Free Stuff!

There’s a question amongst computer types when someone says something is free, “Free as in Beer or Free as in Speech?”, the difference being if someone gives you Free Beer, you can drink it, or sell it, or you can pour it down the drain, but you can’t make the beer, it’s yours, but only in certain ways. Whereas if you’ve got free speech, you can say whatever you want, there’s no limits on it.

Well, I’ve been looking around the web, and found some stuff which can be yours free, some of it free as in beer, and some if it free as in speech. Some of this is useful to everyone, some of this is a bit niche and geeky and useful to only those building their own stuff.

Particles.js

This is a cool little Javascript library which adds a particle effect to the background of your website, it looks great, and I can see some sites which it would really suit, and it’s kind of fun just to head over the the site to play around with the particles as the dodge your mouse pointer.

http://vincentgarreau.com/particles.js/

Bideo.js

Full screen streaming video is an incredibly cool thing to have on your site, and this plug in Javascript library does just this.

https://github.com/rishabhp/bideo.js

SQLectron

SQLectron is a user interface for easily connecting to and managing databases, 10 years ago you would have paid a hefty licence fee for similar software, SQLectron, Free.

https://sqlectron.github.io/

Freepik

A fantastic resource for free-to-use pictures for your website or blog, what more needs to be said.

http://www.freepik.com/

Pexels

Free stock photos, again, what more could you ask for.

https://www.pexels.com/

Pixlr

A free to use picture editing program with a lot of the functionality of Photoshop, and it’s web based so you can access it from any internet connected device, no need to install software, and if you really need a desktop version to use when you’re offline, they’ve got that too. Amazing.

https://pixlr.com/

BeFunky

Not photoshop, but if you need some amazing effects added to pictures, you can’t go wrong with BeFunky, it’s quick, easy to use, and pretty fun too.

https://www.befunky.com/

Freebbble

A collection of free templates and images from Dribbble, all collected together for convenience, from Icons to complete PSD templates, very cool, and a great starting off point for projects.

http://freebbble.com/

Postleaf

Now this one really got my interest, a simple beautiful blogging engine, that really is easy to use, just click on an element and edit it, designing your blog has never been easier. It’s not a match for WordPress yet, but it’s elegance is absolutely breathtaking. I’m going to need to find a project to test it out on, can’t wait.

https://www.postleaf.org/

Grafika

Now this is one only for coding nerds to get excited over, Grafika is a image manipulation library for PHP, allowing creation and editing of images within the code to be incredibly flexible and easy.

http://kosinix.github.io/grafika/

Browser Logo Gallery

Not the most exciting thing in the world, but if you’re building a website it could be pretty handy, a collection of the logos for almost every browser out there. You’ll have heard of Explorer, Chrome, Safari and Firefox, you may even have heard of Opera or Iceweasel. But this is an extensive collection, and I’ll bet you’ve not heard of them all, Iridium, Puffin, Seamonkey, nope sorry never heard of you.

https://github.com/alrra/browser-logos

Lightgallery.js

A fantastic Javascript library for displaying images, I’ve never seen such a versatile library with such an array of user options, Zooming, Full Screen, Download and Social sharing, a joy to use both as a developer and a user, just great.

https://sachinchoolur.github.io/lightgallery.js/