Spice, Spice, Baby

*It's been rather busy for me on Ye Olde Blogsphere, it seems: I started this on 15 June 2013.

Sorry to disappoint, but this is not about the Spice Girls getting back together (the world will heave a collective sigh of relief, secure in the knowledge that this is NOT happening), and as far as I know, Vanilla Ice is not coming back, either. The title? Well, Vanilla sampled Queen, so I'm sampling Vanilla!

I thought I'd share some of my favorite I.T. related sites here.

So, what's it all about, Alfie... sorry, I'm stuck in cliches and trivia, it seems. Actually, it's more along the lines of what's I.T. been all about lately, to me? In a word, Spiceworks. I've wracked my brain about this, and at first was not sure if it was TechRepublic, How-To-Geek or CRN, but I backtracked a bit and the ad was in a Daniweb email I read recently. At the very top of the email was an ad for free help desk software. Since I know nothing about the care and feeding of help desks, I decided to give it a try. After all, my network presently has ten nodes, and more than likely it will grow.

I'm starting off with Spiceworks, because Spiceworks was the inspiration for this blog. Spiceworks has a very active user community, but what first brought me there was their help desk software. I downloaded the application but it was a very long download and after it was done, it would not run. So, I posted a question on the forums, and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly my problem was solved. I haven't spent a bunch of time on this site, but I do like it quite a bit.

Next up in my world is the granddaddy of I.T. sites, TechRepublic. I'm not sure how long they've been around, but its a long time.They have all sorts of features, discussions, and email notifications one can subscribe to. I especially like Bill Detweiler's TR Dojo feature. 

When I need software, my first choice is not tucows or cnet, but rather majorgeeks . I'm not sure when I found this site or what prompted me to search here, but this is another tried-and-true site, full of good stuff.

Daniweb is a really neat I.T. help site- I was looking for an answer to a driver question and this is where the answer came from.  This is also where I learned about Spiceworks.

Can't forget howtogeek .How to Geek is another email subscription I have, and they have everything a geek could want, from cartoons and trivia to practical how to information.

W3schools is the place to go if you want to learn internet code- specifically, HTML 4/5, CSS/CSS3, javaScript, Query, JSON, Ajax and ASP.NET. What I particularly like about this site is their live training sessions- you're given a window to type code, and can execute the code and see the results (and modify them) immediately.

Last but not least, there's Dream In Code . Not surprisingly, Dream In Code is a forum devoted to all things code.

There are a few other email subscriptions I have, but the listed site are the ones I visit the most. I hope this was informative and pegged your geekmeter at 11. And, if you've never pegged a VU meter, you're missing out!

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.