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In this section I want to recognize some of the cool tools and services I used to create, edit and manage this website. Most are free or surprisingly low cost. A few are commercial products that are just good values. If you are looking at setting up your own site, you may want to check them out.

Amazon and CaRP have affiliate programs and you will see this reflected in the links. I list them here because I really like them, not for the few pennies I might make if you click and buy something - just figured I'd mention it up front.

• Website Baker - The cool, simple CMS that I used as the backbone of this site. The interface is less cluttered than the big CMS packages, it is well maintained and beginner friendly. 

• CaRP: Caching RSS Parser - One of several neat, low cost utility products by Antone at geckotribe.com. Offers the features I need to grab, format, cache and display internal and external RSS feeds on this site.

• Amazon.com - Not only does Amazon offer great prices on almost anything you can imagine, they are also constantly innovating and pushing the envelope with new products and services. Their affiliate program is also the most dependable and easy to use. I have used them on each of my sites since about 1996.

• RentACoder - Rent A Coder is a unique service created by Ian Ippolitto that provides a way for buyers and sellers of services to bid for services. It is a good way to use your skills to make a little extra cash, or a way to hire someone to handle that bit of custom art, web design or programming you need done.

• Color Wheel Pro - A unique software program that allows you to see color theory in action. With Color Wheel Pro, you can create harmonious color schemes and preview them on real-world examples.

• KomodoMedia - The small social networking icons in the footer are part of a nice free set by this artist.

• Montastic - Free website monitoring service that doesn't suck -their words, and so far pretty accurate. In addition to  monitoring the site for any problems I can use it to 'check' a stub page with a few critical rss feeds forcing CaRP to cache them locally; this provides a simple workaround to my lack of cron and makes for a faster page load.

• DebugMode - Features several useful software items including the free Wink product that I use to create the interactive Flash help files that you can see in a few places on the site.

• Xenu's Link Sleuth - I don't have a sophisticated link management system to verify broken links, so I appreciate this free -and fast- desktop link checker.