TastyStartup

Load Impact a free tool to test how well your website can handle lots of traffic.

One of the big problems developers face is knowing how much traffic a website or web app can handle.  In development, sites are often only used by a handful of people so you have o idea how well it will handle when its released to the masses.  Although a tool like load impact can’t really test the ins and outs of a web app, it can give you a good idea of how it will perform if hit by a ton of visitors at once.

Load Impact has a number of different plans, the free one allows you to simulate up to 50 users hitting your website at once.  This is perfect for small websites, but larger apps may need to pay the small fee to simulate more.  Its a good idea to see just how many visitors are required to bring down your website.

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Estimurl is a free tool you can use to find out how much your website is worth.

These tools are never very accurate, but its nice to compare to different competing websites to see the differences.

As well as generating a value, it outputs your PageRank, Alexa score, backlinks and where your server is located.

A nice free tool to waste some time on!

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Next year I’ll be travelling through Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, London and Glasgow.  Unfortunately I will most likely be staying in run of the mill hotels.

If your looking for a little more excitement and more authentic travel experience take a look at AirBnB.

The site lists a huge range of “pads” from around the world, where the owner, turned host wants to offer their room/apartment/studio up for guests.

The site is complete with reviews (lots of people seem very impressed) and a booking engine.  Whats more, this personalised, boutique experience will cost you less than staying in a business hotel.  And some of the destinations ook amazing – a must see site for any traveller

Take a look at AirBnB

Its only been a few days since Twitter rolled out its Twitter lists features to all users, but already a directory of popular lists has emerged.

Discover Lists

Using Listorious you can discover the most popular Twitter lists and search for lists of interest.

Twitter lists provide a great way to expand the people you follow without letting in too much noise – You can easily flick through lists to get an overview of whats happening in any given niche.

So take a look at Listorious and start discovering new and exciting twitter users.

Create Lists

I’ve started to create a list or two and have been doing research into finding the best tweeps.    A good place to start would be seeing how others are using lists.  Robert Scoble is doing an incredible job…..but didn’t offer any clues on his techniques:

My suggestion would be to start by categorizing the people you already are following.  Chances are you are already following a bunch of people in a specific niche.

List Your Colleagues

Work for a startup or brand that uses twitter?  Put your colleagues into a list (if they won’t mind).

Visit WeFollow

WeFollow is a great directory of Tweeps and recently got much better when they started using a better ranking algorithm.  Use keyword search to find tweeps.

These are my ideas – how are you using Twitter lists?

btw. How soon before we see lists of the best lists?

For most freelancers, managing your own finances is seen as a haslle.  You’re to busy being creative to worry about tracking your expenses. Right?  Well luckily there are some amazing tools online that will help ease the strain of accounting.  And because they are hosted in the cloud, you can keep up to date anytime  and anywhere.

Freshbooks

Freshbooks is a very popular tool among designers and creative freelancers.   Its a fast and easy way to send and track invoices.  It also has built in time tracking – great, if you charge by the hour.

Pricing starts at Free (for 3 clients) and goes up to $149 if you’re lucky enough to have 5000 clients!  This pricing model means it will grow with your business.

Xero

Xero is a professional and full featured account application.   Its designed for more serious accounting and has more features than the previously mentioned Freshbooks.  It probably isn’t the best choice for freelancers and is geared more towards the small business.

Pricing starts at $29 a month

Outright

Outright is my personal favourite tool and is designed to do one thing – bookkeeping.  Its great for tracking your expenses and income and integrates nicely with PayPal and other accounting apps such as Freshbooks.

Outright is free and plans to always stay that way.

Less Accounting

LessAccounting is very similar to Freshbooks.  It allows you to track expenses, send invoices, manage tax – and its all wrapped up in a very simple interface.  This is a good choice for any freelancer who hates the “business” side of freelancing.

Pricing starts at Free and goes up to $24 a month.

TweetTabs provides an interface similar to Tweetdeck – but solely for Twitter search.  Plus its browser based.

If you track multiple search terms on Twitter like I do, then a tool like this is really useful.  It puts all the info in one page and scanning for new entries is dead simple.

TweetTabs is really simple – it only does one thing, but it does it really well.

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Up until now, I have been using xe.com as my currency converter.  They did a pretty good job.

However, im now definitely liking Curculator and relatively new player on the block that has a focus on saving you time.

Curculator is a good looking currency converter and calculator.  Meaning you can calculate and then convert.  I can see this coming in handy when I do my cashflows over the coming months as we trade in U.S dollars but are based in Australia.

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One of the biggest and ongoing struggles I’ve been having while building Task.fm, is giving feedback to designers and developers on their current work.

My process currently involves sending a string of emails with screenshots attached or doing my best to describe to issues using words.

A private beta tool, potentially could save our team a lot of time.  Notable is a feedback tool for projects that makes use of a browser based button to quickly take screenshots of your app and then overlay them with notes etc.

The app at the moment is in Private Beta so I haven’t been able to try it out and do a full review.  Fingers crossed they give us an invite (hint info@task.fm)

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Super Chirp is a new service that allows you to charge people for viewing your Twitter stream.

Now I know what you’re thinking! Why would anyone want to pay to look at your Twitter?  But, this could be useful for offering some premium content.  Im sure celebrity users could also find a few peeps to pay.

This wouldn’t work with average joe, but if you having something valuable it could.  There are plenty of membership only blogs, so why can’t there be a membership only Twitter!.

Super Chirp handles all of the payment processing and there is nothign tricky to setup.

In an age where content providers are starting to switch to a paid model – this just might work.

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FeedMingle is a free and very easy to use tool that allows you to mix a collection of rss feeds into just one.

FeedMingle outputs the result in the form of a combined rss, aton, json and a widget.

This tool could be useful for bringing all your digital profiles together, but could also prove valuable in tracking mentions of your name or product.  ie. put Google alerts, blogsearch and twitter search feeds all into the one.

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