Posted 09/24/09 at 08:33:11 PM by Ryan Whitwam

If you happen to be a web designer, Microsoft would like to have a quick word with you. Just don’t drop any more money on Adobe products until you’ve heard them out. Microsoft’s Expression design tools haven’t enjoyed wide scale adoption in the face of Adobe, but they’re out to change that. As part of Microsoft’s “Spark” program, they will be giving away several thousand dollars worth of software to any small design firms interested.

Web design shops with up to 10 employees are eligible, and all they have to do is pay a $100 administrative fee. The so-called “WebSpark” giveaway includes multiple licenses of Expression, Visual Studio 2008, Web Server 2008 and SQL Server. The software licenses are good for three years and include full support. Not bad for $100.

Microsoft expects 15,000 to 20,000 companies to get in on the deal. Clearly, this program is meant to get small firms into the Microsoft ecosystem early. While their intentions may not be entirely pure, it’s hard to refuse the offer of free software.

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Posted 04/27/09 at 01:43:22 AM by Justin Kerr

If a web 2.0 service goes offline in the middle of the night does it make a sound? Well, if your Yahoo quietly pulling the plug on your free web hosting service, you hope not! As sad as it may be for us nostalgic types, after more than a decade of hosting free community webpages, this once innovative and powerful brand will finally come to a close later this year.

The trademark of the GeoCities service was the neighborhood system which allowed users to assign their page to a specific community of like minded websites. They were also founded during a period when only a handful of developers were publishing content for the web. Neighborhoods such as “Hollywood” and “Silicon Valley” were abandoned shortly after Yahoo took control of the company in 1999. It was purchased at the peek of the dot com bubble for $3.57 billion dollars, and like many other web properties scooped up at this time, it wasn’t worth as much as they’d hoped.

Yahoo is also known for having made several unpopular changes to the service shortly after acquisition which some users blame for its slow downward spiral. One of these changes for example was a modification to the terms of service which allowed Yahoo to lay claim to any content hosted on its service. Many of these decisions were eventually reversed, but with the rapidly falling costs of web hosting, it was only a matter of time before it folded in. Yahoo has stopped accepting new applications, and existing users are being encouraged to upgrade to one of their paid web hosting packages.

Did you ever host a website on Geocities? Share your memories after the jump.

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Posted 12/31/08 at 11:45:21 AM by David Murphy

We're taking a look at Web page creation tools in this week's freeware/open-source roundup.  And let's face it, the task sounds daunting: making a Web page, that is.  Finding the programs is the easy part.  There are a ton of authoring tools out on the Interwebs, but therein lies the problem.  You don't want to have to burrow through 30 different applications to find the one that matches your experience level.  And if you're completely new to HTML/CSS, you're going to want the most bare-bones, easy-to-use application you can find for making your first big online "Hello World!"

We've scoured through a number of programs to find the best applications for helping you make that picture-perfect Web page.  From HTML creation, to file uploading, to validating, our choices represent a batch of must-have programs.  Depending on your experience level, you might not need all five before you have your own variant of Maximumpc.com up and running.  But everyone should be able to find something they need in our treasure trove of Web tools.

Click the link to get started!

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