TinyPic.com is owned by Photobucket, but looks and feels more like ImageShack. Unlike Photobucket, TinyPic does not require registration, and the upload form is directly on the front page. The whole website is surprisingly simply, and it basically consists of an upload page and a few pages for browsing. There isn't even an FAQ page or a help section. For support, the site instructs you to directly email Alex Welch, the CEO and co-founder of Photobucket.

Although the website and service appear simple and unprofessional, the service is highly popular and the traffic grows consistently.

The name TinyPic does not mean the service shrinks uploaded images, but instead refers to the extremely short URLs that uploaded images are associated with.

In addition to images, TinyPic supports the uploading of video files, something ImageShack does not.

TinyPic allows users to keep track of uploaded files by saving the uploader's IP address. This makes the service simpler to use, but also creates certain problems, such as not being able to keep track of files from any computer other than the one that uploaded the files.

TinyPic is a simple and easy to use alternative to Photobucket that resembles ImageShack in many ways.

By Michael Zhang on August 12, 2006 | 5 Comments

BlogSkins.com has one of the largest online databases of skins and layouts for weblogs. The difference between this site and others is that it also supports skins for individually hosted weblogs such as MovableType and WordPress. The currently supported weblog software and services are: Blogger, Diaryland, LiveJournal, MovableType, Roller Weblogger, WordPress, and Xanga.

Notable areas of the website are: skin browsing, tag cloud, forums, and contribution. There are two methods of browsing skins. The detailed format allows you to order them by various criteria such as name, type, author, date, downloads, and rank. The downside with this method is that you cannot see a thumbnail preview of the skin. The other format displays skins in thumbnails, but does not allow various orderings of the skins.

The website was founded in February 2002 by Myles Grant while a college student at Miami University.

By Michael Zhang on August 10, 2006 | 5 Comments

The xTracker is a service that allows you to secretly and invisibly log any user who visits your Xanga website. If you enable Xanga Lock on your site, then visitors will be forced to sign in and reveal their username through xTracker logging. If you've noticed many popular Xanga websites enable Xanga Lock, it's probably not because they desire privacy, but because they wish to keep an eye on their visitors with a Xanga tracker.

The current feature set includes: an optional module that can publicly display your recent visitors on your Xanga site, IP address and computer information detection, log search, visitor statistics, and visitor profile images.

The xTracker was launched on August 29, 2004 by founder Justin Dela Cruz. For a period of time the service was accessed at the domain name bloggary.com, but after traffic increased, a new and more permanent domain name was purchased. After steady increase in popularity, the xTracker now stands as one of the dominant visitor trackers for Xanga.com.

Future goals of the xTracker include expanding to additional blog services such as MySpace.

By Michael Zhang on August 08, 2006 | 8 Comments

CreateBlog.com is a blog resource website that offers layouts, scripts, graphics, tutorials, topsites, stats, and forums. The resources available are submitted by the website's members and are free to use by the general public.

Although originally dedicated Xanga resources, CreateBlog.com has expanded to include major blog services, including Blogger, LiveJournal, and Myspace. Despite the addition of these services, content and activity continue to be dominated by two services: Xanga and Myspace.

The website was founded as Xangans.com in December of 2003 by Ju-Sun Lee. After being contacted by Xanga regarding trademark infringement, the website was forced to change its name to CreateBlog in February 2004. Their main competitor, Blogring.net, received a similar notice from Xanga for infringing on the copyright of "Blogrings", but was not forced to change domain names.

While Blogring.net was founded earlier and enjoyed an early dominance in Xanga layouts, recent changes in ownership and their failure to include additional blog services early on allowed CreateBlog to take the lead in traffic and use. CreateBlog.com is currently the leading website for blog resources, and will stay in that position unless Blogring.net can undergo a drastic change and revival.

By Michael Zhang on August 07, 2006 | 2 Comments

ImageShack provides free image hosting with unlimited uploads and bandwidth. Their only limit is the 1.5 megabyte filesize restriction for uploads. Photobucket was the dominant image host for over a year, but in 2006 ImageShack has surged in use and popularity.

This could partly be due to the fact that ImageShack does not require a registration for uploading and hosting images, and sets an extremely high limit for the amount of bandwidth each image may consume. Photobucket's strict limits caused a lot of images to either be deleted due to inactivity, or replaced with a bandwidth exceeded image due to transfer restrictions.

The downside to uploading images to ImageShack anonymously is that uploaded image URLs cannot be recovered if lost. Registering an account solves this problem by saving and organizing all uploaded images, so that you can obtain their URLs easily.

ImageShack claims that as long as an uploaded image does not violate their Terms of Service it will be available on their servers forever. As long as this promise is kept and they take careful steps to avoid catastrophic losses of data, their feature set and relative lack of limits give ImageShack a huge advantage over image hosting competition.

By Michael Zhang on August 06, 2006 | 3 Comments

Photoshop seems to have overwhelming popularity among bloggers and template designers, and if you're looking for a place to learn new techniques, then Good-tutorials.com has what you need. Already with an archive of over 10,000 tutorials, new ones are added daily, and all are organized under categories such as animation, photo retouch, text effects, and more.

Have tutorials to share? You can submit them to the site using a simple form, and the tutorial will be added once it passes a review. This website is both a good way to learn Photoshop techniques, and a powerful way to drive traffic to your tutorial website.

Sadly, if you use an image editing program other than Adobe Photoshop (such as Paint Shop Pro or GIMP), this website has nothing to offer you. There doesn't seem to be any immediate plans for including tutorials for additional programs, but that might be a good thing.

Good-tutorials was founded in 2002 by Zach Holman, a student at Carnegie Mellon University.

By Michael Zhang on August 05, 2006 | 1 Comments

After months of testing in a private beta stage, Photoblog.com is now open to the public without the need for an invitation code. Photoblog.com offers unlimited uploads and unlimited storage. Users can post up to 20 photographs per entry, which is always associated with a single day. This style of photoblogging allows members to chronologically organize and preserve events. This is useful for such things as: travels, family gatherings, the birth of a baby, photojournalism, and more.

The current feature set includes drag and drop photo organization, commenting, friendship, messaging, user profiles, tagging, full archiving, and simple browsing. They also offer a unique feature called "daylinking", which involves forming a connection between friends' posts of the same day. This makes it easy to browse and explore events that multiple friends shared from different points of view.

The service is free and supported by relevant text advertising found in certain areas of the website. The simplicity of the service allows anyone to sign up and start his or her photoblog in minutes. Photoblog.com has only been in existence for a few months, so there's still heavy development. New features are sometimes introduced daily, and the programming team is constantly looking into new ideas for features.

If you're looking for a place to share your pictures and document your life, check out Photoblog.com.

By Michael Zhang on August 04, 2006 | 2 Comments