“Elgg is an open, flexible social application engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application. Building on Elgg is easy, and because the engine handles common web application and social functionality for you, you can concentrate on developing your idea.”

I’ve been testing out Elgg 1.0 for a couple of weeks now and it looks great so far. I never used the classic version of Elgg but from what I understand Elgg 1.0 is a big, big update.

Every day they are updating and adding new features, changing the look and working out bugs. The release date for Elgg 1.0 is August 18th, 2008. Today they posted a blog asking for more users to help test the product.

The reason why I have a big interest in Elgg 1.0 is because I work in a school district with technology and we are looking at Elgg 1.0 as a possibility as a staff intranet.

I highly suggest checking this product out even if you pass up the opportunity to test it out. Elgg has already made a huge impact in the education world (and will continue to) but now they are trying to emphasize the use in the business world.

In no particular order:

Firefox

Simply the best browser out there (imho of course ). I find that Firefox works the best with handling web design and CSS and since I do some web work I rarely run into problems.

But the real reason why I could not live without Firefox is because of the add-ons. Firefox add-ons simply make my time on the web more productive and much more efficient. I can know instantly whether I get an email from multiple accounts, keep track of my twitters, have multiple tabs open, view media on websites, get the weather, use FTP…you get the point. Whatever you do on the web there is more than likely an add-on for it.

Gmail

I will only say a few things about Gmail because a lot of the reason why I like it so much is because there is a sweet Firefox add-on for it and I use other Google applications, which makes it easy to navigate. First, I like the easy and powerful search. Second, I like the concept of labels and third, I will never run out of space.

Social Networking

I am going to bundle in Facebook, MySpace, Ning and all of these social networking sites. Sure some of these things are for play and waste a lot of time but honestly networks like Facebook and MySpace have connected me to old friends and keep me connected with current friends that I would not have any connection with otherwise.

Notepad++

This is a great free source-editor that I use daily. Sure, there are other fancy editors like Dreamweaver but Notepad++ does the trick for me.You can open multiple files (using tabs) and it will work with HTML, CSS, PHP, etc. Since I do a lot of web design work, this is a must-have resource.

ESPN.com

I love sports! I get all of my sports news and updates from here. I visit this site multiple times a day. A boring pick, but hey I couldn’t live without it.

Rationale

The above are resources in all areas of my life, no specific area. I know these resources are no secret and a bit boring but they are sort of at the core of my experience online. I will be posting another post about must-have resources in a more specific area soon.