I like free tools, who doesn’t?

Today, I’ll create a small (Probably gonna be huge :P), list of tools that I use often, and also tell a little about what each tool does.

Monitoring

SimpleMonitor – SimpleMonitor is a small number of python scripts, that you can run on your server, you’ll be able to monitor all the servers you want, using ping, TCP, service monitoring, HTTP Monitoring, and even APC UPS monitoring. You can do things like tolerance, so it needs multiple failures before it will report downtime.

CloudStats.me – I talked about this a few days ago here. It’s a great tool to do basic monitoring of your servers.

Activesyncdr – It’s a tool that monitors and diagnose exchange servers that allow ActiveSync, I haven’t tried it personally but it looks promising!

Javascript libraries

nanoScroller.js – It’s a simple library that makes an ‘OS X’ scrollbar, even on windows. So those who hate the scroll bars on windows.. This is for you!

Shadowbox.js – It’s a great alternative to lightbox, and it’s really easy to implement.

live.js – LiveJS will monitor local CSS and javascript changes by sending HEAD requests to the server, this is really great for development, and save the time of refreshing your browser all the time.

jQuery Notification bar – A very lightweight notification bar for jQuery, to show a simple message in the top of the browser.

Generators

htpasswd generator – from time to time I need to generate a htpasswd file, so I just use this tool, since it supports multiple hashing algorithms. Simple and fast.

Noise Generator – If you want to generate a repeatable noise background for websites, take a look at this tool, it’s easy and gives a good result.

WP-Config Generator – In WordPress you have wp-config.php, it’s very basic, but this generator will let you see all properties supported, some of them are quite awesome!

Favicon Generator – a simple way of generating favicons for your website. The tool is made by websiteplanet.com.

Web Fonts

Fontello – Fontello provides a nice interface, to select exactly those icons you want from many different icon fonts, and download it so you can use it for the web.

Font Awesome – The well-known font awesome, the scalable web-font you’ll also find in twitter bootstrap.

IcoMoon – the guys behind IcoMoon is well known for many of their font packs, they’ve even made fonts supporting multiple colors. How cool is that?

Sosa – This font has some nice icons, especially for social media.

Zurb Font – The Zurb Foundation have created different things, like CSS frameworks. They’ve also made this nice icon set.

Google Fonts – Great source of online web fonts

Font Squirrel – Also provides a great number of free fonts, both for desktop, but also web.

Random stuff

Youtube Repeater – want to listen to the same song hours in a row on youtube, and tired of pressing the play button? Just add repeater between youtube and .com – and it will repeat the video, over and over again.

between youtube and .com – and it will repeat the video, over and over again. Fake Name Generator – Want a fake name? Fake Name Generator is the right place to go.

Web Performance

GTMetrix – This will run pagespeed and yslow on your website, from 7 different locations in the world. Registering for a free account gives you the benefit of saving the history of your tests.

Webpagetest – Will allow you to do REAL website performance from many different places in the world, on different connections and browsers, and give you good information about your site’s performance.

Redbot – Great online tool to test headers of a website, and it’s resources, and give a recommendation on what to improve or change.

Pingdom Tools – Also a very well known tool to test performance, DNS health, ping and traceroutes.

Google Pagespeed Insights – This is a great alternative to Pingdom Tools, it’s made by google, so it should be fairly up to date.

Web Related

Mail Spam Tester – is a tool where you can send a copy of your email to a temporary mailbox, it will then analyze your email based on some spam filters, and give you nice feedback how spam filters will react on your email.

MXToolbox – can check a lot of things, like blacklisting, DNS lookups, MX lookups, mail server testing etc.

RBL/Blacklist check – This tool will check IP/Domain on a list of blacklists.

Just Ping – Just Ping provides ping tests from 90 servers around the world, so it will give you latency data from all over the world, including possible packet loss, and the IP that was reached.

Twitter Bootstrap – You probably know the framework already, but whatever! It’s awesome.

HTML/JSON/XML/SQL Formatter – This website will do formatting of your code, and actually make it readable.

CloudConvert – Need to convert a file? Try to take a look at CloudConvert before installing any application on your computer. It might save you some time (and space on your computer).

Zurb Ink – A responsive email framework that will work on any device.

Mandrill App – If you from time to time send transactional emails, Mandrill app will be a great service to look into. And it’s damn cheap (the first 12k is free).

Code Beautify – This website will beautify all your code!

Local Tools

Vi and Vim – We all love these editors, they’re pretty old, but extremely powerful if you know how to use them! I can recommend taking a look.

Do you know any other tools? If yes, please write a comment, and I can add it to the list! Hope you’ll find some of them useful.