Web Calendars & Other Free Web Services
Last Modified 1/12/02.

I used to offer a free calendar on my site, but it's a pain to keep up when you don't host your own site and anybody could just toss up anything they wanted and fill my web host's hard drive, so that is not included on this site. I liked my calendar better than any of the other free ones I've seen because I offered users a way to edit their calendars and provide interested parties with a non-cluttered public view that you could easily integrate with your own web site through a frame. I have yet to see this offered anywhere else. Yahoo comes close. You can share your Yahoo calendar, but they clutter it with their logo and random banner adds. What can you expect from a free calendar?

Yahoo is my favorite all-purpose website. I use their stock quotes option to keep track of all my stocks. I download the spreadsheet and import it into a Filemaker database system almost everyday. I can do that automatically through a Filemaker Pro script using the MondoMail plug-in by Acme Technologies. Their plug-in allows you to download any web page into your database and comes with handy parsing tools to pick the data apart.

Besides a free calendar and free stock tracking, Yahoo has travel planning resources, people and business searches, driving directions, free email and just about everything else. The only service that I use other than Yahoo is AltaVista's free translation service. I don't rely on it completely, but it's as accurate as you can expect a free, automated translation service to be and it can give you an idea of what a foreign phrase means. It can also be quite a hoot if you're bilingual.

Besides the big search engines that are trying to do it all:

when I research a client's site, one site I always visit is Brad Schrick's What WebServer page so I know for sure what server the client is working with.

I found the Kelly Blue Book extremely useful when I traded in my last car. Also, AnyWho Directories provides a reverse telephone lookup which comes in handy when you get your phone bill if you can't remember who you spent so much money talking to. Yahoo's people finder service sometimes doesn't give you the zip code. I use the US Postal Service site to look up that.

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