In a recent post reviewing service from WebNode — one of players in rather a crowded market of online site builder — I mentioned SynthaSite as a serious competitor in the field. A few weeks ago, Monique sent me a shout about SynthaSite’s upcoming release with a lot of improvements in site builder and new widgets like Form, Map and Google Adsense for site monetizing.

My Tech News Site

Viewing all good widgets available, I decided to create a mash-up called “Tech News”. Please take a look at final site as the image below.

Basically, this site has three pages: News, Photo and Video. The “News” page contains six RSS widgets which pull headlines from some infamous tech blogs like TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM… and JustTalkAboutWeb (not so famous ). “Photo” page displays photos from Flickr’s search result and “Video” page shows a YouTube’s video clip.

SynthaSite’s site buider looks plain with tabbed UI. There are no sexy ribbons like WebNode’s UI, just traditional-styled menu and toolbar that makes me think of the differences between Office 2007 and my beloved 2003 version.

Just start creating a website by choosing title and nice template for it. After that, a default page is loaded in a new tab ready for making. All of your tasks would be choosing the right widget and dropping them into right places.

First, I dropped in some layout widgets to divide the page into 4 columns. I found only “Two column layout” widget available that is not really convenient for building complicated layout but I could manage by embedding layouts within layout. Then, I simply dragged and dropped RSS widgets into the columns.

Now modify feed URL in the widget to get the latest tech news by selecting it and clicking “Edit Widget” button on top-left of its container then change appropriate properties.

Well, it’s time to monetizing the site by dropping “Google Adsense” widget under “Advertising” category into the last right column. A popup would appear asking for Adsense code and if you know what to do you’ll see Google ads displaying immediately in the design mode.

The last step, I wanted to add an image to get “tech” look for font-page. This can be done with “Image” widget. The best of this widget is you can edit the uploaded image online with very good Flash tool from Picnik (see UI of Picnik’s image editor below).

Creating “Photo” and “Video” pages was as simple as to add new pages and drop in Flickr and YouTube widgets so I don’t want to make you fed up with details. Just see my “Tech News” site at technews.synthasite.com and remember to check out it daily for the latest tech news, cool photos and funny video clips.

My 2 cents

I think SynthaSite is a good example of “web 2.0″ idea implemented in practice. You can build a multimedia website without writing a single code line, no hosting needed and you can even get money from ads.

SynthaSite takes different approach from WebNode. While WebNode seems to focus on site builder tools, SynthaSite puts emphasis on taking advantages of services provided by third parties. The result is websites created with SynthaSite look simple and are more suitable for some kind of showcase while WebNode’s sites have more professional look with unique feature like SEO-ready.

Free Website Magazine: Know more than your competitors with Website Magazine

Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future posts!

Here are a few things I discovered while playing with Google search. Did you know already?

Search in Search

Searching “Microsoft”, I got the result as image below.

Now you can search within search result. It seems only news portals have this functionality as I got similar embedded search button when trying with “New York Times” and “Washington Post” keywords but just got old-styled results when searching for “Yahoo” or “AOL”?

Google Toolbar Installed

When searching for “Google Toolbar” I received result like this screenshot:

I…

A few weeks ago, I posted a comparison of Dojo ShrinkSafe, YUI Compressor and Jasob Obfuscator. Then, I received comment from Brian introducing an interesting project: Include; some day later it was covered by Ajaxian with a few good comments that are worth a read. So, I decided to integrate into one of my projects to have hand-on experience with the lib.

Server-Side JavaScript Compression

Briefly, my project is a full-Ajax application based on Ext JS lib. I try to separate all parts of…

Every journey begins with the first step and after the first two months I can say I’ve passed the first step of a very long trip. So, I want to show a summary of my blog stats as a milestone.

Visitors and Site Ranking

In the passed 2 month, “Just Talk About Web” (JTAW) blog has welcome about 19,000 visitors (i.e. 367 visitors/day in average) who viewed over 50,000 pages. Our visitors come from 127 countries/territories; about 36.7% are from the United…

Yesterday, I subscribed to Website Magazine - a magazine which covers a variety of categories of web business from website management, online advertisement, SEO to web design and development. This magazine is an excellent source for people who are interested in doing business on the net of any kind.

I’m very fond of the digital edition of the magazine powered by NXTBook, a Flash-based book reader from Nxtbook Media; and because Flash plugin is installed in almost all browsers, you would…

In search to make my blog more popular via link exchange services, I’ve found BlogRush and registered for the service.

BlogRush states itself as a “Cooperative Syndication Network” — a network of blogs that run a small “widget” on their pages. Each time this widget is loaded it will contain 5 clickable headlines which are the blog post titles to other users’ posts. Clicking on any of these links will open a new browser window and load the blog and full post.

BlogRush…

“I’m sure what most of you care the most about are the facts, and so I’ve compiled the results of the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test for each of the different browsers. All of the tests below were performed on the same Windows machine, and the Firefox 3 nightly builds definitely came out on top.” reported Ryan from CyberNet.

“It’s important to know that every time you run the SunSpider Benchmark it conducts each test five times, and the result is the average of…

If you are going to start a business, you may have some ideas of your biz name and logo. I have no advice for the name because it is your business, no? But you can try to create a logo by yourself with two cool online tools: one is completely free and the other costs around 100 bucks for true professional service.

Online Smart Logo Maker

This is an extremely easy-to-use tool. You’ll know what to do at the first look on…

As you may notice, I’ve created a mobile version of this blog using service from WireNode.com. I’m very impressive with the simplicity of the service - it took me only about 5 minutes to do everything. Now you can read JustTalkAboutWeb DOT com from any mobile phone (optimized for iPhone too) via the link:

http://justtalkaboutweb.wirenode.mobi/

To get more info about WireNode, I sent an e-mail for company’s history and Tomas Zeman, WireNode’s innovator, said:

“We have started 3 years ago and we were…

Mads B. Westmark and Jesper Rønn-Jensen have some great quotes for the agile project wall. The quote below is what Jesper likes best:

“Small agile teams where we can show and tell - make working software and prototypes very fast in close collaboration with clients.”

And here are some other interesting quotes:

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it”

– Alan Perlis –
(American computer scientist, inventor of ALGOL)

“Expansion means complexity and complexity decay”

– C. Northcote Parkinson –
(British historian…