I am a dedicated seeker of freebies (some would say a scrounger). Why pay for something, when a little investigation will turn up a free alternative. In this spirit, my entire website is based on the 'Freebie' principal. All the services used here (e.g. guestbook, hit counters, e-mail) are provided free of charge. Angelfire provide me with 5MB of their disk space free of charge, and subsequent notification to a handful of popular search engines was provided free, too. Most of the services require little more than a valid e-mail address as information from you, before they are willing to let you sign-up. I am a little wary of those that require home addresses, phone numbers, and other information like salary bands, hobbies, etc. My name has found its way onto enough mailing list databases already!
In an endeavour to support those who provide me with free services, I shall try to make sure that I acknowledge them all on this page, as well as providing links to other useful sites that I have used to locate free services (there are whole sites dedicated to anything free!).
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Firstly, and most importantly, Angelfire, without whom, I wouldn't have a site in the first place. 5MB of disk space, an online editor for my html, as well ftp facilities, should I want to maintain my pages offline, and just upload them to Angelfire (which is exactly what I do). Previously, my site resided at YI.COM, who provided me with 2MB and an ftp account, but they disabled my ftp access for some reason (possibly during a lull, where I sent no updates for a period of some months), and wouldn't reply to any of my e-mails asking why. So I moved here to Angelfire, and I think I have found a much better deal. YI.COM still advertise a free service, but have lost my patronage thanks to their (in)actions. Other sites that were considered included Nether.NET, although I have experienced problems attaching to their site, and Dragonfire (although that was back in the days when they were free - I don't think they actually qualify for inclusion in my page any more!) |
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Every personal website should have a guestbook, and there are lots of freebies out there to choose from. I chose this one from Phaistos Networks in Crete, because of its adaptability. I was able to modify the amount of data requested from users, change the labels against these items, change their order, add new items, etc. I wanted my guestbook to be easy for users to complete, not require too much info from them, and also I wanted to be able to offer the ability to read it without neccessarily having to add an entry. This one satisfies my requirements, but there are loads of others for you to look at - see the links spot below. |
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Free e-mail used to be difficult to come by, and I resisted having to set up an e-mail account for a long time. Now, it is not only easy, but comes as standard with other services! I set up my account with Hotmail.com, just before they linked with Microsoft, and they provide a great service. Having subsequently signed up with Angelfire for my website, they automatically gave me a free e-mail account too! Both accounts are POP3 enabled, but for some reason, Hotmail doesn't seem able to login to the Angelfire account and retrieve its mail. Since I had the Hotmail account for some six months prior to the Angelfire account, and all my friends/relatives know that one, that is the one that will remain on my web pages for now. Again, there are many e-mail services available for free, a lot of which appear to use a common engine to drive them. MailCity is one such alternative that I considered, and I believe that Angelfire's offering uses the same engine. It provided a useful facility to download all new messages and review them offline, but I preferred the interface of Hotmail. Its your choice - see the links spot below. |
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Website authors like to know that their pages are being visited, and there are lots of services out there to keep you as informed as you want/need to be. Personally, I am content just to see a counter steadily increasing, to show that I am getting hits, so a basic set of counters is all I really wanted. Angelfire provide a single counter for your index page, that will record hits to the site in general providing access is via that route. I wanted a counter on each page, and found LinkExchange to provide me with this via their "FastCounter" service. Other sites will keep statistics for you, providing peak usage times, trends, referral sites, repeat visits, graphs, and all sorts of other stuff. Services are generally free provided your site doesn't exceed stated threshold levels. Be careful your site doesn't become too popular, or you might just end up getting billed for services, or having services withdrawn. |
PS - Before you leave, please take a moment to
sign my guestbook,
or you can just
read it, and see what others have said.
