To run a Web site or blog, it was unsurprised to learn that creating an online form, or contact form in order to promote interactivity or capture leads is a required specification, but to create the forms without any programming language or advanced computer skill will be another story. However, there are many free tools out there, one of the tools available on the Web called VisitorContact can helps you to get started.

As the name implies, VisitorContact is an online tool with which you can create a visitor contact form on your site. Currently, the service is available for free and users are allowed to create their contact forms even the highly customized forms in a simple manner. At first glance, it is very easy to create the form, as VisitorContact’s form creator provides a lot of functionality such as postal address and map display, skype status, the auto-responder as well as the flexibility to change the color of the contact button.

With VisitorContact, users can create as many different purposes of contact form as they wish. Simply add the button code or embed the code into your site, the contact button will be shown in real-time. What’s more, with VisitorContact, you also get to know the stats of the visitors that contacted you.

There are a lot of question and answer services on the Web, some in the forum design, but it seemed that the most prominent in this sphere is Yahoo! Answers. Imagine a city-centric New York version of Yahoo! Answers, it leads me to AdviceYard, a Q&A site that anyone can use and post question about anything in NYC (New York City).

AdviceYard is a well-designed Q&A site with most of the questions are organized by NYC. The site has a very strong community focus, as all the questions posted must be categorized under any of the communities given, may it be beauty, style & fashion, going green, heath care, or the others. Of course, there is a scenario whereby certain questions are not given an answer, but if you find a good answer to a question posted, a user can rate a point to that answer for the recognition purpose. To further encourage users to get involve in a community, the idea is a user can register any of the communities he/she interested during the sign-up process.

For questions given to a particular topic, for instance, bar or karaoke places, you can get a more specific and objective opinion since this site is NYC centric. If you’re worry of keeping up with the questions you posted, there is a live notification feed in your profile.

On the business side, AdviceYard’s business model is relatively simple. Unlike Yahoo Answers and other Q&A sites, AdviceYard offers a premium membership which provides the ability to post business listings for a one-time fee ($60 for 6 months or $100 for 1 year). These listings are indexed in up to three (3) related communities, on the user’s profile page, and on a dedicated business page. An example of the business listing can be found here.

There are many sites that utilized Yahoo! Search BOSS and successfully built their own vertical search engines. For the green search engine, the typical example is Truevert. And despite the fact that Truevert search engine is powered by Yahoo!, but it uses its own proprietary, patent-pending technology to select and rank the results it gets from YAHOO! instead of render the generic YAHOO! green results.

Basically, green issues are hot right now. For those who want to search the green stuff for the good of the planet, Truevert has a simple interface that includes search function in addition to the recent green news which are all pulled from the popular green Web sites.

To know more about Truevert, I’ve embedded a visual presentation about this green search engine. Enjoy.

Truevert Vertical Semantic Search

View more documents from Truevert.

For the Web designers, getting the client sign-off seems to be the most important thing, though there are times when clients think that the Web development is not yet finish, and there is disagreement occurred. If you’re a Web designer, and you thought the Web project was completed, and you wondered that if there is a tool that can helps you to be more efficient, even that if you have not start to code for the client in this aspect.

To help solve the sign-off issues, a UK firm Headscape has developed a tool for the creative professionals to get their design sign-off. This tool called GetSignOff lets you create designs for your clients and acts as a two-way communication channel between you and your clients in pertaining to the design’s specification.

It was on the basis that presenting the Web design and getting the positive feedback are the core issues for making the both Web designer and clients happy about the Web project. To cater to these needs, GetSignOff provides a lot of functionality and usability such as up to 30GB of storage space, customizable domain names, etc. To use GetSignOff, luckily it has a free and paid plans for up to $59 per month for its “Enterprise Account.”

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a very common way to distribute or subscribe to the frequently updated Web content such as blog postings or news items. If you have a feed reader with you, and you use it quite often, you will find it most useful and well suite your news subscription purposes.

However, there are advanced use of RSS other than the aforesaid RSS reader. One of them is referred by us as RSS mixer. In technological settings, RSS mixer is by mean a very advanced RSS tool with some great set of options to help you to combine and filter feeds and do some conversion out of the results.

There is a RSS mixer called FeedMingle that worth a look. FeedMingle has an easy to use user interface and one of the great features is that you can use it without any registration. To use it, simply enter the feed URLs, and follow the instruction on its interface by giving your favorite feeds a title, FeedMingle will then combine all those feed into one. An online feed aggregator, if you want to, then you can copy and paste the code to your blog or Web site as a widget option. Also, theme design and short text options for the widget are available. But if you want to use the combined feeds for creating mashup, FeedMingle has already converted the feed URLs to RSS, Atom or JSON format.

In overall, I feel FeedMingle is a promising RSS mixer, and its interface is very easy to use, thus even the least technical savvy users will know how to mix their favorite feeds.

Finding a good, memorable dot com domain name is virtually a difficult task. It is due to the fact that most of the short, keyword-domain names have been taken, not to mention if you want to further build the domain name and makes it as a worldwide brand.

Although there are several marketplaces purposely for domain names, such as DNForum, or you went to eBay, you might end up buying several domain names and you wouldn’t know which domain name is the right one and starting to build something on it. In fact, buying a good domain name could spend you endless time in evaluating the domain name, go through the domain appraisal, and etc processes, but if you willing to pay a hefty premium for domain name, you now have a new option by visiting this newly launched site called BrandBucket.

On BrandBucket, there are all types of top-level domain names currently offered by them, ranging from below $500 to over 5K and above. For the domain names you like, you can first favorite them and then send all to your email before further buying decision to be made. Perhaps you want to recommend any one of the domain names to your friends, you also allowed to use BrandBucket’s system to send the domain description to your friend’s email address. Besides, I think what you might like on the site is the “Resource” page, there are free tools and several designers’ contacts so that after you bought the domain name from them, you know where to get the top designers for your startup.

As I am not becoming younger and younger everyday, I tend to be forgetful on certain things that need to be done. I tried to source for a good reminder service on the Web and in fact there are many of them. Yet new reminder services are being introduced and one of them is Superminder.

As the name implies, Superminder is essentially a reminder service that remind us on things to do for Web content. After you signing up for the service, you can go to your personal dashboard and add reminders, or change the timezone. However, before the system automatically send you the reminders, you must first input the confirmation key that Superminder sent to you. Of course, you can schedule your reminders and the reminder messages can be delivered by email or automated cellphone. Thus, it will be most useful if you do not want to miss any big date in your life. Perhaps you want to support Superminder for the great service it delivered to you, you can support them by buying the SMS credit from them.

From a user’s standpoint, Superminder didn’t have many differentiating factors from other reminder services out there on the Web, but it has a very easy to use and clean looking interface.

URL shortening service are not new nowadays. It seems that there are endless supply of new URL shorteners appeared on the Web in tandem with the rise of Twitter, which only allows users to post any message not more than 140 characters. For those who haven’t use any URL shortener before, it is very easy to use as you simply just need to copy the URL of the Web page you want to shorten, it will helps to shorten the URL link in a one-click, for instance from over 100 characters long URL to a short URL link that not more than 20 characters, thus makes it more shareable in blogs, or social networks such as Facebook.

However, if you think you want to use a URL shortener for multi URL links, you can check out the service from MultiURL. As the name implies, MultiURL works pretty much the same as other URL shorteners. However, it can helps to shorten multiple URL links in a go. You can use it either the regular mode or the batch mode. And whenever you created the link, it will stay in your account so that you can use it in near future. Another good optional feature is that you also can group the multiple URL links you created under a group name, with customization such as password-protect your group.

There are a lot of times when typing a document and I realize that I had a similar document sit well on my computer or I came across a similar document before and I want to google it on the Web. Normally, I will open my browser or perform a tedious run and search the document on my computer thoroughly.

Now you don’t do this anymore, if you had installed Google Desktop. Perhaps you want an even light-weight version of a search tool offered by Google, you can check out this Google Quick Search Box.

Google Quick Search Box is now labeled as open source search box which mean users can download it from Google Code whenever they want. Though it’s offered as free, it is an impressively robust due to the search can reach filename, Web pages, address book, just to name a few. What’s more, it is well integrate with Google accounts and Twitter at this moment, and no doubt GMail integration will be included in the future development of this tool.

Right now, one question you probably will ask is: Google Quick Search Box is better than Google Desktop or vice versa? While everyone has their own preferences, but time will tell since Google Quick Search Box is currently only supports Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

I’ve been playing around with some job board demo software recently. Many are built using PHP/MySQL, with pricing range from $40 - above $350, though there are free scripts available, only if you’re luckily enough to scour for it on the Web.

With the offer of many job scripts, one can pay, download and install the job scripts on the Web site, blog and the full features job board will be up and running instantly. But if you’re looking to create a job board, and have limited budget for the project, you can take a look at this great example, i.e. Buddingup.

Buddingup is a job site that rolled out its job features with a back-end WordPress engine, a forum set up by using Simple Machines as well as the job board that powered by Simply Hired’s Job-A-Matic. The front page is amazingly sophisticated with several contents, but the contents are split up in a nice manner. You can find several job related information on the site such as career pages, job interview video analysis, indeed’s search function and etc. Besides, Buddingup also provided a PDF copy of “Buddingup’s Job Search Optimization Starter Manual”; a well-written job application tips purposely designed to help job seekers to optimize their profiles on Buddingup. For the job seekers, perhaps they also want a robust set of tools like resume and cover letter templates, and Buddingup also provided a URL link in which they can download the template from Microsoft Office Online.

In fact, Buddingup is built to be a job information site for students, new graduates, interns and co-ops from colleges and universities, though I still feel it’s still very much in its beginning stages. At present, Buddingup don’t have any job seeker’s area or employer’s area whereby job seekers can submit their resumes or manage their job alerts and employers can sign-up and browse job seeker’s resumes. However, it might be a great example for one to get a job site up and running if he/she know how to tweak the aforesaid WordPress, Simply Hired and Simple Machines forum software package.

When I started TagEdge and at one point, profiled the ever popular Web framework, i.e. Ruby on Rails, what was clear was thousands of apps that based on Ruby on Rails are already live on the Web now. To its credit, Ruby on Rails is entering version 2.3, at the time of my writing.

Though Ruby on Rails works great for doing front-end Web development, there aren’t many open source projects available to be viewed by the public. In other words, for a beginner to get access to the public code for some of the Ruby on Rails projects, he/she had to visit the open source applications and software directory such as SourceForge or github, and etc. one-by-one and perform the keyword searches on it.

That’s why OpenSourceRails has came into the limelight. How many of the open source Ruby on Rails projects that listed on the site? You get it. Meanwhile, you also get to know the demo links, download links, screenshots, and the details pertaining to each of these projects.

I hope this site will stay as long as it could, as I predicted the Ruby developer community will continue to run rampant and the number of apps listed on OpenSourceRails will be in huge number one day.

I still remember I did profiled a travel review site called WHERE’S COOL last month, and it seemed that the travel review is a big niche and now a new one with a similar idea and a generic domain name called Nextstop is officially launching this month.

Nextstop’s main focus is to offer a solution to address some of the challenges when users come to share their authentic travel experience. At first glance, I was very impressed by its user-friendliness interface in building a travel guide. Since some of the founding members have a common background for working at Google, they have used Google APIs in building the local and image search results and successfully integrated them into the Nextstop site.

In fact, there are plenty of similar apps launched with the similar idea of travel review, and unfortunately I failed to recall them all, except the aforesaid WHERE’S COOL. However, the interface of Nextstop is probably one of the easiest to be used when a user want to add a travel recommendation to the site. Simply enter the name of the place to be shared, the country name will be rendered in below of the place, makes it abundantly clear that easy-to-use is the primary function of the site. Besides, users are allowed to upload or add a photo of the place if they find that they have a better photo instead of the few that pull from Google. I like the fact that one can add a quick text recommendation with the highlighted 160 characters, though the maximum limit one can post is beyond this 160.

Like most of the review sites, Nextstop has a strong community features. You can add comment to any of the quick text recommendations, also have the option to recommend any travel guide to friends, buddies, and etc. To encourage users in sharing the places, Nextstop has applied a badge system whereby different badge color carried with the different community status. Besides, browse the community leaderboard, you will come across a succinct list of top nextstoppers who are passionately want to share the local hotspots within the community, and Nextstop is making sure that their efforts will be awarded with their own “Reputation” system.

Also, the content of the Nextstop site plays smoothly, though the site have Challenges, Forum, and the interface is not clutter. For those who love adventure, the travel recommendation posted by Nextstop’s users is extensive as there are many travel guides, and each guide is comprising of several useful travel recommendations. For instance, this London travel guide will definitely offer some places of interest for other people who haven’t been to London a completely taste of London.

I remember that I did profiled a site called Evernote which helps users to capture what they like on the Web, so that they won’t miss out anything when they want to revisit these pages. Though Evernote appeared to be one of the most talked about online note taking apps, but there’s another new player Ibrii which offers several nice features and might proved as noteworthy alternative to Evernote.

At first glance, Ibrii has a very easy user interface for users to take notes. Like most of the other note taking apps, you must enable the clipper before you could take a picture, text, or video from a Web page and put it into your note. Since most of the users who used Ibrii solely for bookmarking sites, Ibrii required users to drag the ‘Create a note’ button on their bookmark toolbar so that when they like a particular Web page, and hence it become an easy task for them to drag the page to the clipper for instance. However, the clipper will sit in the right-pane of your browser by default.

To use the clipper, you can sort your notes by using the functions such as Redo, Undo, Reload, and you even can add URL link, image, document to the drag-n-drop note. To highlight some of the text in your note, you also allowed to Bold it, or Underline it as well. For the user experience, I don’t see Ibrii have any major differentiating factor from other bookmarking tools out there. But it definitely a useful app as it offered several aforesaid nifty options and one can also share the notes to his/her friends on Facebook or Twitter even they don’t have the Ibrii accounts.

A lot of people are using Twitter now. And despite the fact that with the growing number of tweeters around, it’s never an easier task for one to look up for the right tweeters to follow. Many of us don’t even know that by following the right people in Twitter and receive the stream of tweets that are of our interest is a great fun.

To fulfill this kind of needs, a newly launched site called Tweetsourcer has came into the right place to help you find the right people to follow. To use this service, simply enter the keyword in the query that interest you, Tweetsourcer will find the right tweeters relevant to your query and what’s more, they help you to auto-follow them.

On the upside, you save yourself a lot of hassle and keystrokes on finding the tweeters that are all worth a follow. However, take a closer look at the new tweeters you’ve just auto-followed, you might not want to follow them in the long-run as you’ll find these new tweeters you just auto-followed are due to one of the tweets comprised of the keyword you entered, you might not find them posting tweets about the things you’re interested in, and want to join them in a conversation in a respectful manner.

When I started this site more than two years ago, I believed that Internet is all about organizing, especially information organization. Google do that, no matter how complexity your query is, they will help you to get your destination in the shortest time frame. Facebook also do that, collecting and organizing the biography, hobbies, circles of friends of its users one after another. Wikipedia do that as well, each Wikipedia entry, regardless the new addition or revision has made up the structure of the greatest online encyclopedia as we ever seen.

However, with the advent of the aforesaid Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, search engines, etc. the Web has taken on a new, and ever complexion. And it seemed that the users would prefer to know the top news story instead of reading through the cluttered results. For this reason, we had RSS aggregators. But in pertaining to Wikipedia, a new site called Wikirank has thus created with a simple purpose in order to help users cope with the overwhelming entries added and revised by its users every day.

As the name implies, Wikirank only gives you the popular Wikipedia pages. Without much hassle, you’ll learn to know the most read page, and trending topics over the day on Wikipedia. Besides, there is also a visually stunning graph in which it shows a comparison graph for the Lost (TV series) and Heroes (TV series) in the month of April 2009. If you view it in the range of 30 days, 60 days or even 90 days, the look and feel is well-designed and you’ll get to know which show is the more favorite one at your first glance.

Obviously, by checking out this site, one will be motivated to join along with others and read the most read Wikipedia pages. No surprise, the most-cited Wikipedia entry recently is Swine influenza.