When it comes to the word “social network”, Facebook and Twitter are probably the first ones that come to the mind. And, creating a new one can sounds like “creating an alternative to them (which is kinda crazy)”.

However, there are lots of niche social networks out there which are used by millions of people. And, creating a new one is not something crazy, actually, something not that hard.

Dolphin, a professional PHP web application, is the most popular self-hosted solution for building such communities.

The application has all the core features (and more) that can be expected from social networks like connecting with friends, status updates, messaging, chats, image/video sharing, groups or events.

Members can discuss on forums, have personal pages or blogs and there are even e-commerce features where the site owner and/or members can create stores and sell stuff.

Visitors can register with their e-mails or sign-up with Facebook Connect to see which other Facebook friends are there (also invite them).

Considering audio/video is shared too much on social networks and handling audio/video streaming +processing can be expensive, Dolphin has a custom media server that takes care of this.
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Ok, copying is not good.. but getting inspired from other successful projects and learning from them definitely makes sense.

Pinry, an open source web application, eases building Pinterest-like (dynamic-column-grid-layout) websites.

It allows users to register to the app and pin, tag and share media (images, videos and webpages) quickly.

And, a bookmarklet exists for saving the content without leaving the pages being browsed.

The application is built with Python (Django) and it is a good starting for creating a community around pinning contents or a bookmarking site for personal use.

For any client job or professional app/service, making a clear contract with the customer is one of the key points for the success of the project and happiness for both sides.

Recently, Smashing Magazine has brought together design/development-related contracts that exist on Docracy and encourages everyone to share any new ones.

The list includes sample contracts for web design, icon design, copyright ownership and licensing, app design and much more.

Simply, a must-bookmark for creative in case you don’t have a ready-to-use contract yet.

P.S. You should also check Docracy for any kind of contracts. It is a great legal resource.

The 1st of April is getting very close and I’m sure we’ll see lots of fake news or fun stuff going around on websites that day.

For anyone willing to implement a quick joke to their websites, Fool.js, a jQuery plugin reaches to help.

The plugin can feature various jokes including “falling scrollbar”, “displaying annoying videos”, “hiding random elements”, “turning the page upside down” and more.

All of these can be called with a single jQuery function that can be attached to any event.

There is also a pure CSS alternative: aprilFools.css which can again perform some crazy stuff.

You already know Google Pagespeed, a pack of tools and services for optimizing the performance of websites.

And, they have a widely-used module named mod_pagespeed that auto-applies the best performance practices to Apache-hosted websites.

There is now a Windows alternative for it, IISpeed, that is free and offers the same feature set.

It is capable of minifying, rewriting and combining JavaScript + CSS files, optimizing + auto-spriting images and many other stuff provided by Pagespeed.

IISpeed is installed on the server level and it is compatible with IIS 7,7.5 and 8.

When launching a new web project, having a “coming soon” page that collects e-mails of users to notify them about the launch is pretty common.

The same also goes for some other landing pages that ask users to fill a form to move forward.

Desant is an open source, single page web application (in Backbone.js managed by Sinatra backend) for handling such cases with ease.

Any page built with it can easily collect user information via forms, it keeps track of the referring URLs and the locations of visitors (by country).

It uses MySQL for storing data and can be installed manually or quickly with Vagrant.

Nested is a jQuery plugin for generating multi-column grid layouts with zero gaps.

The plugin creates a matrix of all elements, builds a multi column grid and tries to fill any gaps by reordering the elements.

There are various other solutions out there that does the same. However, Nested applies one small action: it resizes any element at the bottom of the grid to guarantee the gap-free layout.

Its usage is very easy by simply targeting a container element through a jQuery function.

And, various options exist for customization like enabling/disabling animation, min. number of columns and more.

Edicy is a hosted and professional CMS platform that enables designers and developers to create new sites and/or integrate any existing sites.

The platform doesn’t require a hosting account, anything to be installed and  it is always up-to-date + secure.

Many templates exist to get started with or new ones can be created with the help of a powerful templating engine.

And, optionally, there is a desktop designer tool which actually launches a small webserver that can render Edicy‘s templates. So that you can keep designing sites in your favorite editor.

There is an easy-to-use content editor to edit sites while browsing, it has a built-in and advanced image editor where you can upload with drag ‘n’ drops and rotate, crop, resize them.

Besides images, videos, tables, maps and other widgets can be inserted within few seconds. Also, a form engine exists to create any type of forms and collect data (they can be exported too).

Websites created don’t need to be all static, it can work with databases or product catalogues, has a blog engine and can be integrated with 3rd party apps.

Another very useful feature is the ability to offer the same website in different languages. Once a new language is added, Edicy simply asks you to insert the translated texts.

The service has many other features from password-protected pages to, statistics or the ability to managing your domains.

To sum up, Edicy is very handy for anyone willing to create their own site or a bunch of sites for their customers (and get support when needed).

It costs almost the price of a quality hosting account (which is included) and 300,000+ sites are already being managed by it.

Today, creating cool videos for any platform (web, TV, etc.) is not that hard with the help of high-quality footage.

VideoBlocks is a professional stock footage website to find 100,000+ stock videos, motion backgrounds, sound effects, production music and more.

Info: VideoBlocks is giving away 3 * 1 month (unlimited downloads) subscriptions ($79 value/each) to WRD readers and details can be found at the end of this post.

The website has a huge library which is well-categorized (slow-motion, nature, people, locations or cartoon, ambiance, horror.. for sounds) which eases browsing and locating the right resources.

In contrary to what you would expect, they are offered for a good price with a single plan of “unlimited downloads”. They can be used in any type of projects and no additional fees for that.

VideoBlocks’ library grows regularly with new resources being added each day and their footage is already being used by media giants ABC, MTV or National Geographic.

How to join the giveaway?

Commenting to this post is enough. Winners will be selected on 27 March 2013 (1 week later) with the query below and announced as an update to this post.:

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=3885 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3

Good luck.

The winners:

• dlv (comment #1182947)
• Luca (comment #1182707)
• pablo luis rey (comment #1186747)

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for joining.

Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets and similar spreadsheet apps have powerful formula functions.

Formula.js is a JavaScript library that brings most of these formulas to web developers.

The formulas are listed under multiple categories like date/time, text, logical, financial and much more.

Also, besides client-side it works with nodejs (to be released soon) as well.