gqshen.com

FREE does not mean “not good”, sometimes it only means “not perfect enough”.

• Email: Gmail. It simply rocks and totally changes my email using habit, especially my attitude toward web mail. I believe it’s not perfect yet because it’s still in “beta” stage.
• Photo sharing: Flickr. Another “beta” service, but it stands out and blows those not-beta-and-even-not-free services away.
• Online album: Gallery. I have been using this great software for about five years and its neat layout and robustness satisfies me a lot.
• Blogware: WordPress. This blog is running on it.
• Online RSS reader: Bloglines. The first one on my browser’s quick links.
• Browser: FireFox. After several “to change or not to change (from IE)” rounds, I finally dumped IE. FireFox with Tabbrowser Preferences and other nicely written extensions surely make me one of the happy FireFox users.
• Social bookmarks: del.icio.us. Now even there’s a FireFox extension for it.
• DNS: ZoneEdit. Their free DNS service just makes things done perfectly. I used their service for two weeks before I finally moved my DNS records to my hosting company, and I was impressed by their efficient service and extremely simple configurations. Besides, their nslookup service is neat too.
• Online notebook: Google Notebook. It’s a handy tool to record contents, including pictures, on a web page being visited. With the firefox extension, it’s a click away.