Ninite: A super-cool way to download common free programs

Oh, I love free stuff, and I love people who make it easier to download free stuff.

Visit the Ninite site, and check off the free applications you want on your computer, such as Firefox, Chrome, iTunes, Audacity, Skype, AVG, Adobe Reader, Gimp… The list is fantastic! (And it reminds me of all the great tools I still need to cover here on Cheapskate Freelancer.)

Once you choose your programs, click to install, and Ninite will manage your installation. This is great when you are doing a full upgrade to Windows 7.

Ninite Easy PC Setup and Multiple App Installer – Great For Win7 Upgrades.

K9 Web Protection: Control your internet usage

After a recent upgrade of Firefox, one of my favorite plugins, LeechBlock, stopped working. So I went in search of a new control system that would help me think twice before I surfed my day away.

I’m now in love with K9 Web Protection, a free internet filtering service. Sure, it’s made for parents to protect their kids, but as a professional with a bad web habit, I appreciate its ability to keep me from wasting my precious time.

You set sites that you’d like to limit, and you can eliminate entire categories of sites. I am particularly bad when it comes to reading news articles. I can read article after article and waste an hour or two… Time just slips away. With K9, you can allow access for 15 minutes or a certain period of time. That way you can pop in to check on your friends in Facebook, but soon you’re back at work.

And it’s free. I love free.

K9 Web Protection – Free Internet Filtering and Parental Controls Software.

chartbeat: Real-time website analytics

I first discovered chartbeat when Ashton Kutcher and CNN were competing to be the first Twitter account with one million followers. Chartbeat showed the race live, and I was hooked.

For about 10 bucks a month, you can monitor the traffic on up to 5 websites in real time. I mean really real. It shows how many people are visiting, whether they’re new or returning, what pages they are on, how long it took for their pages to load, who is talking about you on Twitter, where they live… everything you might want to know.

On sites with very moderate traffic (like mine thus far), it can be incredibly boring. But when I send out a newsletter or one of my tools goes viral for a few minutes on Twitter, I can monitor the “stickiness” of my site. Do they visit just one page or click around for a few? How long are they hanging out?

As I write this post, a new visitor to my site is checking out my entry about Wordle from a computer on the East Coast. Cool!

You can set up alerts so you get a text when a certain number of people visit your site at once, and the service sends you emails (or texts, your choice) when your site is down (which happens more than you know).

TRY IT! Keep Cheapskate Freelancer open and click here to see yourself on the site.

chartbeat – real-time website analytics and uptime monitoring.

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