Tackk review: Out of beta, still an excellent way to create simple websites

Tackk If you think you can't create your own website, Tackk will help you change your mind.

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Tackk, the best way I know of to create one-page websites, has emerged from beta full of new features and surprises. It's the same Tackk you know and love (or should, if you don't already), except it's bigger and better. The platform is now easier to use, offers more personalization, and, in keeping up with the times, is also much more social.

In a nutshell, you can use Tackk to create good-looking websites for any occasion, as long as you don't need more than one page. You need not a shred of coding skills, and even design skills are almost unnecessary. This does not mean all Tackks look the same, though. Tackk's found the golden way to ensure all pages are beautiful, while giving you just the right amount of decision and personalization options.

All embed options are in the same place, and include a contact form, a payment widget, and more.

If you've used Tackk before, you won't be disoriented by the new design. Most options remain where they were, with the addition of a more streamlined creation process, taking you through the steps of designing your page. You can now choose from whole color palettes rather than just one base color, and the embedding options for videos and music now support additional services such as Rdio, 8Tracks and TED. One option I found missing is Instagram embeds, which are nowhere to be found in this version.

The highlight of the new Tackk, however, is in the social features. Unlike the beta version, which included very basic profile details and no social options to speak of, the new Tackk adds the community to the mix. Your new profile includes a photo, a short bio, and links to your personal website and social accounts. You can follow other users and like their Tackks, as well as share Tackks using a new and improved sharing widget. You will now have a username on Tackk, derived from the email you signed up with, which you can change through the settings if you wish. If you don't like all this social stuff, however, just make your Tackks private and forget about it.

The new Tackk profiles are much more elaborate, helping you promote your personal portfolio of Tackks.

A new tagging system makes categorizing and finding Tackks much easier. When searching for Tackks in the public Tackkboard, try searching for a tag or multiple tags to zoom into pages you're interested in. Aside from following users, you can also follow tags or combinations of tags, and remain updated on any new Tackks created under these categories.

When you search for Tackks, it's easy to find out more about them or share them with one click.

No website or service is complete these days without mobile support, and Tackk is no different. The new Tackk's design is completely responsive, letting you easily browse and create Tackks using your mobile or tablet. Tackk shines on bigger screens, especially when creating pages, but it's nice to have the option to work on your Tackks from anywhere. The new Tackk is still as awesome as always. It's still the best way there is to create single-page website. And now, it's a community too. Hurry up, before everyone hears about it.

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Review: Transfer your website's RSS feed from Feedburner to FeedPress

FeedPress Future-proof against FeedBurner's likely demise by switching your RSS feed to FeedPress.

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Google has treated Feedburner like a bad impulse buy ever since purchasing it in 2007, leaving it in a state of neglect. After the announcement that Google Reader was being discontinued, the Internet grapevine began buzzing about what Google service was next on the chopping block. The general consensus is that it will be Feedburner (since both the API and Adsense for Feeds have already been closed). It would make sense, if you are a webmaster, to redirect your RSS feed and newsletter subscribers to FeedPress before it's too late.

The dashboard screen shows all of the information you are going to need, including your subscriber count and your statistics.

FeedPress (formerly URI.LV) is the only serious opponent to Feedburner right now. For years, Feedburner dominated the RSS aggregation market, but now that it is looking vulnerable, the scrappy upstart FeedPress has emerged to provide a serious viable alternative to those who are nervous about possible future events. The only slight downer about FeedPress is that the free basic service is restricted, with the muzzles taken off only if you pony up $30 a year (or $3 a month).

If you sign up for the free basic FeedPress service, the RSS feed restricts you to a maximum 5,000 subscribers. If you want to exceed that, you need to pay. The restriction will make no difference to most small sites, and commercial sites have the budget to afford the $30 a year.

The most important part of the feed is how often the site is checked and the feed refreshed. After all, if you are a breaking news website, it makes no sense if your feed lies unchecked for hours on end. The free version gets checked once an hour, and paid users get checked every 20 minutes. The totally free Feedburner, by comparison, gets checked every 30 minutes.

FeedPress makes it easy to add feeds.

Social network sharing is also another important aspect of your RSS feed.  Feedburner currently only supports Twitter, but FeedPress tries to get one over Google by offering Twitter, Facebook and app.net for paid subscibers. The free service only allows one social network, but at least you have your choice of three.

It is extremely easy to set up redirection for your feed from Feedburner to FeedPress. After signing up for your account, you are given detailed instructions on how to do it, in effect an easy way and a hard way. The hard way involves some coding, and the easy way is installing a Wordpress plugin that will do all the necessary coding for you (if you have a Wordpress site).

Give the server a few hours to update your account, and then you'll see your subscriber count waiting for you. You can even import in all of your newsletter subscribers. Your subscribers won't even notice the switch.

The great thing about this is that the switch to FeedPress isn't permanent. If Google suddenly decides to fall in love with Feedburner again and shower it with improvements and guarantees of long-term survival, then you can switch your feed back again. But it's an awfully good idea to set up some insurance now and move the feed, so if Google suddenly shuts down Feedburner, you won't be one of the panicking webmasters wondering what to do.

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Review: Create stunning websites in minutes for free with Tackk

Every once in a while, I come across a service that leaves me speechless. This is exactly what happened when I first started using Tackk: It took my breath away. Tackk is a free website maker currently in beta, and will help you create any single-page website (or Tackks) in minutes.

Choose between multiple fonts and add as many images as you want to your page.

Not only is it free, but if you don't mind your website expiring after seven days, you don't even have to sign up. Just point your browser to tackk.com and start editing your new page. It's going to be beautiful, too, regardless of your skills—there's simply no other way with Tackk.

If you decide to go for a free account, you'll get Tackks that never expire, the ability to create multiple Tackks, give them custom URLs, and include contact forms. All other features are available to everyone, and anonymously. To help you get started, Tackk comes with five different themes: Anything, Events, Housing, For Sale, Announce, and Business. Each one comes with the features you're most likely to use on the page, but you can add and remove elements as you please.

After choosing a theme, use the Editor on the right to choose your color, headline font, and background texture. Remember when I said your website is going to be beautiful? This is due to the delicate balance of freedoms and limitations that Tackk provides. You can choose any color you want (there are almost 100 to choose from), but once that's done, it sets the color scheme for your entire page. When it comes to your headings, sub-headings, and buttons, you only get to choose from 3-4 colors that go well with your background. The weak point of this feature is links, which always take the background's color, and may become almost invisible when using dark backgrounds.

Embedding a video, song, or Instagram photo is as easy as pasting the URL.

Your Tackk page is not all about text. You can easily add lists, buttons, photos from your hard drive or Instagram, videos from YouTube, Vimeo or Hulu, embedded songs from Spotify or SoundCloud, maps, a contact form (registered users only), comments, and even a payment widget that lets you sell products and accept PayPal payments. Adding an element could not be easier: hover over an existing element and click on the plus sign. Provide the necessary details, and you're good to go. Contact forms, maps, and payment elements are added from the Features tab in the Editor.

Tackk's brilliance lies in its simplicity, but also in the way it lets you personalize your page to a limit. No matter what you do, the page will be an obvious Tackk in its design, but it can be personal enough to be your page, with your background, colors, and content. If you've created an account, you can create a custom URL for your page, otherwise, you get a random one. If you've included comments, your visitors can interact with you page using Facebook, Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail logins. They can also share your page on various social networks.

You can easily sell items through your Tackk, and include a map to your physical store.

Unlike Wix or Breezi, Tackk cannot create full-fledged websites with multiple pages, and doesn't include many of the more powerful features such as collaborative creation, blogging options, hosting, etc. Unlike these services, it's also free to use no matter what features you use and how many pages you create. Use Tackk when you want to create a beautiful online invitation, a gorgeous announcement or ad, a stunning sales page, or anything else you can think of that can be done in one page. For businesses, Tackk provides branded Tackks for customers to play with and build upon. You can browse a large collection or public Tackks for some inspiration, but Tackk is so well made, I doubt you'll need it.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use the latest version of this Web-based software.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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Swear Off Time-Wasting Websites With Cold Turkey Free Edition

ColdTurkey’s simple interface lets you pick from a list of sites to block, or add your own custom sites.Cats would be far more remorseful if they only knew how many hours of productivity are lost on funny cat pictures across the world every day. Then again, the same could be said about random YouTube videos, aimless Wikipedia crawling, and the numerous other forms of online procrastination keeping us away from doing boring (or scary), yet essential, work. The trouble is that pulling the plug is often not an option: Many of us need the Internet for work. One interesting solution is censoring your own Internet usage, blocking out distracting websites while still being able to use the Web for work. This is what open-source utility Cold Turkey Free Edition offers, at no cost and with no ads.

Free browser add-ons such as WasteNoTime for Chrome and LeechBlock for Firefox offer easy ways to block distracting websites, but they are also easy to disable. All you need to do is switch to another browser, or start a private browsing session, and you're free to procrastinate again.

Cold Turkey, modeled after Mac utility SelfControl, takes blocking much more seriously. Specify which websites to block, pick a time frame for blocking, and start. When I used ColdTurkey, I also turned off my smartphone and put it in another room (the application won't do this for you, unfortunately).

Before you start blocking, ColdTurkey gives you one last chance to reconsider.When Cold Turkey is active, you are truly locked out of those sites: Opening a different browser (or a private session) won't help. Neither will restarting your computer or killing the ColdTurkey process (it doesn't even run in the background, so there's nothing to kill). And if you try to do something clever like tamper with the HOSTS file to disable blocking, ColdTurkey may detect that and lock you out of your distracting websites for a whole week.

Simply put, there is no way to abort blocking once you're midway through, so you need to carefully consider the websites you block and the time frame. I once locked myself out of Gmail so I could focus on writing, but I finished sooner than I thought and was then unable to submit my work until the lock expired. When you try to access a blocked website, the browser simply fails to find it—just as if you were offline.

Once the blocking period elapses, ColdTurkey reminds you that you’re now free to browse anywhere.Another technical limitation is that Cold Turkey does not let you block site paths. For example, there is no way to block just google.com/reader (Google Reader) while leaving google.com accessible. Since Google Reader is a gateway to endless procrastination (at least for me), my solution was to block Google altogether and use alternative search engine DuckDuckGo instead.

The free version of Cold Turkey offers plenty of features, and is easy to use. You can also donate $5 to developer and self-described "student in need" Felix Belzile to get a more powerful version that can block executables, such as games, and supports a time frame of up to 30 days (compared to 7 days for the free version). Combined with screen-recording utility TimeSnapper, these two programs form a powerful duo of productivity-enhancing tools for changing long-time habits and getting work done faster and with less stress.

—Erez Zukerman

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