openkom

Lovd by Less

Lovd by Less is one the first and only few open-source social networking platforms built on Ruby on Rails.  Built with Ruby on Rails, Lovd is a social networking solution that has everything you need to build your community.  Some of it’s features include blogs, photo gallery with captions, site search for friends, activity update and user-to-user messaging to name a few.  Below is a list from thier site outlining the current features.

Demo

Current Features

• Follow a user, mutual following is friending.
• User-to-User Messaging
• Profile Comments
• User Blogs with Comments
• Photo Gallery with Captions
• Site Search for Friends
• Profile Bio and Information
• User Dashboard (Recent Activity of Friends)
• Emailed Activity
• Flickr Integration

YouTube Integration

New phpLD template, incircle

phpLD is one of the most widely used directory scripts on the Internet today.  It is simple to install, use, customize, has great product support from the company and the community user base.  Here is a great example of a free template released by iGuides.org.

incircle phpLD template

Live Demo Link

incircle Download Link

Note: Footer link to the designer is mendatory while using inCircle Free phpLD Template.

Flowgram, create an interactive guide on the fly

Flowgram allows anyone to create an interactive experience using online or PowerPoint content.  It combines the advantages of slide presentations and screencasts with an interactive user experience that fully exploits the fact that almost all the information we might ever need is already on the web.  Best of all you can export this into a blog widget and embed it seamlessly into your site.  It’s not for everyone, but it’s cool.  Make sure to check out all the samples and user submitted demos.

Soundsnap, a platform to find and share free sound effects

Soundsnap is a clean platform to find and share free sound effects and loops- legally. It is a collection of original sounds made or recorded by its users, and not songs or sound FX found on commercial libraries or sample CD’s.

This is a great example of the creative communinuty (consisting of sound designers, sound artists, web game developers, filmmakers, music producers, hobbyists and home video makers) develop and are open to sharing their creations with others on the Web.  Koodos to all of you.

Soundsnap

QuarkBase, know more about sites

Quarkbase is a free tool that allows anyone to find detailed information about a website that interests them or are monitoring their competition.

According to Quarkbase, it is a mashup of over 30 data sources and many algorithms gathering information from Internet on various topics like social popularity, traffic, associated people, etc.

The beauty of the site application is that it is very simple and easy to use.

Quarkbase

DHTMLX’s DhtmlxGrid Ajax Sortable Table for Large Datasets.

dhtmlxGrid is an Ajax-enabled JavaScript grid control with cutting-edge functionality, powerful databinding and excellent performance with large datasets. The component is easy-to-use and provides great flexibility due to its rich client-side API. dhtmlxGrid supports different datasources, including XML, JSON, CSV, JS array and HTML table. Since v1.6 grid data can be loaded from custom XML format.

dhtmlxgrid

DhtmlxGrid is easily modified and integrated to fit your needs.  The interface can be changed through CSS design or predefined skins.  Also to consider, is that it runs on the client side and that it is easily adapted to PHP, Ruby-on-Rail, JSP, ASP and others, with little effort.

DHTMLX’s DhtmlxGrid is available for free under the open source GPL License, download here.   A commercial and enterprise editions are also available with more features, samples and support.  Within the download they provide many useful examples to get you started.

Joomla! Turns 3.

Joomla, the award winning open source content management system (CMS), that enables you to build dynamic Web sites and various applications turned 3 this month.

Joomla Balloons

I’ve been following their developments off and on and it is just amazing how fast the Joomla community has grown.  According to the Joomla site, there have been over 6 million downloads of the app since March 2007.  Not bad by any standard.  Although that shouldn’t be so suprizing.  They provide a great product and community support, in turn this has encouraged others to join in it’s overall development, from assiting in it’s core development to add-ons and themes.

Happy 3rd Birthday Joomla!

Piwik : open-source web analytics.

I am continously impressed by the quality and dedication of the developers in the open-source community.  Once again, a wonderful open-source application, Piwik.

As per their site: “piwik is an open source (GPL license) web analytics software. It gives interesting reports on your website visitors, your popular pages, the search engines keywords they used, the language they speak… and so much more.”

Piwik

World’s Only Background Advertising Platform, by AdCamo.

AdCamo, provides the service of advertising using the backgrounds of web pages.  It re-launching itself as a platform for web sites and ad networks that want to offer this unique format to their clients.

At first glance this is truely a unique and interesting platform, however it is not for everyone.  Take a look at the demo sites that show how this is viewed by the end user.  If not carefully selected or customized this can turn an average site into a nightmare.

AdCamo Sample site

On the other hand, this could be just what some sites require.  Here is a sample of one that I think really works.  This is where PopSci uses AdCamo projection to promote DIY’s latest hit show Blog Cabin.

PopSci DIY

Fonts, fonts and more fonts.

Now you can download over 8000 free fonts from Urban Fonts.  One big advantage Urban Fonts has over other sites is that you can customize the look of the font previews by typing your own text in the input text field provided in all the font pages, or switch to an alphabetical view all before you download a single item. Also look for the Names button, click on it and it switches your preview back to the name of the font.  Want to customize the look and feel a bit more?  Go right ahead, you can change the colors of the text and background using the built in color picker.

Urban Fonts