Scott on Writing

Musings on technical writing...

Web Sites Can't You Live Without

About a week and a half ago I posted a blog entry asking for programs you can't live without.  I got a lot of great responses, and - thanks for the comments - have learned about a few new, cool tools (replacing WS_FTP with FileZilla, trying out Skype).  Among the comments was this one, from Arif Khan:

Now that we have received so many suggestions regarding the programs that are a necessity, how about a post regarding 'websites' that are an intrinsic part of one's daily life?

So that is the purpose of this blog entry.  I figured since I learned about a lot of neat tools from the last post, this would present an opportunity to learn about new sites that I'll likely come to find invaluable.  So let me know what Web sites do you find yourself visiting every day, those sites that you couldn't live without.  Here is my short list:

So what sites are on your must-visit list each and every day?

posted on Thursday, September 02, 2004 8:53 PM

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# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/2/2004 9:29 PM Scott

http://www.fark.com

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/2/2004 9:29 PM TimP

Channel 9, of course.

http://channel9.msdn.com

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/2/2004 11:05 PM Ben

http://www.dilbert.com/
http://userfriendly.org/

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/3/2004 2:16 AM Morten Jacobsen

My number one, and with a huge margin, is Bloglines. I have 71 feeds in it, and it has pushed out a lot of others like news.google, ccn and pcmag. The other are:
- google (a lot of times)
- blogger
- sitemeter
- msdn

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/3/2004 4:53 AM Rajeev Gopal

http://rajeevgopal.blogspot.com :-)
BOOKS
http://www.bookpool.com
http://www.amazon.com

TECH
http://www.aspalliance.com
http://scottonwriting.net
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com

NEWS
http://news.google.com
http://www.keralakaumudi.com (regional)
http://www.rediff.com

DEALS
http://www.digitaldeals.net
http://www.ecost.com

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/3/2004 5:27 AM Thomas Freudenberg

Technology:
http://www.codeproject.com
http://windowsforms.net

News:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/ (german)

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/3/2004 7:30 AM Brian

News & Commentary:
Rush Noon-3pm
http://www.970wfla.com/main.html
Boortz 8:30-1pm
http://boortz.com/

Interesting:
http://www.gadgetopia.com

Fun:
http://www.thedailywtf.com


# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/3/2004 7:47 AM KenB

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

http://www.metacritic.com/

http://www.wunderground.com/

http://www.cinescape.com/

http://www.infoplease.com/

http://dictionary.reference.com/

http://www.quotationspage.com/

http://www.biblegateway.com/

http://www.hps.com/~tpg/ukdict/

http://www.nme.com/

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/3/2004 11:05 AM Josh Christie

http://my.yahoo.com - Custom news, weather, stock quotes, and access to my yahoo mail account.

http://blogs.msdn.com - Everything happening at Microsoft.

http://sourceforge.net - I check out the most active projects every several days. I'd do the same on gotdotnet.com if the site wasn't so slow :)

http://www.slickdeals.net - You never know when a rebate or sale might convince you to buy something you didn't even know you wanted :)

# RE: http://www.lazycoder.com 9/3/2004 1:13 PM jason@jasonkemp.ca (Jason Kemp)

For fun, http://www.spamusement.com

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/3/2004 6:29 PM Brian Cooper

Tech
http://www.asp.net
http://www.sqlteam.com/
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/
http://www.jelks.nu/colorsNS.html
http://www.msd2d.com/
Shop
http://www.amazon.com
http://www.newegg.com/
Interests
http://www.pikaht.com
http://www.thedailywtf.com
http://www.tomshardware.com/
Other
http://gmail.google.com
http://www.google.com

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/3/2004 10:29 PM Wessam Zeidan

A couple of Macromedia Flash websites

http://www.flashkit.com
http://www.ultrashock.com

Another .NET forum

http://www.xtremedotnettalk.com

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/4/2004 1:18 AM John Tobler

I can't believe I get to be the one to put http://www.gotdotnet.com/ on this list! Don't you folks need to be up on the latest on Application Blocks and stuff?!

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/4/2004 1:21 AM John Tobler

I'm also amazed that nobody has nominated http://www.bloglines.com/. There are *so* many desktop RSS readers now, but with Bloglines I have access to my entire blogroll from *any* internet connected machine wheresoever. Bloglines rocks!

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/4/2004 1:29 AM John Tobler

My third and final-for-now entry in this venture is http://www.backflip.com/. Backflip is a kind of free bookmark manager and it works extremely well. I currently maintain 2,880 links on it. I can easily and quickly export my links to MSIE and then can quickly and easily import them into FireFox. It takes very little time to recover my favorites on any new machine. Go from home to work? No problem. Change jobs? No problem. If you have ever lost bookmarks because of a machine change, you need this service!

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/4/2004 1:38 AM John Tobler

Sorry, Morten Jacobsen already recommended Bloglines. The wierd thing is that the keyboard Find feature of Firefox, where you start typing a word and it finds it in the text, skipped right over his entry for some reason yet to be explained. And, regarding Backflip, some of you might find the very creative "My Daily Routine" feature handy - I haven't seen anything quite like it for setting up a daily run on websites.

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/4/2004 3:36 PM // Rutger

http://scottonwriting.net
http://www.worldlingo.com/products_services/worldlingo_translator.html
http://validator.w3.org/


Well, nice, these lists, but everybody has it's own favorite websites.

Scott, what about favorite RSS feeds. While it's hot and even getting hotter every day I'm curious about the favorite RSS feeds.

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/4/2004 5:26 PM Scott Mitchell

Rutger, the "RSS Feeds You Can't Live Without" entry is going to be my next one in this "series." Thanks.

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/4/2004 11:00 PM piyo

I'm slowly moving my browsing experience online, meaning my bookmarks are going online. First, I have to second www.bloglines.com. This really is a great tool. That is how I found this site. If you want to find "RSS Feeds You Can't Live Without" I suggest you visit to www.bloglines.com's suggestion list.

John Tobler mentioned www.backflip.com, which to me seems so very useful. I want to add that in my toolkit.

Another web service I can't live without which I recently found is http://www.stumbleupon.com. This gives you peer-reviewed sites randomly and it also has site categories. It adds a toolbar to your browser and you click a thumbs up/down icon if you like/dislike the site. You can optionally add comments to your rating. You can develop an "audience". Granted it's more entertainment than pure information (you may not want to "stumble" during work), but I've found very useful sites this way.

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/4/2004 11:03 PM piyo

I mentioned BlogLines's suggestion list, well I may as well provide a link:

http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs

This list is changed daily, and is based on popularity. (For example, Slashdot has 14000 subscribers, etc.)

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/8/2004 9:13 AM Arif Khan

There are plenty of sites that I visit very often, several of them have already been mentioned above and I will try to avoid those, below is the list of few:

http://teawithtammy.blogspot.com/
(interesting blog about innovative technologies and its social impacts etc.)

www.databasejournal.com
www.aspmessageboard.com
www.dotnetjunkies.com
www.informit.com
http://www.programmersheaven.com/
http://www.earthweb.com/
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/home/home.htm

www.infomrationweek.com
www.zdnet.com
www.pcmag.com

www.pricegrabber.com


# RSS Feeds You Can't Live Without 9/23/2004 9:18 AM Scott on Writing

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 9/24/2004 12:39 AM Tom Churm

Programming
http://www.hotscripts.com
http://www.planet-source-code.com
http://www.dynamicdrive.com
http://www.php.net

Python
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/
http://py.vaults.ca/
http://www.churm.com/python.txt

RSS
http://www.syndic8.com

# FileZilla 1/21/2005 7:45 PM .Avery Blog

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 11/15/2005 11:58 AM Blog Entry Title

Just thought that I would point out the blog entry title Scott. I think it should be
"Web Sites You Can't Live Without"

Thanks for all the great articles!

# re: Web Sites Can't You Live Without 10/14/2006 6:30 PM moeyae

http://forums.asp.net
http://www.google.com
http://www.codeproject.com

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