AlmondRocks is a fast web-based RSS news reader. It makes extensive use of AJAX and has a one-click guest signup that makes it very easy to try without giving out any personal information!

Wink is a new breed of search engine and public bookmarking site that gives you the most relevant and interesting results as found by people! Wink uses Google powered search and applies Wink’s PeopleRank technology to deliver sites that people think are the best for your search. PeopleRank is a feature similar to Digg, where users of Wink can give each link a “Wink” to indicate that the site is good. Wink also makes extensive use of tagging to help find related links.

Ryan from DropSend discusses The Cost of Bootstrapping Your App in his latest article at the 37 Signals weblog.  These are notes from his recent presentation at the Future of Web Apps conference in London.

Tag this one “geeky” - the Optical Mouse Cam is a simple little program that turns your optical mouse into a greyscale scanner.  Turns out optical mice have small 18×18 CCD sensors in them which can be used to scan images!  Be warned - there is probably no practical use for this, but it is cool nonetheless!

WordPress Multiuser is a specialized version of the popular PHP-based blogging software that could be used for creating community-based blogs.

Using WordPress Multi-user edition you will be able to have people be able to sign up for a new blog and have them securely manage their templates and settings without affecting any other users. Only one blog per user is allowed, but you can have unlimited users, and you can have multiple users on a single blog.

Earlier this week, RedHat announced the release of their latest Linux distribution - Fedora Core 5. Some new features include updated versions of the GNOME and KDE desktops, native MONO support, and the latest versions of Apache and Open Office.

Jeroen van der Meer has an article that takes a look at what’s coming in PHP 6.  Some of the more noteable features are improvements to the OO features of the popular web scripting language including the addition of namespaces.  Namespaces allows you to group variables, functions or objects under a certain name which lets the developer use the same name for a variable, function or object multiple times.  Other featues include improved caching and some changes to the extensions that are packaged with the base PHP install.

freeSSHd is a free SSH Server for Windows that is unique in the fact that it provides a GUI to manage the SSH Server.  Once the SSH Server is up and running, you can use it to create a Secure FTP server!  It’s easy to use and possibly the best way to turn you Windows system into a rock solid and secure FTP server.

Well now that Mozilla has officially released the Firefox 2.0 (bon echo) Alpha, you can now also get the Portable Firefox 2 Alpha 1.  All you have to do is download the Portable Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 then run the file PortableFirefox.exe.  The profile is kept with the PortableFirefox folder so you don’t have to worry about messing up your other profile and the uninstallation process is simple…just delete the folder!  A nice way to test the latest and greatest Firefox!

This is one of my favorite Flickr mashups.  If you’re like me, you often check out the Flickr Interestingness page to see what new and cool photographs have been uploaded for the current day.  The problem with the page delivered by Flickr, is that you have to navigate through quite a few pages to see them all.  Not anymore! Flickr Leech is a mashup that presents all the images on a single page!