WEBSITE:  FANATION: The Rebuplic of Sport

CATEGORY:  Sports

URL:  http://www.fannation.com

DESCRIPTION:

I have always enjoyed reading news stories from the papers of opposing teams.  Like right now the Brewers are playing the Pirates, so I love seeing what their papers and fans are saying about us.

This website brings all the free newspapers and blogs together in one site and makes it easy to see them all.  A very cool site that I found about three days ago and have been using non-stop ever since.

WEBSITE: PDF Online

CATEGORY: Computer

URL: http://www.pdfonline.com/index.htm

DESCRIPTION: You can upload a "Word", "Excel", "Power Point", "TXT", etc, file to this site and it will convert it to a PDF for you.

WEBSITE: YouSendIt - File Sharing Transfer

CATEGORY: Computer

URL: http://www.yousendit.com/

DESCRIPTION: You can use this site to send big files to others. You upload your file(s) to this site and you can then email the LINK(s) to it to the recipient. The recipient can then download the file at their convenience rather than saturating their connection as the email comes in. Also, many email programs have file size limits that this will avoid.

SITE NAME:  AniBOOM

CATEGORY: Fun

WEB LINK: www.aniboom.com

DESCRIPTION:  Animation has come a long way since the early days of Looney Tunes. Studios like DreamWorks and Pixar are producing animation that is amazingly true to life. No doubt, theyve inspired many to pursue a career in animation. Of course, this type of animation takes a lot of computing power not to mention talent. But maybe you just want to have some fun.

In that case, visit aniBOOM. It has a great online program to create animated shorts. Its easy and fun to use. And you can create some detailed animations if youre up to the task.

SITE NAME: Room planning

CATEGORY: Household

WEB LINK: http://www.bhg.com/bhg/story.jsp?storyid=/templatedata/bhg/story/data/arrangearoom.xml

DESCRIPTION:

Is it time to freshen up your house? No, Im not talking about cleaning. Im talking about redecorating!

Redecorating can be a lot of fun. But theres one part that isnt fun: moving furniture. So it pays to do some planning before you start. That way, youll only have to move it once.

Better Homes and Gardens Arrange-a-Room site is sure to help. You can plan out the room by adding architectural features and furniture.

Arrange-a-Room is easy to use. You can also print out your rooms. That way, you can ask other peoples opinions on the layout. And dont forget to save your rooms you can store up to 25.

SITE NAME
iGoogle (plus Google Calendar, GMail, Google Reader...)

CATEGORY
Internet tools

WEB LINK
iGoogle: http://www.google.com/ig
GMail: http://mail.google.com/
Google Reader: http://www.google.com/reader/
Google Calendar: http://www.google.com/calendar/
Bookmark gadget for iGoogle: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=http://gadgets.joshuakent.com/bookmarks/bookmarks.xml
To-Do list gadget for iGoogle: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=http://mostlycloudy.net/~dnl2ba/subpages/gdir-test/tasklist.xml

DESCRIPTION
I've been Google-fied. I use a Google homepage, which they are now calling iGoogle. It's really helping me stay organized, and now all the stuff I usually check on the internet are in the same place.

Basically, iGoogle is a personalized homepage, but it's very flexible and you can put just about anything on it. You can even have multiple tabs. I currently have a Home, News, and Entertainment tab. The news tab is exactly that. It gives me up to date headlines from a variety of sources. I currently have a few weird news sources (how surprising), BBC world news, NPR news, Wired news, and Yahoo news photos. In Entertainment, it's the same sort of thing. I have the last 3 days of Dear Abby, Get Fuzzy, Dave's Daily Links, etc.

But my home page is still the top, and combined with other Google tools, it totally rocks. I kept searching for a mail program I liked, and the only ones I was happy with were system hogs and bogged my computer down, but the Google homepage totally remedies this. I switched all my mail to now go to GMail, and have a widget to see the top 5 newest messages on my homepage.

I now use Google's Calendar, which I think I've mentioned before, to totally keep track of my appointments. In Google's calendar, you can make multiple calendars to show up in different colors (I have a main calendar, a work calendar, a birthday calendar, and a payday calendar), and you can also hijack some public calendars, like US holidays and phases of the moon. And of course, I've got a snapshot of my calendar on my iGoogle homepage, which also shows an agenda of my next few appointments or dates to remember. Since I'd forget my head if it wasn't attached, I also have my Google calendar email me reminders of certain dates or events, and can set when I want to get that reminder, and how many reminders in total I want.

I also use Google Reader to keep track of the blogs I follow, including some MySpace blogs (unfortunately, if that person choses not to make their MySpace blog public, it doesn't work right), and all my Twitter messages.

I've also got a list of the links I use most often, including a link to the forum and to the voting page. And, I've got several To-Do lists and shopping lists.

Basically, iGoogle has become my life.

P.S.
You can also change the theme of your page too.  I currently have the beach theme, which gradually changes depending on the time of day.  For example, right now the sun on my iGoogle page is high in the sky.  But in the morning, it's rising out of the left hand horizon, in the evening it's setting on the right, and at night I have a full moon.


-- Edited by MzHartz at 15:33, 2007-05-19

I've been using iGoogle for a couple of weeks too

SITE NAME
Sassafras PigeonCam

CATEGORY
webcam

WEB LINK
http://ibmgeek.shacknet.nu/pigeoncam/

DESCRIPTION
Remember the bird nest I was talking about?  Well our neighbor who lives right by it has hooked up a camera pointed at the nest.  So now we have our very opwn PigeonCam!  It'll really be interesting once the eggs hatch.  At night, it's a lot of darkness, because the pigeons picked the light that only comes on sporadically.  (It always seems to turn off just as you need it.)  Though, he is thinking about putting a light on the camera that visitors can turn on when they visit the site.