Motiv Designs

In an effort to reorganize our website better, we are creating some new category pages throughout the site. We have also added some new features that we hope you will enjoy, including a free software library. We have outlined the other category changes after the jump.

Wordpress is probably the most well known, and most popular blogging platforms in the world today. There are millions of blogs that currently use Wordpress for their website. Wordpress has come a long way since it's creation, and also has a large development community behind it. There are more plugins being created these days that are taking Wordpress to the next level, and actually making it more of a CMS in the traditional sense. Out of the box, it is still just a powerful blogging platform, but with a few good plugins, you can have yourself an E-commerce store, a solid forum, or a community driven website like Reddit, Flicker, or Reddit. I wouldn't say it is as powerful as Drupal, but it is a quite a bit more user friendly at this point.

TweetDeck is a very robust Twitter application that runs on the Adobe Air platform. It allows for custom searches that can be saved and updated at a constant interval. It is probably one of the most popular Twitter applications out there, as it makes Twitter so much easier to use itself in most cases. It may take a few days to get used to it, but it can really save you time and effort while doing your daily Twittering. It has even added functionality for Facebook in one of it's later updates, solidifying it as an upcoming app in the Facebook community as well.

Mozilla Firefox is by far one of the most preferred browsers on the planet at this point, especially within the development community as it has tons of add-ons that will blow your mind. Once again, the open-source community shines through with a huge community behind these addons, and some see hundreds of thousands of downloads per day. If Firefox isn't the most popular browser right now, within 10 years it probably will.

DeskTube is a pretty cool adobe air application if you are into YouTube. Not only can you search for and watch YouTube videos from your desktop, but you can also video chat with your friends and connect easily to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Drupal is becoming one of the most popular, if not the most popular true content management systems as this point. Of course it is not on par with Wordpress in terms of usage by bloggers, but it has a tremendous amount of functionality for an open-source CMS platform. The development community has really come through as well as there are tons of modules, otherwise known as plugins to the rest of the world, available to add much more functionality to your Drupal site.

Currently the Whitehouse.gov runs on Drupal, along with all of my websites.

I found this very useful SEO tool today at one of the webmaster forums I frequent. I was just kind of browsing around and happened to come upon a tool called ,the SEO for Firefox plugin, that I will use from now on. I felt the need to share this I found it to be very useful for determining quite a bit about a website on the fly and displaying that information to you quickly. I would recommend checking out this SEO tool if you are into finding out as much information about websites as I am. The tool has been around for a bit it seems, and I just had not found it yet. The reason I did find it was that the latest version had been released. The tool was released by Aaron Wall, and looks to be a solid tool for anyone looking to move ahead in the SEO field.

Recently we were got a website consulting gig to help redesign a Zen Cart store and optimize the website for search engines. It turns out that Zen Cart is not as difficult as we expected it to be. It is just like any other CMS really. There are some install files, some templates, and it also has a bunch of plugins available as well. The project did not start and end how we had planned, but it ended up being a great learning experience for both my Drupal development and future Zen Cart development projects.

Comodo has come out of nowhere from what I can tell to put out some fairly nice security applications. One of which is their free firewall. It is sort of annoying that the program updates of of nowhere, but it still seems to provide some great software firewall features.

Kerio Personal Firewall was bought out by Sunbelt a while back. It has been able to keep up one of the best free software firewalls around and has held onto the top rated free firewall spot for several years. I have stopped using it personally, but it still has some advantages for those looking for a great free firewall.