Technology Talk - 09/05/2007

I usually don’t do more than one technology talk a week, but a lot of great stuff is happening, so here is the second one in three days!

• Daily Blog Tips has released a new WordPress Plugin called Homepage Excerpts. This plugin gives you a large number of options, but its primary function is to allow you to convert all your older pages behind your homepage to only show excerpts of the posts. This has some SEO benefits, but will also improve the user experience as people try to find a particular post on your previous pages.
• Nirmal of Life Rocks gives us 10 Free Portable Applications for Bloggers. I thought I was pretty up on this stuff, but it looks like Thunderbird has a portable application which I didn’t know about. Thanks Nirmal!
• Web Worker Daily gives us 15 iGoogle Gadgets for Web Worker Productivity. I prefer iGoogle over other homepages, so I found this post particularly useful.
• CyberNet News covers the OpenOffice 2.3 Features. Even if you don’t use OpenOffice, it is good to cover the progress of this open source office suite as it looks to bridge the gap with Microsoft Office.
• CSS Juice gives us 13 Online Generators for Web 2.0 Design. I’ve actually used 3 of these at some point in the past, but had no idea this many existed. I try to keep them bookmarked for future reference.
• Mashable has a few more useful posts, including 110+ Thunderbird Themes and Extensions, 17 WordPress Plugins for Google Adsense, and 30+ 1-Column WordPress Themes.
• World Politics Review has produced a graph showing average broadband speed by country. It looks like the United States is quite a ways down the list with Japan and Korea heading up the list.
• Host M has a free CSS authoring tool called Simple CSS. I gave this a test run and it seems to work pretty well.
• PC World offers 20 Tools to Get the Junk Off Your PC.   This post includes several useful applications, many of which I wasn’t aware existed.