The Tangrens

As most of you probably know, I've had a cold/respiratory illness now for nearly 2 months now. After three rounds of different medications, (and some powerful cough syrup) I think I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Since I've been neglecting my duties of posting cool websites/tools for a while now. I thought that I would penitently try to catch up and post the My Top 5 Online Tools from 2007....

5. LDS.org Tools

• I'm lumping a few sites under one umbrella, although this could probably be a post in itself (as I'm thinking of this I'm thinking I might have to expand this list and devote an entire post to just tools like this). Here are some of my favorites which you may or may not be familiar with:
• Church Publication in Compressed Audio Format
• Several Church publications in .mp3 format that you can download for free including the Standard Works, General Conference Addresses, the Ensign Teachings of the Presidents of the Church and Jesus the Christ by James E. Talmage. Several individuals have even set up various podcasts to help you study the different materials put out by the church.
• Church Videos
• The Church has recently made several videos available on its website and seems to be updating this on a regular basis with new videos. Some of the videos included are the Book of Mormon Study Guide Videos (including one of my favorites, Boyd K. Packer's the Mediator), Church Growth by Stake, General Conference, the World Report and the last two Worldwide Leadership Training meetings. I hope they continue to add to this especially as video iPods and the like continue to be more prevalent.
• LDS.org Interactive Music Player
• I love to sing hymns, but I have never learned to read music and learn mostly by ear so to pick out the different parts has always been a struggle for me. In the past I've had friends record the base part to certain songs so I could try and learn them. The Church came out with this interactive music player where you can select which part(s) to include and it will play just the notes for that particular part even allowing you to change the key and tempo. It has been really helpful (when I have time to use it) to help me learn the bass and tenor parts of hymns more easily.
  

4. Del.ico.us

• Del.ico.us is a social booking marking site that provides an alternative to managing the myriad of bookmarks while given you the ability to share those bookmarks with your friends and family. I bookmark a lot of sites and it's easy for standard bookmarking to just get big enough that it's impossible to find anything. Deli.ico.us let you organize your bookmarks with tags (similar to blogging tags). Also, there is a Firefox plug-in which nearly seamlessly integrates the bookmarks into your browser. (If you aren't using Firefox, I would strongly recommend it regardless if you decide to use Del.ico.us or not).
  
  

3. Netvibes

• I have beeing using Google/IG as my homepage for a while now and recently happened upon a cool site that I think does a lot better job called Netvibes. You can set up different widgets of things that interest you or to create a one-stop-shopping for things you get on different websites. On my page, I have a widget that shows me my Gmail Account, my Hotmail account, stocks I like to follow, a calendar and some news feeds (to name a few). Currently there are over 100,000 different widgets that you can add.
  

2. Lifehacker

• This is one of my favorite places to read about cool websites or random tips to improve your life. I have found lots of cool websites through it (Netvibes, Animoto, and Mint just to name a few) and it is usually a good read. A lot of it is geared towards tech tips, but might be a good read.
  

1. Mint

• I blogged about Mint a while back and so I wanted to include it again in case you missed the last post. This is seriously the coolest little tool that I have found in a while. It allows you to import financial information into a single location and then helps you create budgets and analyze where all your money is going. If you haven't checked it out, give it a go.

Anyway, there's my list. What cool tools did you come across last year?