Click to visit: W W W . F R E E – W E B H O S T S . C O M

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Before I started paying for my webspace I tried numerous free web hosts. Some were good and some were a waste of time, but it makes me sympathise with anyone who wants to create a website for free but doesn’t know where it should be hosted. My life was made a lot easier when I discovered today’s site.

Free-WebHosts.com is a directory made up of many free site hosts out there, all of which are given a score based on certain criteria and can be reviewed and rated by users. On their homepage you are greeted with a little information about what their site is about followed by featured free hosts, new features their site offers and the most recently available hosts that they list.

A few sections are worth highlighting. For anyone dipping their toes into getting their site online, I’d recommend reading through the help pages on the right hand side of the page. If you have an idea of what you want from your host you could go straight to their Power Search which allows you to search for hosts that fit your specifications. If you would prefer to see hosts that are scored highly then head on to their Best Free Web Hosting page instead.

There are a lot of great features available that make it a lot easier to find the perfect website provider for you, many of which you will easily discover while surfing the site. I do however feel it’s important to point out that, although the focus is on webspace, the directory does also have comparisons for Free File Hosting and Free Image Hosting too.

Mostly this directory is an excellent resource for anyone that wants a site but doesn’t want to part with any money. Saying that, you should take some of the user ratings with a pinch of salt – I have seen some excellent hosts get low scores because a few people have had bad experiences and the people with good ones rarely feel the need to go on a free web host directory to talk about it.

Click to visit: W W W . F R E E B M D . O R G . U K

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There are plenty of genealogy themed websites out there but I want to focus on one of my favourites for those of us based or with relatives from the UK. FreeBMD is called that because it freely supplies visitors with information of their ancestors birth, marriages and death data. It has a few points that makes the site unique compared to others out there like it.

The majority of websites only have a selection of information they will allow to be seen before you’re asked to pay. To see the original scans usually has a fee and some years are off limits to guests. Not so with FreeBMD. All the records are available for free and date back to 1837 and up to 1983. The original scans can be downloaded and it’s easy to do a search for the family member you’re looking for.

You may wonder how this can be offered for free when others cannot do the same, but there’s a simple explanation for this which has a good and bad side. Each record is manually entered by volunteers from across the world using the scans of the pages the data was originally recorded on. The good thing about this is that no one is paid so it keeps costs low enough to not charge a fee like other places would. The downside is that it’s a slow process and there are still many entries waiting to be uploaded and, of course, human error can sometimes alter records that what they were intended to be.

Overall though it’s a wonderfully ambitious project that has helped me gather more information about some of my ancestors and encouraged me to volunteer my own time to help out. I highly recommend anyone researching their family tree take a look and anyone interested in helping contribute can look on the website for more details.

Click to visit: W W W . W H A T S O N . C O M

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I love to listen to music and I feel that there is no better way to relax than to tune into my favourite radio station but that can be easier said than done sometimes. The biggest obstacle is getting a signal and even if you can get one occasionally the quality is poor or tends to cut out. Another problem is that local stations are only for those in the area which stands to reason but can be frustrating if for example you’re visiting another part of the country and miss what you’d usually listen to. Thankfully, whatson.com solves a few of these issues.

Whatson.com is a website with several local and regional stations that you can listen to online. The benefit to this is the superb quality, no need to live in the stations region to listen in and no tuning or aerial moving required! There are a few downsides, of course, such as; the bandwidth used, needing to use a computer and downloading plugins to listen if you don’t already have them… however, I really think these are small issues easily overcome.

The stations are easily arranged into three sections selected by a drop down menu. The first is popular stations such as Kiss, Heat and Magic. The second has the stations arranged by genre to easily find the type of song you want to listen to. The third divides by local stations categorized by their city. Alternatively, there is also the Zoo Radio Guide which lists all stations, highlights, top shows and what’s playing live. Each station page usually lists links to their official website, a competition they’re running or has archives of interviews / clips you can listen to at your leisure.

Whatson.com does have a few flaws I feel worth mentioning. Occasionally the radio will need buffering or will stop playing. Usually you can just refresh the page to get it back, but rarely non of the radios appear to start streaming. Over the many months I’ve used the site though, this is a rare occurrence. The majority of the time whatson.com works perfectly and I highly recommend it to those who love their radio but also want to keep up with the ever-changing technology.