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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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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I run a team of developers, bloggers and designers for Task.fm.  They are based all over the world, from Switzerland right across to Australia.  We all work different hours and are doing 10 things at once.

So communicating on email is starting to get hetic.  One of the tools im trying to get the team to use is Present.ly.  This could effectivly replace a big chunk of our email.

Present.ly is like a private twitter for just your company, team or group.  Users can post updates, reply and dm other users.

So why would a startup like Task.fm need this app – from my perspective, knowing what the team is currently working on is vital.  Previously, getting this info involved me sending daily emails asking for a progress update.  Now I can just login to Present.ly and get a good overview of whats going on.

You can also attach files (great for design work), create groups of users and it even integrates with Twitter.

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btw – if you havent already done so, make sure you check out the smartest reminders on the planet – Task.fm

I run a number of webesites that need a mailing list and a regular email newsletter sent out.    I use iContact – mainly because its so affordable with pricing starting at just $9.95.

The interface is extremely easy to use and of course its feature rich with a built in autoresponder and survey tool.  iContact handles all of the subscriber issues such as unsubscribes and email bounces which keeps your list free of dud contacts.  Clicks and opens are also tracked to give you very good idea of how well your campaign is performing.

You will also get access to over 300 professionally designed templates, although you can do what I did, and use your own design.  You can also create custom subscription boxes that can be easily embedded on your sites.

Bloggers, you can also import your rss feed to have it delivered to your email list.

Of course, you will find pretty much all of these features in other similar products.  What won my business was simply that its cheaper.  Being able to send out emails at a cheaper rate means my campaigns will be more profitable.

Check it out, and as always leave a comment and tell us what you think.