No distraction, easy to navigate and a nice slideshow brings you the perfect experience if your are an afficionado of photography (like I am). Just use the droplets to insert the “view in black” feature to your pictures directly in Flickr, sort your pictures by sets, tags or favs. There are numerous possibilities to enjoy the inspirational ride. The function I like most: spress the spacebar to start a sort of diashow where only one pic is shown with all its properties.

And here’s my Fluidr-stream: http://www.fluidr.com/photos/roberthauk

Programmed by photographer Andrew Hauser Flickr Leech gets more features soon. Version 2 is soon to become public beta so if you like this app be sure to apply by filling out a short form on this site or even consider a small donation…

Edit: Because of the enormous popularity his server loads exceeded beyond pain and he decided to code his nice idea into an air applet – now you are able to bring Flickr Leech to your Desktop. With his new Air-Application you can browse all your searches within a tiny, nice app…

And it seems that the community is active again – you find quite nifty and useful addons: from Ajax driven ratings to powerful tagging.

Here are some Photoblogs which are using Pixelpost (and you’ll see the different approaches and possibilities of ‘tweaking’):

• My Photoblog (of course)
• Lumières
• Justin Gaynor
• Laurent Batailley
• ps mrk (a russian artist)
• Greyscalegorilla
• One Eye Photoblog

If you feel I left an essential Photoblog unmentioned (almost sure about that) please comment.

If you like this list I would be happy if you share with your friends or digg this article.

• Iconbuffet – the community site with a lot of very creative, cutting-edge icon sets, (150 free sets now and growing every week). Every set is delivered in gif, tiff, png, bmp, icn & ico format to be used in any OS and application. Definitely my first visit every day! All of them usable for commercial projects and for private pleasure.
  
  
• Silk Set – the famous and ubiquitously used set from Marc James is still one of the best (over 700 icons).
  
  
• Vikiworks the site of Yichi, a chinese designer from Beijing, presents a very elegant set of social bookmark icons.
  
  
• Horizon Foundation is the name of a free to use icon set from Clevericons. The format range goes up to 256 pixels and the set includes the states Normal, Hot and Disabled. Sad that it is delivered only as a Windows-exe – so Mac-unfriendly.
• Ian Main from e-lusion gives away 40 greyscale icons.
  
  
• DaPino (redirected to his main page, see comment) delivers 400 sweet 10×10 and 16×16 pixel icons free for commercial use in png format.
  
  
• Stylishlabs provides us with a new set of RSS icons. 1 standard web 2.0 style and 4 avant garde style. Well: Des goûts et des couleurs on ne discute pas.
  
  
• UserInterfaceIcons, the site of Abdylas Tynyshov provides a set of 140 very nicely designed icons for all purposes. All in png and 4 sizes.
  
  
• The italian designer Sonia Anepeta shows a set of quite unusual social bookmarking icons on her site Webfruits.
  
  
• Techlogica has icon from 16×16 up to 48×48 – not quite the modern style – but free.
• The Minimalist Pixel Icon Set from nclud’s website consists of 26 tiny icons in grey – very stylish.
  
  
• Mint Set same author Marc James as with FamFam, different set- just marvellous.
  
  
• Tango Project – a huge resource for beautiful icons – for almost anything you can think of.
  
  
• The Iconmaster – artistic and fun.Take a look especially at Mondrian!
  
  
• The Notebook iconset from Manuela Hoffmann is a true hit.Very special!
  
  
• Toolbar Icons from Matt Ball. Highly recommendable.
  
  
• Everaldo Coelho produced a beautiful KDE Crystal Clear Set.Wonderful, not only for KDE…
  
  
• My fellow countrymen, the widely known Bartelme, shares a beauiful shopping cart icon with the world.
• Deziner Folio delivered the free Aqua Gloss Set for private and commercial projects.
  
  
• Web 2.0 Buttons 3D-style you’ll find on Utom Box for free download and usage.
  
  
• Liquidicity gives you 165 free to use vector icons – so you can alter them in Illustrator for your needs – handy!
  
  
• InterfaceLift provides the fanatic with some nice icons (searchable for platform and other parameters) below a sample from the blessed icon designer Dirceu Veiga – see also FastIcon link below…
  
  
• Sweetie is a nifty and as the name suggests sweet set of 182 icons in the base set and 37 icons in the web-communication set.
  
  
• Iconshock is the right place for all Vista icon freaks. Sign up for free and exchange with your buddies. You can use them in commercial and private projects. Some are even downloadable in vector format.
• BrandSpankingNew: 113 10 x 10 greyscale icons ideal for using in a blog
• DocType icons: same source as above gives you 42 free icons 16 x 16 pixels.
• Drunkey Love: iconset of over 100 icons in png 16 x 16, still growing…
• Graphic Push: they give away a teaser icon set for bloggers free for private and commercial use and some file and developer icons.
• mIcons: some cute little icons free to use from Björn Seibert – 9 sets of them.
• nDesign Mini icons: free to use up to 10 different per site – use more: linkback or pay…
• Sanscons: a small spinoff of the Bitcons icon set that allows for CSS-based coloring and framing.
• Fasticon: gives away some Web 2.0 styled Social Bookmarks Icons. And not only that! As the icons are special I provide you with 2 preview panes…
  
  
  
  
• VistaIcons: supplies you with 12 iPhone inspired icons for free.
• Danish Royalty Free Icons: from one of the masters, Jona Rask come these beautiful 96 icons free for commercial and private use (you have to scroll to the bottom of his Startpage).
• Looking for some parrots? Find them as a free icon set here. Provided by Maria Rodriguez.
• A small set of control icons in 3 sizes and 4 different colors by Marko Vidberg.
• A cute little set of icons – Nuvola – by David Vignoni licensed under LGPL.

Found another source with nice icons free to use both commercially and personal? Drop a comment here.

I’m catching up… The list is growing constantly. Here are the most interesting icon resources. You can use these sets both for commercial and private projects (as they say in their disclosures) – but to be on the safe side: check the license agreement again. This list is growing constantly – so drop by again soon. Please comment if you found more resources which are free for both commercial & private use. The list is also growing thanks to AmpleSanity, a friend of IconBuffet.

• Iconbuffet – the community site with a lot of very creative, cutting-edge icon sets, (128 free sets now and growing every week) Every set comes in gif, tiff, png, bmp, icn & ico format to be used in any OS and application. Definitely my first visit every day! All of them usable for commercial projects and for private pleasure.
• Silk Set – the famous and ubiquitously used set from Marc James is still one of the best (over 700 icons).
• Mint Set same author, different set- just marvellous.
• Tango Project – a huge resource for beautiful icons – for almost anything you can think of.
• The Iconmaster – artistic and fun.Take a look especially at Mondrian!
• The Notebook iconset from Manuela Hoffmann is a true hit.Very special!
• Toolbar Icons from Matt Ball. Highly recommendable.
• Everaldo Coelho produced a beautiful KDE Crystal Clear Set.Wonderful, not only for KDE…
• My fellow countrymen, the widely known Bartelme, shares a beauiful shopping cart icon with the world.
• Deziner Folio delivered the free Aqua Gloss Set for private and commercial projects.
• Web 2.0 Buttons 3D-style you’ll find on Utom Box for free download and usage.
• Liquidicity gives you 165 free to use vector icons – so you can alter them in Illustrator for your needs – handy!
• The guys from Turbomilk give away some very nice & funny icons (just to mention them if you use it in public)
• InterfaceLift provides the fanatic with some nice icons (searchable for platform and other parameters)
• Sweetie is a nifty and as the name suggests sweet set of 182 icons in the base set and 37 icons in the web-communication set.
• Iconshock is the right place for all Vista icon freaks. Sign up for free and exchange with your buddies. You can use them in commercial and private projects. Some are even downloadable in vector format.
• BrandSpankingNew: 113 10 x 10 greyscale icons ideal for using in a blog
• DocType icons: same source as above gives you 42 free icons 16 x 16 pixels.
• Drunkey Love: iconset of over 100 icons in png 16 x 16, still growing…
• Graphic Push: they give away a teaser icon set for bloggers free for private and commercial use.
• mIcons: some cute little icons free to use from Björn Seibert
• nDesign Mini icons: free to use up to 10 different per site – use more: linkback or pay…
• Sanscons: a small spinoff of the Bitcons icon set that allows for CSS-based coloring and framing.
• Fasticon: gives away some Web 2.0 styled Social Bookmarks Icons.
• VistaIcons: supplies you with 12 iPhone inspired icons for free.
• Danish Royalty Free Icons: from one of the masters, Jona Rask come these beautiful 96 icons free for commercial and private use (you have to scroll to the bottom of his Startpage).
• Looking for some parrots? Find them as a free icon set here. Provided by Maria Rodriguez.
• A small set of control icons in 3 sizes and 4 different colors by Marko Vidberg.
• A cute little set of icons – Nuvola – by David Vignoni licensed under LGPL.

This list is growing constantly so drop by again soon.

Due to heavy traffic it sometimes can take a while to load but it might be a fun thing for aficionados to try out. See here my try with a set from Lower Austria.

Light is a web-based content management system on a hosted basis that specifically addresses designers and agencies to provide their self-branded design and CMS to their clients. Signing up takes about 5 minutes and gives you a free account for testing and nibbling around the system.

Finding my way around was fast: due to the clear and sufficiently precise help files (online or downloadable for further reading during the family picnic on the weekend) I managed to focus on the main issues for setting up some pages in just one hour . I’m somehow familiar with coding but not to the extent that people stop by my office to touch my hair or worship my knowledge of PHP/MySQL or semantic markup at FOWA. But that’s not necessary with “Lightâ€?.

The system consists of three mandatory page templates, the suitable CSS and some data-fields named “tokensâ€?. These tokens allow your prospective client to interact with the CMS: to add, delete or modify the predefined containers. Tokens have a precise syntax <$regionâ€?$> and attributes like this : <$region name=â€?MainContentâ€?$> defining the main editable region in a template where your clients can add text, pictures, blog entries, forms, a gallery and more. Defining breadcrumbs, root or side menus is easy as eating cake (unless you’ve diabetes).

If you don’t want to use the nicely designed templates (which are six in total) it gets more tricky: although Light provides an online tool to alter CSS parameters it is somehow tiring to surf to the presentation view every minute to see the result – at least when you’re me (so, don’t be me). Having a firm grip on the CSS language will be necessary to achieve satisfying results within the system. Plus the editing window isn’t quite providing the big picture due to line breaks every 100 letters or so. I allowed myself the smooth way and just mashed up an existing template offline with Coda.

It is recommended by the company and fairly easy to design your templates offline, slice them up, zip them and upload into the CMS. A slight drawback is the fact that direct access via FTP is not provided – so avoiding going back and forth might be an issue for further development. Speaklight also provides a service called “HTML-Expressâ€? where you get your design nicely sliced within 5 days to implement in their CMS but that will certainly depend on the budget you’re willing to give away.

Conclusion: if you want to achieve the value-add of a CMS for your customers which is easy to administer and operate, Light is definitely an option. With their sophisticated pricing strategy and the ability to down- or upgrade monthly it can be a good start to grow with the number and the needs of your customers. The service of being able to offer the essential pages and plugs for a client in nearly no time provides an asset which gets more important (not to say vital) for a Designer these days. Plus: you are able to brand the CMS and (in the near future) the Help-System with your own logo. The missing FTP option and (not mentioned above) tricky customization of the form module could become an implementation issue to boost the number of satisfied designers.

• Iconbuffet – the community site with a lot of very creative icon sets (101 free sets now and growing every week) – my first visit!
• Silk Set – the famous and ubiquitously used set from Marc James is still one of the best (over 700 icons).
• Mint Set same author, different set- just marvellous.
• Tango Project – a huge resource for beautiful icons – for almost anything you can think of.
• The Iconmaster – artistic and fun.Take a look especially at Mondrian!
• The Notebook iconset from Manuela Hoffmann is a true hit.Very special!
• Toolbar Icons from Matt Ball.Highly recommendable.
• Everaldo Coelho produced a beautiful KDE Crystal Clear Set.Wonderful, not only for KDE…
• My fellow countrymen, the widely known Bartelme shares a beauiful shopping cart icon with the world.
• Deziner Folio delivered the free Aqua Gloss Set for private and commercial projects.
• Web 2.0 Buttons 3D-style you’ll find on Utom Box for free download and usage.
• Liquidicity gives you 165 free to use vector icons – so you can alter them in Illustrator for your needs – handy!
• The guys from Turbomilk give away some very nice & funny icons (just to mention them if you use it in public)
• InterfaceLift provides the fanatic with some nice icons (searchable for platform and other parameters)
• Sweetie is a nifty and as the name suggests sweet set of 182 icons in the base set and 37 icons in the web-communication set.
• Iconshock is the right place for all Vista icon freaks. Sign up for free and exchange with your buddies. You can use them in commercial and private projects.