."</a><br />Trackbacks: (".$value->trackback_total.")</li>";
 }
 break;
 case "search":
 $url = 'http://otter.topsy.com/search.json?q='.$options['author'].'&window=auto';
 $contents = file_get_contents($url);
 $contents = json_decode($contents);
 foreach($contents->response->list as $value){
 echo "<li><a href='".$value->url."' title='".$value->title."'>".$value->title."</a><br />Trackbacks: (".$value->trackback_total.")<br />Hits:(".$value->hits.")<br />Score:(".$value->score.")</li>";
 }
 break;
 }
 }

 /** @see WP_Widget::update */
 function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {
 return $new_instance;
 }

 /** @see WP_Widget::form */
 function form($instance) {
 //Defaults
 $instance = wp_parse_args( (array) $instance, array('title'=>'', 'method'=>'links', 'author'=>'thyclub') );

 $title = htmlspecialchars($instance['title']);
 $method = htmlspecialchars($instance['method']);
 $author = htmlspecialchars($instance['author']);

 # Output the options
 echo '<p style="text-align:right;"><label for="' . $this->get_field_name('title') . '">' . __('Title:') . ' <input style="width: 250px;" id="' . $this->get_field_id('title') . '" name="' . $this->get_field_name('title') . '" type="text" value="' . $title . '" /></label></p>';
 # Methods select field
 echo '<p style="text-align:right;"><label for="' . $this->get_field_name('method') . '">' . __('Topsy Method:') . ' <select style="width: 200px;" id="' . $this->get_field_id('method') . '" name="' . $this->get_field_name('method') . '"><option value="' . $method . '" selected="selected">'. $method .'</option><option value="authorinfo">Author Info</option><option value="authorsearch">Author Search</option><option value="related">Related</option><option value="search">Search</option><option value="links">Author Links</option></select></label></p>';
 # Parameters field
 echo '<p style="text-align:right;"><label for="' . $this->get_field_name('author') . '">' . __('Parameter:') . ' <input style="width: 200px;" id="' . $this->get_field_id('author') . '" name="' . $this->get_field_name('author') . '" type="text" value="' . $author . '" /></label></p>';

 }

}

/**
 * Register Topsy widget.
 *
 * Calls 'widgets_init' action after the Topsy widget has been registered.
 */
 function topsy() {
 register_widget('topsy');
 }
 add_action('widgets_init', 'topsy');
?>

Get the plugin here.

As the largest operator of WordPress blogs (over 10 million and counting), we receive a steady stream of requests from people looking for WordPress savvy web design and software development firms. In response we’ve started CodePoet, a directory of consultants who specialize in building beautiful and efficient WordPress sites.

CodePoet

So it actually raises attention to people and companies specialized on Wordpress development and websites creation. This new directory is a great way for you to promote your Wordpress related business and if combined good with the WP Pro mailing list and Wordpress Jobs Board, it can actually bring in a lot of opportunities.

How To Become One

Automatic says that in order to apply for listing you need to provide some info about:

• The name, country and primary language of your firm
• A sentence no more than 12 words to describe your business
• A link to a page that describes the WordPress related services you provide
• Samples of your WordPress work
• References

The first 3 points are obvious and there is no need for explanation. The last 2 points though can surely be covered in this post. What kind of samples and what references could be used?

Creativeg

Last month, a close friend of mine, Vasilis Kanonidis and his team, CreativeG, managed to become the first Wordpress certified consultants in Greece and I thought that he would be the right person to explain what you need and how you can become certified.

Vasilis told us that the process took a significant amount of time in order for creativeg to get into the codepoet directory. The timing was bad because they happened to apply for certification during the time that most of the attention is on the new Wordpress version. Vasilis says that to be listed on codepoet.com you need to have some good references that will prove your Wordpress development skills. Any Wordpress related project is a good reference.

References could be :

• Websites built with Wordpress
• Wordpress plugins
• Themes
• Good knowledge of the Wordpress API

At the time spoken, Creativeg has developed more than 15 Wordpress powered websites, 3 plugins and 2 themes freely available. Some references from customers were also provided to Automatic in order to verify the integrity of our application. If you have written any Wordpress related tutorials could also count in as a good reference.

When I asked Vasilis what the benefits of this listing are, he told me that it is a great way of promoting his job. People that visit codepoet.com are mainly looking for people who are specialized in Wordpress development so being listed there is a great way to shout a “Hello my name is Vasilis and I develop with Wordpress”.

What is next for Creativeg? More Wordpress and other Automatic products related services, plugins and themes. Creativeg is the team behind WordCamp.gr which is an effort to organize Wordpress events and camps in Greece, Wpfav.gr a Wordpress related bookmarking site and WpGreece.gr which is a showcase gallery of Wordpress designs from Greek designers.

Concluding, Vasilis summarizes what it needs to become a certified Wordpress consultant in 3 parts:

1) Study it

Wordpress is one of the most documented software packages out there. If you study the API and manage to get a good grip on it, then developing with Wordpress is something easy and fun.

2) Use it

Use Wordpress as much as you can. Wordpress is not just a blog. You can create nearly anything with it so use it all the way. Create something unique that will use Wordpress in a new way.

3) Sell it

Wordpress has good business potentials. Try to think of Wordpress as a tool that will pay back in the future. Provide services that are so professional that will bring money and visibility.

These are our favorite Wordpress plugins to create custom navigation for your website.

1) AllWebMenus

A great plugin to create menus for your Wordpress powered site. It works in combination with AllWebMenus Pro, a desktop application from likno software and allows you to create custom menus from your site’s structure, add external links, customize colors and behavior and many more.

Major features :

• Full cross-browser support (Internet Explorer – including v8, all Mozilla based browsers (Firefox, etc), Opera, Safari, Google Chrome and many more)
• Optimized menu building with separate javascripts for different browsers
• Full Search Engine Optimization (SEO) support
• Edit CSS menu properties through a WYSIWYG interface
• Use your own HTML code on selected menu items to achieve enhanced formatting or advanced functionality
• “Auto Item Highlight”
• Vertical Scrollbar for vertical Groups with “Automatic Scroll on Mouse Over”
• Multiple Rows and Columns on submenus
• Floating Images can be added to any of your menu items
• Create any kind of web menu fast by using pre-designed menu themes from the Theme Gallery
• Can display all languages in the javascript menu text through full unicode support
• Use “separate” borders on any side (top, bottom, left, right) of Groups or Items
• Full documentation on all features and properties
• Use three flexible ways to position your menus
• Choose among many options on “How”, “When” and “Where” the submenus appear
• Choose among many options on “How”, “When” and “Where” the submenus disappear
• Use the Advanced Copy/Paste functionality to quickly transfer any value among menu items
• Use Sticky submenus. A sticky submenu does not close unless you move to another item that has a submenu or click on the page. This is how the Windows “Start” menu works.
• Use popup and hidden menus that appear on events specified by you
• Use static or animated images for both background and content
• Create effects by using different property values for three different item states: the “Normal”, “Mouse Over” and “Mouse Click” item states
• Floating menus: Keep the menu visible in the same position while scrolling using either smooth or immediate scroll. Specify Javascript Commands to be executed when any menu item gets clicked, when any submenu appears or disappears, when the Main Menu appears or disappears. This feature allows you to create fully extensible menus
• Use both vertical and horizontal submenus at any possible combination
• Use Header and Footer on the submenu groups and allow the user to drag the menu from its Header
• Use “Distances between menu items” and assign optional “Statusbar Text” for each item
• Use Custom Variables instead of actual text
• Use several unfolding effects for the submenus
• Add AJAX menu effects to your items

Helpful Links:

• Wordpress plugin Download and Information
• Plugin Page on Likno Software
• AllWebMenus Pro Download

2) WordPress Menu Creator

This is one of the easiest and most configurable menu plugins for Wordpress. You create as many menus as you want from within the plugin’s panel and you place them in the template by using the template tags provided by the plugin. You can create nested menus with sub items using internal or external resources and create cascading menus. You can also set the cascading level by using the appropriate template tag.

It supports:

• OpenCube Menus
• Suckerfish

Helpful links:

• Download the plugin
• Plugin Information

3) Admin Drop Down Menu

This is a very helpful plugin that is useful for Wordpress administration since it replaces the typical admin menu found on Wordpress admin panel into an easy to use, customizable dropdown menu. Even though it is of no use for the frontend, this plugin is a must have for productive environments.

Features:

• Customizable color scheme with a neat color picker
• Normal mode for regular users, compact mode for real estate maniacs, minimal mode for those who never have enough
• Optional cute icons from FamFamFam
• Enhanced compatibility with handheld devices

Helpful Links:

• Download the plugin
• Plugin Information

4) PixoPoint Multi-level Navigation

If you need a plugin to create beautiful dropdown menus, then this plugin is exactly what you need. The plugin generates the code necessary to create a Son of Suckerfish horizontal dropdown, vertical flyout or horizontal slider menu. The plugin produces W3C valid HTML and CSS and only requires JavaScript to function for very old browsers such as IE 6. The Javascript is held in an external file which is linked via IE conditional comments, so only the browsers which require it will download the file. You have control over what items (pages, categories, archives, blogroll etc.) appear in your dropdown via the plugins options page.

Helpful Links:

• Download the plugin
• Plugin Information
• Customize the appearance of your menus

5) Wordpress Custom Menu

A very simple plugin that simplifies the process of managing your menus without hacking your templates each time you add a new section on your site.

Helpful Links:

• Download the plugin
• Plugin Information

6) NAVT

The WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) plugin is a powerful tool designed to provide you with complete control over the creation, styling and contents of your web site’s navigation. The plugin gives you the ability to create unique site navigation from your pages, categories and users using a Drag ‘n Drop Interface; arrange the items within a group in any arbitrary order. Navigation groups may be composed of any combination of pages, categories, Authors, (Editors, Contributors, Subscribers), internal/external links and list dividers.

Some Features:

• Navigation items can be duplicated and may appear in more than one group. Each item (even if duplicated) can be independently configured.
• List item names (called a menu alias) can be set to a name that differs from the name used as the page title or the category name.
• Create navigation items to be displayed in one of the following format:

1. 1. Text only
   2. Text over graphics
   3. Text with side graphic
   4. Graphic only

• Group items can be constructed to appear as a hierarchy – parent/child relationships can be formed between all types of items.
• Navigation menus may be styled using NAVT provided CSS classes, standard Word Press classes, or NAVT will apply user specified CSS classes.
• Supports BreadCrumb navigation.
• Supports navigation trees. Clicking a parent navigation item on a page reveals all child navigation on the subsequently displayed page.
• Navigation menus can be displayed (or not displayed) on any combination of user selected posts, pages, home page, archives, 404, search pages.
• Theme integration options allow you to insert a navigation group anywhere in your theme (without editing your theme).
• Create navigation using HTML Selects. Create multiple selects in a single group by using dividers.
• Embed navigation lists inside your posts and/or pages.
• Privacy settings for all navigation items and entire groups allows you to hide navigation items in a menu if the user is not logged into your site.
• Supports Gravatars for user navigation items.
• Transparently supports Word Press widgets.

Helpful Links:

• Download the Plugin
• Plugin Information

7) CustomNav

A fully customizable menus creation plugin that allows you to do anything you want with your menus. You can set title attributes, relations and custom icons or separators. CustomNav allows the administrator to easily create and add a horizontal navigation menu or even a vertical navigation menu if you wish to a WordPress based site.

Helpful Links:

• Download the plugin
• Plugin Info

We had the opportunity to interview the owner of JoomlaWorks, Fotis Evangelou. The company behind K2. It was a pleasant talk and an opportunity for us to look deeper into the magic world of Joomla. Even though time is money, Fotis kindly answered all my questions about JoomlaWorks, K2 and Joomla in general.

Here we go.

Jeez Tech: Hello Fotis, I am happy to talk to you.

JoomlaWorks: Hello Vasilis. It is a pleasure for me too.

Jeez Tech: The pleasure is mine for talking with the creators of such a great extension as K2. Tell me some words about JoomlaWorks.

JoomlaWorks: JoomlaWorks is a company specialized in Joomla development. We started developing for Joomla in 2006 and since then we are committed to bring some of the best extensions and give them back to the community.

It was 3 years ago that I started creating websites with Joomla and as JoomlaWorks grow bigger, more people were added. In the meanwhile, we noticed that Joomla lacked some crucial features that other systems like Drupal and Wordpress not only had but they were builtin also. So, it was a natural conclusion that we would go into extensions development.

During the last three years, JoomlaWorks managed to become one of the most popular and respected Joomla development companies. We have released 16 GPL licenced extensions and 3 commercial ones. Our extensions and plugins were downloaded more than 2 million times and our sites serve more than 400.000 unique visitors per month.

Jeez Tech: Before we go into K2, are there any other extensions that you are really proud of having created?

JoomlaWorks: Even though other extensions are simpler than K2, most of them were one step forward from the competition. This is why we have the biggest number of extensions showcased in the Joomla “Most Popular” extensions directory. As a matter of fact, we are the only company that holds two places in the most popular extension’s Top 10. This really makes us proud! Our favorite extensions though are the ones showcased in our main page in general.

Jeez Tech: What about K2? Was it something that came up or a planned extension?

JoomlaWorks: As I mentioned before, there was a big gap in Joomla publishing features. Features that were defacto on other popular CMS like Drupal and Wordpress. As professionals, we needed these crucial features in Joomla. So, since there was no such extension that would really do the job, we used our experience and created K2. We managed to take the best from Wordpress and Drupal and added them into one Joomla extension. It was our needs that created it.

Jeez Tech: How would you describe K2’s development status? Do you plan on adding more features in the future?

JoomlaWorks: K2 is a stable version that we improve it’s features functionality. No need to add more features since it offers a great API that developers can use to create Joomla K2 plugins and extend it’s forms. As with Joomla, K2 follows the same principles. We want K2 to be powerful with it’s features and as extendable as possible so that developers can use K2’s power to create plugins.

Jeez Tech: Speaking about K2 plugins. How many plugins are out there and which ones are your favorites?

JoomlaWorks: At the time spoken, there are 30 to 35 plugins plus our custom made plugins that we plan to give back to the community. I really like Nikos Dionysopoulos’s plugin that extends Joomla’s most popular editor to use K2’s content. RocketTheme’s modules like RokNewsFlash, RokNewsPager and RokTabs, and Robert Deutz’s comment system that replaces K2’s comment system with a more accessible one, are also my favorites.

Jeez Tech: Your plans for K2 include porting the extension to other popular CMS?

JoomlaWorks: This is way too much. Porting K2 to other systems would require a lot of work from us and this is something that would mislead us from our main goal. That is to create quality and useful extensions for Joomla. Not to mention that it would not worth it. If you start with Joomla then you will realize why we chosen to work with it.

We have developed some addons for other systems that we use internally just to get the grip but when compared to Joomla’s flexibility and performance, there’s no luck. So our moto is “Joomla all the way”. This is not a funboy’s opinion about Joomla, just to set things clear.

Jeez Tech: Many people say that K2 is a CMS inside Joomla. Should we expect a CMS out of Joomla too?

JoomlaWorks: There is no reason for another CMS. Joomla’s framework is one of the best in the market and if you get used to it then you can really do magic.

Jeez Tech: What would you say to someone that wants to start with Joomla developing? Does it worth to enter a market and compete with companies like JoomlaWorks ?

JoomlaWorks: As with all things. If you love what you are doing, it is most likely that you will manage to achieve your goals. Joomla is a great starter for success. Just to mention that with Joomla and K2 you can create websites that have nothing to fear against commercial CMSs when it comes into features, add greater flexibility and power on many points and this sums up a great motivation to start with Joomla, create websites and make money.

If the next move is Joomla extensions, then he / she should know what his / her needs are and, to create extensions that cover the market needs or do something better than existing solutions. So, my main advice would be : “Be unique, think ahead”.

Jeez Tech: One last question Fotis. Who and how many, is JoomlaWorks?

JoomlaWorks: We are 7 developers now. We plan to create a new site for JoomlaWorks next month and all developers will have their own personal pages there. We will be rebranding soon.

Jeez Tech: Wow! This was really fun for me. I hope we talk again in the near future.

JoomlaWorks: The pleasure was mine. Thank you and keep up the good work :)

PEAR

We couldn’t write a post about PHP classes without PEAR. PEAR  stands for “PHP Extension and Application Repository” and the Web Services category is the place to get ready made classes for:

• Akismet
• Amazon
• Blogging
• Compete
• Delicious
• Digg
• eBay
• Facebook
• Google
• Twitter
• Yahoo
• Youtube

and many more.

Even though PEAR is a great resource for web services related classes, sometimes you might want to use another class that doesn’t rely on PEAR to do the job or a more sophisticated one. The list that follows has PHP classes for different web services.

Alexa

• Alexa Web Information Service
• Example Use of Web Information
• Example Use of Topsites

Amazon

• Amazon API

Babelfish

• Babelfish Translator

Bit.ly

• Bit.ly URL Shortening Service PHP library

Bing

• Bing API 1.1
• Mocha Bing API
• Bing API on codeplex

DeviantArt

• Retrieve Gallery Images
• Feed Parser

Digg

• Digg API Class

Drop.io

• Drop.io PHP Class

eBay

• eBay Data Retrieval

Facebook

• Facebook Notification Class
• Facebook Application Developer
• Facebook Official PHP Class
• Inbox Handler
• Open Inviter

Feeds

• Feed Validator
• Feedburner

Flickr

• Flickr API
• Flickr Parser
• Flickr Wrapper
• phpFlickr

FriendFeed

• FriendFeed API (Deprecated. Libs for PHP use the v1 API)

Google

• Zend Google Data APIs
• Charts
• Calendar
• Maps

Gravatar

• Gravatar API

ICQ

• ICQ Checker

Last.fm

• PHP Last.fm API
• Felix Brun’s PHP Lib

LinkedIn

• LinkmeIn

MSN

• MSN Checker

Prowl

• Prowl

reCAPTCHA

• reCaptcha PHP Library

Skype

• Skype Checker

Twitter

• Twitter PHP Class
• php-twitter
• My Twitter
• TwitterLib
• Twitter Client
• CodeIgniter Twitter Lib
• Twitter Async

Various Networks

• Contacts Importer from email accounts
• Open Inviter

Yahoo

• Messenger
• Social APIs PHP SDK

Boa Constructor

Boa Constructor is a cross platform Python IDE and wxPython GUI Builder. It offers visual frame creation and manipulation, an object inspector, many views on the source like object browsers, inheritance hierarchies, doc string generated html documentation, an advanced debugger and integrated help.

Visual WebGui

Visual WebGui is a RAD AJAX RIA framework/platform for developing & deploying AJAX GUIs. This AJAX framework simplifies AJAX development and cuts programming by 90% with intuitive WinForms-like Visual designer of AJAX controls which flattens web dev.

Visual WebGui Silverlight

Visual WebGui Silverlight framework introduces revolution in web development. It is the only available RAD tool to develop fully blown, data-centric, enterprise-level Microsoft Silverlight applications using WinForms drag&drop methodologies.

PHP For Applications

PHP5 RAD and object oriented PHP framework for building event-driven stateful web applications. Based on Zend Framework, features tableless HTML, multiple databases, accesskey support, auto data type recognition, transparent AJAX, UTF-8, i18n/l10n.

Coindesigner

Coindesigner is a RAD (rapid application development) system to build 3D applications using Coin3D openInventor. It allows to write simple 3D scenarios just using drag&drop, so users require no programming acknoledges at all to use it. Coindesigner is a system equivalent to glade or qt-designer, where we can choose components from the openInventor toolkit, add them somewhere in our scene and configure them in a very easy way.

Nemesis Pascal Framework

Pascal Develop is the IDE for the Nemesis Pascal project. It creates simple Pascal Scripts, units, forms and web services. Provides features like syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and many other specific PSP enchancements.

Dataweb Project

The aim of dataweb project is to create a rapid development tool for applications oriented to the manipulations of database. The applications created with this tool are immediately usable in net.

Radria

Radria (Rapid Development of Rich Internet Applications) is a collection of RAD tools, 100% web based, to build web applications faster. WYSIWYG, Drag, drop, PHP and Javascript reusable, components to build Ajax and Database driven web app or mashup.

PfP Studio

PfP Studio is a visual programming system for rapid application development (RAD) of Web based forms using PHP and Javascript. The frontend runs in a browser. It is intended to complement the skills of the developer rather than masking out the base languages.

UDev

UDev is an Integrated development environment for C++. Its main asset is its exclusive package system which allows to create projects using libraries or SDK in a simple and efficient way. It has also a form editor to make the design of your applications a painless task. The priority goes to ease-of-use for efficient and quick programming with advanced compilers support, automatic project creation, etc.

GNAVI

GNAVI is the open source alternative to visual software development languages like Delphi and Visual Basic. In addition to just being fully Open Source under the GPL, the language foundation of GNAVI, unlike Pascal or Basic of its competition, is the international standard of engineering, Ada.

RAD C++ Studio

A Visual IDE like VB/VC/Kylix/Borland CB. A truely Rapid Application Development tool. Also generates source for WIN32 API, Dev C++ Project, and best for exporting resource .rc files.

JSPX

JSPX is a pure java opensource free web RAD framework that easier and faster than most of the existing frameworks (JSP-Servlets-Struts-JSF-Clay), with a lot of features that improve productivity.

LabRAD For Delphi

Delphi VCL interface to the open source LabRAD framework (SF project “LabRAD”) for distributed instrument control and data acquisition. LabRAD for Delphi allows the efficient development of Client/Server LabRAD Modules in the typical Delphi RAD fashion.

jVantage

jVantage is a visual web development tool that builds applications from a business model perspective, meaning that you begin by defining your object model first, then further specify the properties and behavior of those objects. In plainer terms, it means that you first identify all of the applicable nouns of your applications, then specify how they relate to each other.

LXRAD

LXRAD means Linux X11 Rapid Application Development, LXRAD is written in c++ and uses own component Library (liblxrad), there are components such as button, editbox, menu and others. The LXRAD is a collection of RAD tools for creating x11 interface base.

wx2xml

Converts wxWidgets C++ code components (generated by wxDev-C++) to XML code. Allows users to port wxFrames created with the wxDev-C++ visual designer RAD to other IDEs.

GUI RAD for qooxdoo

Rapid application development for qooxdoo framework. You can drag&drop components, define properties and generate the source code.

PHPlus

PHPlus is an open source project to help PHP developers and designers make web based development faster and painless. The goal of this project is to develop a framework and tools (IDE) which will clearly seperate the interface & program logic.

ModelJ

ModelJ is a RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool that uses code generation to create complete J2EE designs using the Struts and EJB frameworks. With ModelJ, you are only a few steps away from a complete application readily deployable to JBoss, the leading open-source J2EE Application Server. ModelJ uses proven design patterns to ensure a robust, easy-to-maintain design.

Radical

Radical is an open source RAD tool for building graphical user interfaces in Java. The main focus of Radical is to be reasonably lightweight and to be easily embedded as a plugin for other projects. Currently, the whole point behind Radical is to stay simple, lightweight, and focused.

SOFIA

The Salmon Open Framework for Internet Applications (SOFIA) is a RAD tool set for the J2EE. It integrates best-of-breed tools with a Java framework to provide an end-to-end solution for developing high quality database driven web applications.

Bit.ly provides an excellent API that we can use to shorten our links programmatically. It also provides a method to expand an already shortened link. This is the method we will use to decrypt all bit.ly links on Twitter (it works on any page but it is Twitter that we most use ;) ).

It is nothing special, just 35 lines of code that will transform these small but cryptic links :

to these informative and more attractive to click on links:

The Bookmarklet

Again, nothing special. Just a function that appends a script element on the page to this file.

The book.js file

We need to get all links on the page and if the href value contains “bit.ly”. Then, we assign an id value to all links we found. This id will be used later to assign the correct href value to each link:

var as = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
for(var i=0; i<as.length; i++) {
 var a = as[i];
 if(a.href.indexOf("bit.ly")>=0){
 //set the id based on the hash
 var newid = /bit\.ly\/(.*)/i.exec(a.href);
 if(newid[1]){
 a.id = newid[1];
 getLink(a.href);
 }
 }
}

Next we need to create the function that will call the bit.ly API. Please notice the use of the callback parameter “bb”. This will allow us to handle the API response. Also notice that in my code I use the demo API key which might do the job but it would be better if you used your own key.

This function creates a script element and appends it to the head section of the page. This makes the API call to be executed:

function getLink(theurl,theid){
 var url = "http://api.bit.ly/expand?version=2.0.1&shortUrl="+theurl+"&login=bitlyapidemo&apiKey=R_0da49e0a9118ff35f52f629d2d71bf07&callback=bb";
 var x = document.createElement('script')
 x.src = url
 document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(x);
}

The next thing to do is to create the “bb” function that will do the trick. We go through the “a” elements on the page and if the href attribute contains “bit.ly” then we swap the link text with the expanded URL we got from bit.ly and we also change the href value:

var bb = function(e){
 var as = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
 for(var i=0; i<as.length; i++) {
 var a = as[i];
 if(a.href.indexOf("bit.ly")>=0){
 if(a.id){
 a.href = e.results[a.id].longUrl;
 a.innerHTML = a.href;
 }
 }
 }
}

That’s it! Now each time you click on the bookmarklet, all bit.ly links will be decrypted. I hope you find this useful as I did.

GotAPI

GotAPI is a different search engine. It is used for searching documentations for a number of projects and languages like:

• HTML
• AJAX
• XML
• C/C++ libraries
• PHP
• Python
• Drupal
• Java
• and more…

gotAPI also allows us to add a widget to our pages with which we can search documentation, API references and usage examples from any language or software package included in it’s database. GotAPI has been developed by SensioLabs, the developers of the Symfony PHP framework.

SUIT

SUIT (Scripting Using Integrated Templates) is an open-source templating framework that allows you to define your own syntax through nodes. It is available in both PHP and Python. It is extremely lightweight, yet powerful.
The same team that created SUIT has also created TIE (Template Integration Environment), which is an example template management system, built using SUIT itself. It contains a version tracker and a debug system for SUIT.

Synfig

2D Animation has traditionally been very expensive because every frame must be drawn by hand. Even with today’s digital inking and painting software, the process still relies on individuals hand-drawing each frame. This laborious task is called “tweening”.
Synfig eliminates the task of manual tweening, producing smooth, fluid motion without the animator having to draw out each frame individually. This allows you to produce 2D animation with fewer people while producing art of a higher quality.

OpenLaszlo

OpenLaszlo is a platform where you can create rich internet applications. Laszlo applications can be deployed as traditional Java servlets, which are compiled and returned to the browser dynamically. This method requires that the web server be running the OpenLaszlo server.
Alternatively, Laszlo applications can be compiled from LZX into DHTML or a binary SWF file, and loaded statically into an existing web page. This method is known as SOLO deployment. Applications deployed in this manner lack some functionality of servlet-contained files, such as the ability to consume SOAP web services and Java RPC remote procedure calls.

Skulpt

Skulpt is an entirely in-browser implementation of Python. No preprocessing, plug-ins, or server-side support required, just write Python and reload. This is a great tool for testing your Python code before you add it in an application.

Pyjamas

Pyjamas is a stand-alone python to javascript compiler, an AJAX framework / library and a Widget set API. Like GWT, pyjamas involves the translation of the application and libraries (including UI widgets and DOM classes) to Javascript and the packaging up of that Javascript code. Pyjamas is slightly different from traditional Web development: it’s more like Desktop application development.

ImageFlow

ImageFlow is an unobtrusive and user friendly JavaScript image gallery. ImageFlow is an object-oriented script, that means you can create many instances of it on one website.

Jekyll

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator in Ruby. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server. This is also the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host your project’s page or blog right from GitHub.

UserCake

UserCake is a simple user management system developed in PHP. The goal of UserCake is to provide people with a foundation to build user applications without all the hassle. UserCake is cleanly written, well commented, formatted and documented.

eCSStender

Extensions built with eCSStender greatly simplify the design process because you can author modern CSS using advanced selectors, properties such as border-radius, or custom font faces and rest assured that your design will work even in IE6.

Rhizosphere

Rhizosphere is an innovative approach to help you navigate and filter through your data. Lightweight, web-based, intuitive, its purpose is to provide a simple but effective way to flow through your data, isolate them, filter them and help you locate that information that you know it’s there, but it’s lost amidst the noise.

MooShell

MooShell is a shell editor where you can write your JavaScript, HTML and CSS code and run it. It might prove to be useful in various cases where you need to test your code without reloading your browser.

Pida

PIDA is an IDE (integrated development environment). PIDA is different from other IDEs in that it will use the tools you already have available rather than attempting to reinvent each one. PIDA is written in Python with the PyGTK toolkit, and although is designed to be used to program in any language, PIDA has fancy Python IDE features.

Ident Engine

Ident Engine is a JavaScript library that retrieves and aggregates social profiles from various sites and networks.

Code Prettify

A Javascript module and CSS file that allows syntax highlighting of source code snippets in an html page.

MobWrite

MobWrite converts forms and web applications into collaborative environments. Create a simple single-user system, add one line of JavaScript, and instantly get a collaborative system.

Google MySQL Tools

Various tools for managing, maintaining, and improving the performance of MySQL databases, originally written by Google.

Reducisaurus

Reducisaurus is a web service for minifying and serving CSS and JS files. Reducisaurus is based on YUI Compressor and runs on AppEngine. You can send a POST or a GET, and you can use as many of the “file” or “url” arguments as you need. Values are inspected to determine whether they contain inline code or are external URLs. Values that look like URLs will be fetched, and other values will be parsed as CSS or JS.

WSPL

A web storage portability layer (WSPL) for providing a single portable asynchronous programming model API to access a database provided by either Google Gears or HTML5. It includes a simple example of the cache pattern for building an offline web application which serves as a demo of the WSPL library.

Digital Content Wizard

Digital Content Wizard is a simple tool to help you organize your online content in a structured navigable website. Content can be in the form of YouTube videos, Google documents, Google spreadsheets, Google presentations, Google Books or Picasa Photo Albums. It requires you to describe your content in a template spreadsheet and pass the spreadsheet through the Digital Content Wizard’s workflow. Digital Content Wizard is a web application built over Google AppEngine. It can also maintain different versions of the generated website.