Well, I’m inclined to say that price would be the biggest difference. That’s right, SquareSpace will cost you $8/mo after its two-week trial whereas you’ll never have to open that wallet (or purse) after two weeks of hosting your site on WordPress.com.

I’ll more-than-willingly admit that I’m one of WordPress’ most fervent proponents. That said, SquareSpace is… well, it’s just plain slick. 

Now, both the free version of WordPress and the $8/mo SquareSpace plan offer any introductory blogger exactly what they need:

• site stats,
• a plethora of designs from which to choose (and subsequently customize),
• comment spam prevention,
• easy WYSIWYG post authoring capabilities,
• support for multiple authors/editors/users,
• import/export options,
• social integration (hey it’s all the rage these days),
• ability to post from your phone, email, etc.,
• RSS,
• very good built-in search functionality,
• and much, much (much) more.

So, what about the differences? Well, like I said, one of the main differences comes down to CHC. (That’s “cold hard cash” for those of you that aren’t as completely obsessed with abbreviations as I am.)

Right off the bat, for what any beginnier – or even intermediate – blogger needs, you’re shelling out $8/mo to SquareSpace when you could be paying nothing at all with WordPress. Even with the SS plan, you won’t have access to a custom domain name. So, at this point, you’re either going to be hosting your blog on something.wordpress.com or something.squarespace.com.

Custom domain names are extra with both providers.

From then on, it’s still all about cost differences. 

SQUARESPACE ADVANCED OPTIONS

SquareSpace offers FIVE different monthly plans ranging from that $8/mo plan all the way up to a $50/mo plan. Besides for the ability to have a custom domain name with the latter four plans, the main things for which you’ll be paying with each of the plans include the ability to handle more incoming traffic, handle more members, more editors and more storage space. 

A few other interesting features that start to pop up with the $20/mo and $30/mo plans include:

• DropBox modules,
• form builders,
• FAQ builders,
• email template control,
• SSL and a few others.

WORDPRESS ADVANCED OPTIONS (a.k.a., “Premium Features”)

WordPress offers a different perspective when it comes to advanced functionality – in the form of yearly add-ons. For instance, for $15/year you can have your own domain name. For “VideoPress” (an excellent video/podcast publishing option), tack on about $60/year. For additional storage space, count on at least $20/year, unlimited users: $30/year, the option to go ad-free (or have your own ads): another $30/year.

Yikes… those look like some scary costs. Well, yeah, but if you add ‘em up and calculuate them, instead, as monthly fees, you’ll find that $15 + $60 + $20 + $30 + $30 = $155 per year. So, if you were to divide that by 12 months, you’d be looking at a whopping $12.92 per month.

That’s not so bad in comparison to SquareSpace’s “Advanced” or “Business” plans at $20 and $30 per month, respectively.

Then again, SS throws in a couple of unique features like those FAQ & form builders… and even that DropBox module – features that are nowhere to be found on WordPress.com.

One other thing in SquareSpace’s corner: beautification. Seriously, SS has, in my humble opinion, much better templates/themes than the ones offered by my beloved WordPress. Just take a peek at the release of SquareSpace’s Social Widgets to get a feel for the crisp, clean look of the interface in which you’ll be working.

(The comparison of WordPress to SquareSpace makes me think of the the comparison of Mac vs. Windows. One looks nice and doesn’t give you many hassles but the other one just plain gets the job done at the end of the day. I’ll let you decipher which is which.)

THE CONCLUSION

In the arena of hosted blogs, I’m going to ever-so-carefully wrap things up by stating the following: if you don’t mind shelling the amount of money per month equivalent to that of 2.5 fast food meals, I might sign up for SquareSpace’s 2nd plan (the “Pro” plan at $14/mo.) and be on my merry way. 

Odds are, for most bloggers, you’ll appreciate the expansive flexibility and it’ll be a long way before you have to worry about “yearly add-ons” or upgrading.

If, however, you just want to hop on that thing we call the Information Superhighway and blog ’till your heart’s content, all without sacrificing this month’s groceries (or this month’s Starbucks Venti Soy Lattes), please, by all means, sign up on WordPress.com today. Don’t even hesitate. 

It’s ridiculously flexible and despite what I’ve said about SquareSpace being “slick,” the WordPress interface has been in development for over seven years now and certainly feels like it. It’s fine-tuned, to say the absolute least.

THE THIRD AND INFINITELY BETTER OPTION

“What? A third option? You didn’t tell me you were gonna have a third option! I’m outta here, man!”

Hey, guess what. WordPress has something else you might be interested in. It’s a “self-hosted,” open-source version that you can install on your own space out there on the Interwebz. A version in which you have complete control over ads, design, accessibility, search engine optimization, statistics, backups, images/videos/pictures and just about anything else you could possibly want from your blog. 

If you do happen to find a certain type of functionality missing from your version of WordPress, just check out the Extend section of WordPress.org for thousands of themes and plugins – all free.

Speaking of free, what exactly does this magical version of WordPress cost? 

Nada.

That’s right, you can download every wonderful element of WordPress in a ridiculously easy-to-install .zip file (at http://wordpress.org) for the low cost of zero dollars and zero cents. Then, just find a host on which to install it. 

As a freelance web designer, I manage each and every one of my clients’ WordPress sites throughMediaTemple (which I HIGHLY recommend) but you can find plenty of other companies that offer hosting and 1-click installations of WordPress sites. Even GoDaddy does a pretty good job at WP hosting.

Overall, the self-hosted version of WordPress is, by far, the best option out there if you plan on taking your participation in the blogosphere seriously.

Let your fellow readers know what you think is the better service. Post in the comments below.

As if these weren’t enough, the open-source/freeware product Snarl exists solely to double your notification pleasure.

While providing you with some of the same notifications you already receive (battery is low, audio is muted, etc.), Snarl also enables even more notifications for those that either have OCD or just need to always be “in-the-know.”  Examples include notifications for: hourly time updates, timer countdowns, more-specific power/battery notifications and more. Plus, like any truly-great application, Snarl supports extendability. For those that like the concept of this application, this is where it really gets interesting. Developers (or even you) can even write their own Snarl applications so that you can be visually notified for every event imaginable.

Want to be notified of a recent Tweet? New emails (even Exchange emails)? New Google Wave messages? New weather alerts? Snarl has you covered.

Plus, if you’re a true nerd, you’ll certainly appreciate how much granular control over what you’re notified about and how exactly you’re notified.

G’head and check it out: http://www.fullphat.net.

[Source: downloadsquad.com]

I’ve found many MySQL backup solutions but none of them seem to be perfect in my eyes. (Hey, what is perfect these days?)

DESKTOP APPS

There’s Backup Watcher for MySQL but a) it costs $$ and b) you have to “activate” the software in order to use it. For someone like myself – who is constantly reformatting the various machines on which I work – that’s far too annoying given that you have to wait for a new activation code from the company. Of course, if you’re just gonna set this up on a server or desktop that you touch maybe once every three years – it may very well be worth it. Setting up automated backups is fool-proof and the interface isn’t too archaic. Plus, support usually responds within one business day – even if they aren’t that fluent in the English language.

One benefit to the above app is that it runs on Windows. For me, at least, that makes administration much easier. Another such app is Auto Backup for MySQL. (I’ll try and download and install this to post a review here soon.) This one also costs money (still less than $100) but the fact that it appears to be continually updated – it’s now Windows 7 and Server 2008 compatible – puts my mind at ease.

For more advanced MySQL DB management, you might also look at Navicat for MySQL – an all-in-one mgmt app that not only enables scheduled database backups but also provides you with options to interact with the data itself as well as the overall structure of the database. Pricing is much better than I remember. You can probably stay close to the price-range of the apps mentioned above and wind up with many more features at the same time. Plus, the interface is quite a bit more polished than the other apps.

WEB-BASED SCRIPTS

A more universal option (for those on different platforms beyond Windows) is a self-install script like Backup2Mail… which costs absolutely nothing. (The song “Born Free” from the last episode of the first season of Dexter is now running through my mind.)

Scripts like this one reside on your server, alongside your MySQL install, and regularly emails you backups of your database(s). The company recommends that you use a secure email environment given the risk involved in sending potentially-confidential data through email.

AutoMySQLBackup is a free script that’s been around for a while. Much like Backup2Mail, this script enables scheduled backups via the web but, with this one, you can not only send backups by email but also dump them to a directory on your web server. That way, if you’ve got the available space, you never need worry about the size of your DB backups.

What backup solution are you using/do you recommend? Let other readers know in the comments below.

Related Links:
Weave FAQ |  Weave Download |  Weave Project Homepage

Recently added to the CodePlex (Microsoft’s version of SourceForge.net) is a little app by the name of TweetCraft. As you’d expect from the title, TweetCraft enables you to both read and compose “tweets” while within WoW. The app is currently on a stable release and can be downloaded from tweetcraft.codeplex.com… and it actually looks pretty cool. Plus, like with any above-average Twitter client, you can schedule your tweets and even send screenshots of your current game using the built-in TwitPic integration.

Plus, if you’re a WoW fan/Visual Studio expert, you can easily enhance the application and create your own TweetCraft addons. If you’re not big into programming but might be interested in learning and are still a student, you can grab a full version of Visual Studio 2008 (plus alot more) via Microsoft’s DreamSpark program.

Check out the insanely-awesome overview video below or just start playing with the app now.

(Seriously, that has to be one of the most well-made promo videos I’ve ever seen.)

If the whole concept sounds familiar, it should. This is basically like the Adobe AIR platform with the key difference being that the Titanium platform is 100% open-source, unlike Adobe’s solution. From titaniumapp.com:

“Fundamentally both products are similar. Both Titanium and AIR are free, both are built on top of the open source WebKit engine, and both support development of desktop applications using standard Web technologies.

Our belief is that products like Titanium are ideally suited for open source because they address a large, horizontal problem. As a result, our hope is that we can attract a large open source community around Titanium, which will help it grow and mature into the leading solution for building rich desktop and mobile applications.”

One additional difference I found to be interesting: Titanium applications are currently capable of being produced as standalone applications. In other words, you can publish an application for users to download and install without having to have the Titanium framework also installed on their machine. The FAQ section goes on to state that, in future versions, publishers can choose to separate the runtime from the app much like they’re currently forced to do with Adobe AIR applications. (Speaking of, the company’s list of frequently asked questions re: the project is quite thorough.)

If you’re a Web and/or current AIR developer and Titanium sounds intriguing, check out the project’s official site: titaniumapp.com.

*Linux support is said to be arriving soon.

[via WebResourcesDepot]

This is typically a result of two separate problems. First, the developers of the email message that you received perhaps didn’t use Web standards when composing it. Alternatively, the email authors may have done everything right and composed the message using the most modern standards possible but the developers of your email client don’t know what they’re doing. It’s 50/50 for me… I’ve experienced both the former and the latter equally, I do believe.
Regardless of where the problem originated, there is a solution: agreeing to a set of standards and sticking to them.

That’s where the "Email Standards Project" comes in.

The goal of the Email Standards Project is to work with both the design community (to help them "understand why standards are so important for email") and email client developers (to "ensure that emails render consistently.")

More information is available at email-standards.org including info on how you can help with the project. You can even find up-to-date ratings of current email clients like Google’s Gmail (FAIL), Windows Live Mail (WIN) and, of course, everybody’s favorite email client: Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 (you guessed it: FAIL – most likely because it uses Microsoft Word as a rendering engine).

The tests are based on the ever-infamous acid test and go into detail as to what displays properly in the client and what doesn’t.

It’s a noble cause in my personal opinion and I sincerely hope that both Google and Microsoft invest a little more time and money into ensuring that some of their most popular products follow a set of reasonable standards… something that even Mozilla’s Thunderbird can offer.

How does it work? Start to drag a link or an image and “drop zones” instantly appear. Each drop zone represents a different command and dragging the link or image onto the drop zone activates that particular command. The zones are completely customizable and you can modify the color, transparency and location of each drop zone that you’ve enabled.

If the concept sounds vaguely familiar, there’s a good chance you’re thinking of a couple of other add-ons that have been around for a while longer: Super DragAndGo and Easy DragToGo. Those particular add-ons enable you to quickly drag a link downward to open it in a new background tab or upward to open in a new focused tab… in addition to enabling you to quickly drag an image to save it to a default location. (Note: if you have Easy DragToGo installed, Drag & DropZones’s functionality will render Easy DragToGo useless. The two, apparently, cannot coexist.)

Source: Lifehacker via Webware

Once you’ve got the components installed that you want, you can dive right into testing and use Microsoft’s Web Application Installer Beta to install various PHP & ASP-based Web applications including DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti CMS, osCommerce, phpBB and WordPress. (For most of those applications, you’ll need to have PHP and MySQL installed. However, Microsoft has some pretty simple directions for installing PHP alongside IIS as well as for installing MySQL.)

That’s it. Two quick installations and you can have everything running on your computer to develop new applications or enhance pre-existing, open-source applications like WordPress.

Of course, to help get you started in the world of Web development, the Microsoft Web Platform site features a plethora of resources available to help you along the way including, but not limited to, getting started with ASP.NET and Silverlight.

To get started, check out microsoft.com/web… but keep us posted as to how these packages might have helped with your own project(s).

In case you’re interested, here are the entire contents of the Web Platform Installer package:

Common HTTP Features:

• Static Content
• Default Document
• Directory Browse
• HTTP Errors
• HTTP Redirection

Application Development:

• ASP.NET
• .NET Extensibility
• ASP
• CGI
• ISAPI Extensions
• ISAPI Filters
• Server Side Includes

Health and Diagnostics:

• HTTP Logging
• Logging Tools
• Request Monitor
• Tracing
• Custom Logging
• ODBC Logging

Security:

• Basic Authentication
• Windows Authentication
• Digest Authentication
• Client Certificate Mapping Authentication
• IIS Client Certificate Mapping Authentication
• URL Authorization
• Request Filtering
• IP Security

Performance:

• Static Content Compression
• Dynamic Content Compression

Management:

• IIS Management Console
• IIS Management Scripts and Tools
• Management Service

Compatibility:

• IIS Metabase and IIS 6 Configuration Compatibility
• IIS 6 WMI Compatibility
• IIS 6 Scripting Tools
• IIS 6 Management Console

WAS:

• WAS Process Model
• WAS NetFXEnvironment
• WAS Configuration API

Deployment and Publishing:

• FTP Server
• FTP Management Console

New IIS 7.0 Extensions:

• Bit Rate Throttling
• IIS 7.0 Manager for Remote Admin
• Web Playlist Release Candidate
• FTP 7.0
• WebDAV
• URL Rewrite GoLive
• Microsoft Web Deployment Tool Beta 1

Microsoft .NET:

• .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

SQL:

• SQL Server Driver for PHP
• SQL Express 2008

Visual Studio:

• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1

Windows:

• Windows Installer 4.5

A quick, simple and free download, this app (for Linux, Mac & Windows) allows you to examine an SWF and do find/replace edits for any links you might have included.

Any other niche applications out there that you use to modify/tweak/examine your SWF or FLA files? Drop us a line in the comments.