Software : Download guide: Download this free app toolkit and build your own website in a weekend

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• Download guide: Download this free app toolkit and build your own website in a weekend
• Round up: The best free download manager 2016
• Here's how Facebook will make your News Feed more 'informative'
• Round up: The best free VPN service 2016
• Round up: The best free office software 2016

Download guide: Download this free app toolkit and build your own website in a weekend Posted: Website in a weekend Build a free website in a weekend A personal website lets you share your passions with the world. It could be a hobby (photography, writing, cooking and travel are all popular topics), a professional portfolio to showcase your expertise (a kind of online business card), or a place to share information about a club or organization you're involved in. It's not difficult either, and with free tools you can create a website from scratch in a few hours. You don't have to use a dull template to make your site either - with a tiny bit of extra effort you can create something totally unique and utterly stunning without writing a line of code. 1. Make a sitemap Before you can begin building your site, you'll need an idea of its structure, and how the pages will link to one another. This is called a sitemap, and even simple sites will benefit from having one. There are lots of online sitemapping tools, and our favorite for very small sites is WriteMaps. The free plan lets you create up to three sitemaps and doesn't include any unnecessary frills. Once you've signed up, take 30 seconds to watch the introductory video and you're ready to go. Your map will take a tree-like structure, with pages branching off a central index page. Just hover your mouse over a page, then click the plus symbol to add a 'child' page underneath it. Easy. WriteMaps only lets you create and label branches, which might be all you need, but if you'd like to add notes and colors to make things clearer you can use free mind-mapping software Freemind in exactly the same way. Start with a central index page, then tap [Insert] to add child pages branching off it. See all Freemind's keyboard shortcuts. 2. Edit your pictures Even if it's mainly text-based, you'll want to include some images on your website - and you'll probably need to edit them a little first, even if it's just to crop and resize them. Our preferred tool for the task is GIMP: a completely free photo-editor that's ideal for everyone from novices to experts. You'll find a guide to more advanced image-editing techniques here, but the basic crop and scaling tools are self-explanatory; you'll find them in the toolbox that appears on the right. Once you've finished editing, choose File > Export and select a format to save the image in. There's a comprehensive guide to image formats on Wikipedia, but JPG generally provides the best balance of image quality and file size for photographs displayed online. If you need some attractive images but don't have any of your own, check out Pixabay - it's a fantastic source of public domain photos that you can download and use without worrying about copyright. 3. Pick a host This is the most important decision you'll make - the company that will host your website from its servers and ensure it stays online - and your choice will depend on your priorities. If you simply want to get your site online as quickly as possible, you might be happy with a hosting service that only lets you create sites using its own templates. However, if you'd rather make your own pages using a tool like Mobirise (see below), which gives you far more flexibility over the design and layout, then you'll need a host that supports FTP (file transfer protocol) so you can upload it yourself - more details on that below. You also need to consider how large your site will be, and how much site traffic you're expecting each month. Here's our guide to some of the best free web hosts: Weebly URL: www.weebly.com Ads: Small Weebly banner on each page Site builder: Yes FTP: No Disk space: Unlimited (but no single file can exceed 10MB) Monthly site traffic: Unlimited FreeGreenHost URL: http://freegreenhost.com Ads: No Suite builder: No FTP: Yes Disk space: 1GB Monthly site traffic: 5GB Wix URL: www.wix.com Ads: Small Wix banner on each page Site builder: Yes FTP: No Disk space: 500MB Monthly site traffic: 500MB Biz.nf URL: www.biz.nf Ads: No Site builder: No FTP: Yes DIsk space: 1GB Monthly site traffic: 5GB 4. Build your pages If you're happy to use a website builder provided by your site host then you don't need to worry about this step, but if you'd prefer to build your own pages then check out Mobirise. No knowledge of coding is required, it's free, and your site will be responsive, meaning it will adapt seamlessly to work with different devices and screen sizes. Sites are built using a simple system of blocks, and the results look smart and stylish thanks to features like video backgrounds, content sliders and Google Maps integration. Your finished site can be hosted by any service that supports FTP (see above). Keep your sitemap handy while you're working; if you only have one monitor, it might be useful to print it. If you want to make something less flashy, take a look at SeaMonkey Composer, which comes as part of the SeaMonkey internet application suite. It looks and functions much like Microsoft Word and it'll take more effort to create good-looking web pages, but no prior knowledge of HTML is required. Indeed, you're likely to learn quite a lot about basic web design while you're using it. 5. Upload your files An FTP (file transfer protocol) client is a program used to upload HTML pages, images and other files from your PC to your web host's servers. Most site builders include their own built-in FTP clients (including Mobirise - it's accessible via the 'Publish' button on the top right), but if yours doesn't then SmartFTP is a good option. Find out how to get started with SmartFTP. 6. Get your own domain This step is entirely optional. Your free hosting will probably provide you with an URL in the format yousite.freehost.com, but to make it truly personal you might want your own domain. You can register a free .tk domain at Dot TK, but bear in mind that the free registration is only valid for 1-12 months - to keep the domain longer you'll need to buy a subscription. Hundreds of new top-level domains have become available since last year, and some are available very cheaply - for example, a domain ending in .site, .xyz or .online will cost a fraction of a .com or .org. You can investigate your options at domain registrars like 123-reg or GoDaddy, then search around for the best price. It won't be free, but it's likely to be very cheap - particularly if you get a discounted subscription for the first year.

Round up: The best free download manager 2016 Posted: The best file downloader and accelerator The best free download manager Older internet users will remember the pain of downloads: you'd spend a few days trying to download a GIF of a cat, only for the connection to drop when someone else picked up the phone. Download managers were essential, because they enabled you to resume broken downloads and make the darn things download faster too. Dedicated managers and accelerators are still relevant today, especially if you're prone to downloading enormous operating system ISOs or trying to get your videos via unreliable Wi-Fi. These are our favorite apps for taming traffic, boosting BitTorrent and managing media downloads. 1. Ninja Internet Downloader A superb free download manager for saving and converting media files Ninja Internet Downloader is a relative newcomer to the downloading party, and it looks considerably more contemporary than its, er, contemporaries. The interface is simple and modern, the download accelerator capable of up to 10x acceleration, and if you tend to download media such as music or movies you'll be delighted by its sequential downloading. Many download managers download chunks here and chunks there until you have the whole file, but Ninja Internet Downloader starts at the beginning. That means you can preview files long before they've finished downloading. There's also a built-in video downloader and media converter. Not bad for a free app. 2. Free Download Manager An open source program with all the media management tools you need Free Download Manager aims to be all things to all men and women. It's a download accelerator, a BitTorrent client, an audio and video previewer and a traffic management tool, and because it's open source there's no charge to use it, and it's completely free from adverts. There's a portable version that you can run directly from a USB stick, plus powerful scheduling features and a nifty remote control that means you can leave your downloads running and check on their progress from any internet-connected device. It can spider sites to download specific kinds of files, and you can choose to download only the bit(s) of a ZIP file you actually want. It's really good, and it was tough to choose between this and Ninja Internet Downloader for the top spot. 3. Download Accelerator Plus Only a taster of the premium edition, but it might be all you need The free version of Download Accelerator Plus is handy enough, but is really designed to sell a paid-for product - in this case DAP Premium, at £18.95 (about US$24.55, AU$31.95). The free version lacks the DAP Premium's privacy protection and fastest acceleration, but it does include a link checker, video previewing, file conversion, safe downloading and multiple connections to boost the speed of your downloads. It's clearly designed for media downloading and can help avoid irritations such as slow servers and internet congestion. 4. JDownloader 2 An advanced manager for more experienced downloaders JDownloader 2 is a free, open source tool with a massive developer community, and it's available for Windows, Linux and Mac. It's really one for power users, with support for over 300 decryption plug-ins, automatic RAR extraction, password list searching and OCR to automatically complete some of the CAPTCHA 'I'm not a robot' checks. You'll need the Java Runtime Environment to run it, which means you'll need to be wary: the installer contains adware, which will be installed if you don't specifically deselect it. 5. Free YouTube Downloader Grab multiple videos in moments and save them in resolutions up to 8K The installer is a little too keen on adding bundled software, but Free YouTube Downloader is very good and completely free. Its focus is on downloading rather than converting files from one format to another, so you get a good multi-stream download manager for grabbing several clips simultaneously. It can download files of up to 8K resolution (in MKV) and convert to AVI and MP4. Remember that you should only download videos from YouTube if you have the copyright owner's permission.

Here's how Facebook will make your News Feed more 'informative' Posted: Facebook is changing its News Feed yet again, and this time it's looking to make it more informative. The social network is adding a new "ranking signal" that will help surface the most informative stories that would've already appeared in your Feed, just not in as prominent a view. Here's how the algorithm works: Members of the company's Feed Quality Program rank stories on a scale of one to five, one being "really not informative" and five being "really informative." Participants who rank a story highly are also asked to explain why they enjoyed seeing that particular story. This data is then used to create a ranking signal, which is just one of the many signals used by Facebook to determine how relevant something is to you, based on your interests and habits. The results are, hopefully, posts that you find personally informative. This will likely change over time, Facebook notes in a blog post, and means you'll see content in your News Feed that won't necessarily show up in the Feeds of people of you know. Human touch The Feed Quality Program is particularly intriguing for those who've never heard about it before. It basically consists of "tens of thousands" of surveys crowd-sourced daily as well as more involved participants who are paid for their efforts. Together, they'll determine what makes a story informative, though Facebook will rely on things like your own interests, relation to the whomever posted the story and what content you typically engage with to ultimately surface stories you see. The new ranking signal comes just a week after Facebook tweaked its News Feed to bury clickbait articles. Facebook updates its News Feed algorithm often, so this won't be the last time you hear about changes coming to what you see on the most popular social network on the planet. Facebook's testing a new selfie camera and more Snapchat-style features

Round up: The best free VPN service 2016 Posted: Protect your privacy online The best free VPN tools With the eyes of ISPs growing ever more suspicious and government monitoring fast becoming something tangible and terrifying, the 'private' part of Virtual Private Network has never been more important. But hiding your internet traffic inside an encrypted tunnel isn't the only reason you might want to run a VPN on your machine. Perhaps you want your network traffic to appear to emanate from elsewhere in the world in order to use region-locked services (presuming, of course, you can do so legally). Maybe you're looking to seamlessly access your home network while on the road, or don't trust the security of public Wi-Fi access points. The VPN tag covers a lot of potential uses. Bear in mind that using a VPN does come with certain disadvantages, primarily that you'll experience slower internet speed as your traffic is encrypted and routed through the servers of your chosen provider. Free options usually end up throttled compared to their paid-for siblings and might also serve up ads or, in some cases, track your browsing habits to sell on to third parties. 1. CyberGhost 5 The best VPN tool to keep your browsing activity private CyberGhost is a VPN that truly has its users' ideals in mind: the company proudly declares that it doesn't track your activity, and publishes a transparency report to back up its claims. You can even use its interface to restrict the amount of information you're passing on to the sites you visit, shutting down tracking cookies, malicious websites, and more. If you want your traffic private and protected, this is our number one choice. It's also supremely easy to use, with a simple interface which allows you to select the location of your new IP address, and good visual indication of what's going on. That said, CyberGhost does run a reasonably limited number of servers, with selections mainly focused in Europe – at the time of writing, the free version offers no location option for Canada or any servers located in Asia. You're also restricted to three hours per session, with a moderate delay and a few ads before you're able to connect – a small price to pay for privacy. 2. Tunnelbear Tunneling made simple - but watch out for the data limit Tunnelbear is, as its dev crows, 'really really simple' to use. It's probably the most friendly VPN you'll find, with straightforward apps available for for Windows, MacOS and mobile devices. It's also one of the most well-travelled, with a truly worldwide network of tunnels to connect to, routing your data everywhere from Hong Kong to Norway – only its Australia and India nodes are restricted in the free edition. Much like CyberGhost, Tunnelbear promises high-end encryption and a complete absence of traffic logging. There's a pretty big kicker: the free version only offers 500MB of data transfer per month, so it's going to be reasonably useless if you're using it as a location-spoofing tool to watch geo-restricted video. For those moments when you're doing light browsing in a coffee shop, though, Tunnelbear's simplicity – and mobile compatibility – may come in very handy as long as you can cope with its slightly twee collection of bear puns. 3. VPNBook VNPBook is a simple, convenient way to protect your privacy If you're a confident computer user or want to protect more than just a Windows device, VPNBook is a great option. It doesn't even require any specific software – you just plug the appropriate info into your machine's system settings and you're connected. It uses your choice of point-to-point-tunneling (PPTP) or OpenVPN to encrypt your traffic and fire it out of one of six servers, three in Europe and three in North America. Being rough-and-ready, though, VPNBook does have its issues. We can't vouch for the specific encryption used, for a start, and its open nature (and potential for abuse) means it uses a password which changes frequently. If your ISP blocks PPTP connections, you'll need to use OpenVPN's client software – which pretty much nullifies the benefit of its compatibility with phones and games consoles. But for an ad-free, no-nonsense VPN connection it's a great choice. 4. OpenVPN Server Setting up your own VPN server is an enterprise-level option While the OpenVPN team produces a more user-friendly VPN option in the form of PrivateTunnel – which offers only limited data transfer in its free form – and many of the other options here use OpenVPN tech to get the job done, it's worth putting in the (considerable) effort to install an OpenVPN server on a home machine. You'll need to stump up some cash if you want to make use of more than the two client connections included with the server installation, but this is a proper VPN. Set up its server properly, connect to it with the OpenVPN client software, and you'll not only encrypt your network traffic but gain access to your home network as if you were connected locally -- all your shares, files and machines at your fingertips. Make no mistake, though: building your own OpenVPN server is enterprise-level stuff, certainly not for the faint-hearted given the amount of configuration required, and its absolute overkill for most purposes. But if you're in this for the 'network' side of VPN, look no further. 5. Hotspot Shield Free A promising VPN tool, but the ads and toolbars are overbearing It's been around for a while and has something of a mixed reputation: Hotspot Shield is a cracking VPN, but suffers some pretty heavy drawbacks that are required to contribute to its upkeep. However, Hotspot Shield dev Anchorfree has recently made steps to improve its service to free users. While you'll have to put up with a decent number of ads and frequent pleading to upgrade to its Elite version, some of the more insidious aspects – browser toolbars, page-injected advertising – are on the outs. While it's quick, easy to install and available in a neat Chrome extension version, we still struggle to recommend Hotspot Shield Free fully. There's a 750MB data cap per day, a single USA output locale, and access to many video streaming sites is hidden behind the paid Elite subscription. You might also be interested in How to set up and maintain a VPN How to make your VPN more secure How to build a dedicated VPN router

Round up: The best free office software 2016 Posted: The best free Microsoft Office alternatives 2016 The best free Microsoft Office alternatives With Office 2016, Microsoft has made several enhancements to security and productivity, including a much-needed overhaul of Excel. However, at £120 (US$120, AU$179) for the home edition it's a substantial investment - especially if you're unlikely to use its more advanced features regularly. Microsoft's cloud-based Office 365 has a lower entry price of £8 (US$10, AU$12) per month or £80 (US$90, AU$119) per year for the home version, but again, it's a substantial expense for a set of tools that might be overpowered for your needs. If you work with people who use Office and rely on its collaborative functions every day, the convenience of using those programs yourself may well justify the price. For the rest of us, there are lots of excellent free alternatives to consider. Here are our picks of the best free office apps in 2016. Have we missed your preferred suite? Let us know in the comments below. Remember, when you install any of these office suites you'll be asked if you want to associate particular file formats with the newly installed programs. We recommend deselecting these options at first, then changing your defaults once you're satisfied that you'll be using the new suite in the long term. 1. LibreOffice Comprehensive and updated regularly - the only office suite you'll ever need LibreOffice is a fork of the OpenOffice.org project, and it's available for Windows, OS X and Linux (it's the office suite you'll find on most popular Linux distros). The main draw is that it's OpenOffice but fast-tracked, with far more frequent updates than its parent suite. Like OpenOffice, LibreOffice is designed around the standard Open Document Format with Microsoft Office importing and exporting, and its six apps cover just about everything you could need from a productivity suite: Writer (word processing Calc (spreadsheets) Impress (presentations) Draw (diagrams and vector graphics) Math (mathematical formulae) Base (databases) Unlike Microsoft Office there's no email client - likely because there are so many excellent options already available, developing another would be redundant. See our guide to the best free email clients 2016. LibreOffice's apps have a clear format reminiscent of older versions of Microsoft Office. It's not as sleek as Office 2016 or 365, but features are represented by large, clear icons rather than being hidden behind menus and ribbons. See our guide to getting started with LibreOffice. If its standard offering isn't enough, the LibreOffice community has created hundreds of templates and extensions to add new features and improve existing ones - all available to download and use completely free. There's also a portable version that can be run from a USB stick. 2. Apache OpenOffice Less frequent updates than LibreOffice, but greater stability If LibreOffice does everything Apache OpenOffice does and gets updates more quickly, why would you consider its less action-packed parent? The short answer is stability: a faster update cycle can mean the potential to introduce new bugs. OpenOffice contains the same six core apps as LibreOffice (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base) and its interface is very similar. It lacks some of the features of LibreOffice (such as live word counts in Writer), but the two suites share so much of the same code, such differences are few and far between. Again, a portable version is available for use from a removable USB device or cloud storage service. 3. SoftMaker FreeOffice Excellent compatibility with Microsoft Office documents SoftMaker FreeOffice is available for Windows and Linux (and there's a companion app for Android) and offers effortless editing of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. It can also export files in EPUB and PDF export. FreeOffice contains three apps delivering the familiar combination of word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. While the feature set isn't quite as extensive as LibreOffice - it lacks mail merging, and the spreadsheet charts aren't as spectacular - it's faster, can open password-protected Office and WordPerfect documents (provided you know the password) and covers the basics very well. As with LibreOffice and OpenOffice, SoftMaker provides a portable version of FreeOffice for Linux and Windows. 4. WPS Office 2016 Microsoft-style good looks, but the free edition has limitations WPS Office 2016, also known as Kingsoft Office, is one of the best Microsoft Office-a-likes, but the free version does include some important caveats. The free version for Windows begins with a 30-day trial of the Premium version (it reverts to the free version if you don't open your wallet at the end of the month) and printed documents are watermarked. It's available for Windows, Linux, iOS and Android, and includes apps for word processing, presentations and spreadsheets (hence the name WPS). It borrows the ribbon interface from newer versions of Office, so you'll be up and running in no time, but the drawbacks of the free edition might be enough to put you off. 5. Google Docs Take your document creation to the cloud for easy collaboration If you're looking for a serious Office rival, Google Docs should be towards the top of your list. What started life as a free but basic cloud-based Office suite has evolved into something that's deceptively powerful, and even the weakest app, PowerPoint alternative Slides, is rather good these days. Google Docs is particularly good for teamwork, with excellent multi-user support and change tracking, and the companion mobile apps cover iOS as well as Android. If you're in the kind of environment where documents, spreadsheets or presentations are pinged back and forth, with comments and tracked changes, Google Docs will make your life simpler. 6. Zoho Docs A credible alternative to Google Docs and well worth investigating Zoho Docs is used by the likes of the BBC, Coca-Cola and ITV, and its free service gives up to 25 users 5GB of storage each. It includes three cloud-based apps - the usual spread of word processing, spreadsheet and presentations - as well as document versioning and desktop syncing. There are companion apps for iOS and Android, as well as integration with other services such as Dropbox and Google Drive. That makes it particularly attractive to small businesses, although it's important to note that some of the more advanced features such as password-protected sharing aren't available in the free version. Don't plump for Google Docs without checking out Zoho first.

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