Article updated on January 5, 2025 by Byothe
2018 was another very rich year on the web! It was an opportunity for me to tell you about lots of useful, fun, practical, interesting or innovative tools and sites… but which all have one thing in common: They are worthy of interest and deserve to appear in this retrospective.. Not all of them were necessarily created in 2018, but they were the subject of an article on this blog in 2018!
so here's a selection of tools and websites which we talked about on Byothe.fr in 2018 and which deserve to be taken a look at or rejected!
Resizejpeg to resize photos and images online
If you follow this blog a little, you know that there are many free and online tools for editing photos or images. But the interest of the site ResizeJPEG, is that it only offers one feature that it does very well: resize your images !
As a result, its use is particularly simple and will advantageously replace photo processing software or even Paint which can be complicated to use or unsuitable for simple image resizing.
KeepVid to convert videos online
There are a multitude of media formats whether it is audio or video files. MP4, AVI, MKV… and so many others for videos, MP3, FLAC, WAV and so on, for audio files.
It is therefore not uncommon for a file format to be unsuitable for the use you want to make of it or the device you want to use it on. It may then be necessary to convert this file to a suitable format.
There are many software programs that can do the job, but there are also online utilities that work very well.
This is the case, for example, with KeepVid Video Converter.
A site to easily find out your screen resolution
You may sometimes be asked to provide your screen resolution, but you are not very technical and you do not want to search through the meanders of Windows or macOS settings…
Actually, it is not very complicated to retrieve this information in your computer settings, but I will suggest you a very simple solution to know the resolution of your screen !
CloudConvert to convert all kinds of file formats
There are many online file conversion sites… but not all of them are equal in terms of quality and functionality. And I must say that CloudConvert impressed me with its features.
Indeed, this free (up to a certain point) online utility stands out for the incredible amount of formats it can handle…
CleverPDF to do lots of things with PDFs
One of the things I like to present to you most on this blog is free online tools. And we are lucky, because there are a lot of them. Many that work, many that disappear and many that appear. And this is the case of Clever PDF, an online toolbox for manipulating your PDFs!
And there are no less than 20 tools that Clever PDF offers you for free on its home page. These 20 tools are organized into 3 categories:
- Convert PDFs to documents
- Convert documents to PDF
- Other Tools
FontFaceNinja to identify fonts used on the web
There are quite a few tools on the web to identify fonts and I talk about them regularly on this blog: WhatTheFont, IdentiFont and so on… But this list is not exhaustive, I had never talked about FontFace Ninja.
FontFace Ninja is a web browser extension that allows you toinspect,try on our creations, bookmark and if necessarythe purchase any font on any website.
MyDataRequest to easily retrieve your personal data online
The latest trends (regulatory or not) on the web are pushing players to a significant increase in transparency, particularly in terms of the retention of personal data (hello GDPR). While transparency is generally a good thing, the multiplication of regulations significantly complicates the management of a website (I won't tell you about the hassles).
As a result, many sites have implemented processes allowing you to request your personal data from themThe only problem is that it's not always easy to find your way around.
Website MyDataRequest has therefore been designed to facilitate your data recovery process from just over 100 major sites (and we can imagine that the site will increase this number over time).
A site to find out which video games contain microtransactions
Microtransactions, paid DLC, free-to-play-but-pay-to-win: these are all thorny subjects for gamers, because they involve paying hard-earned money for uncertain gains. And unfortunately, in the age of mobile and everything free (in appearance) it is the remuneration model that is starting to impose itself... massively on mobile games, but also on more conventional games on computers or consoles.
While in some cases these microtransactions only provide aesthetic elements (character skins, for example), in others they are essential elements for progressing...
KiApporteKoi to know who brings what
When you organize an event, there are a lot of things to plan: finding a date, finding a venue, determining who brings what… To find out everyone's availability, Doodle has long established itself as the reference. The service works well, it's free and very practical…
But once the date is found, it is still necessary to determine who brings what ! I guess you've all been to a party where there were 50 bags of crisps for just a few beers... And that's when KiApporteKoi intervene!
CamelCamelCamel to track prices on Amazon
I have been doing most of my shopping online for many years now… I use many merchant sites depending on my needs (most recently a seller of oven windows), but the one I use most regularly is Amazon. While most of the purchases I make are mostly conditioned by an immediate need, I sometimes treat myself… so I have time before going on the offensive and buying the desired product…
Having time to make a purchase is a real strength. It allows you to be opportune and wait for a price drop… but it is not always easy to be reactive! But that was before.
CapsuleLink to save and share URL lists
If you spend a lot of time on the web, you probably regularly come across sites or articles that interest you and that could interest your loved ones. However, it is not always easy to store interesting links and even less easy to share them instinctively.
CapsuleLink is an internet monitoring tool which will allow you to save web page links and share them using a single URL! Practical !
Rebus-O-Matic to generate pretty rebuses
You have all certainly played rebuses in your childhood… the principle is simple, you have to guess a sentence written in the form of images or symbols that represent words or syllables. Just like charades, my children love them. There are many game books that offer to guess rebuses, but know that on the web, there is also a site that will allow you to generate your own rebuses: Rebus-O-Matic.
Witeboard, the collaborative whiteboard for teamwork
Flipcharts and/or whiteboards are very practical tools for brainstorming. We throw our ideas on them, trace drawings, imagine diagrams, make lists... in short, it is a tool that is often essential for the birth of a project, whether professional or not.
But with the virtualization of our world: remote working, connected friends or colleagues... more and more projects are born or set up without people meeting, or at least without necessarily being in the same physical place.
So, it exists Witeboard, a free online and collaborative whiteboard! Very easy to use, it only has a limited number of tools and that's what makes it strong.
Liner to highlight sentences on the web
If you're a frequent web reader (I am), you probably come across interesting content that you want to save or archive. When it comes to entire articles, you can always print it as a PDF, but when it comes to sentences or quotes, a tool that lets you highlight and save content is a real asset!
And there is a free extension that works on the main web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.) that allows you to do this: Liner.
Cliggo to listen to music for free online
There are many platforms to listen to music online for free and legally. But these platforms, if they are free, are generally full of ads that are inserted between the tracks and have subscriptions to avoid these drawbacks. This is the case of the best known ones like Deezer or Spotify.
But there is a pretty good alternative, 100% free and without intrusive advertising, called CLIGGO MUSIC.
Vikidia to replace Wikipedia for children
I guess you all know Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that is continuously updated by its readers! Well, you should know that there is an encyclopedia for children aged 8 to 13, very similar to Wikipedia.
Although completely independent from Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia, Wikipedia is very similar in form to the web's reference encyclopedia.
Matcha for editing complex mathematical formulas
If you've ever had to include mathematical formulas or graphs in a text, you've probably realized that it's not that simple. Word does have some tools, but they're not necessarily very easy to use and even less so very complete.
Fortunately, there is Mathcha.
For those feeling nostalgic:
The good thing is that the web also offers us the opportunity to rediscover old technologies from the early days of consumer computing!
A Winamp emulator in your browser
If you grew up in the heyday of the Internet bubble and experienced the advent of the musical revolution that was the democratization of MP3, You are probably familiar with Winamp.
Winamp left a deep mark on the first generation of MP3 player programs on PC with a first version released in April 1997… more than 20 years ago! However, it took a year and a half, at the end of 1998, and the release of a version 2.0 for the small free software to become popular. Simple and effective, despite questionable ergonomics, but customizable with skins and plugins, Winamp allowed millions of people around the world to listen to the very first MP3 files.
Windows 1.01 emulated on the web
It's time for nostalgia, because there is a website that allows you to emulate Windows 1.01 in your web browser!
Released on November 20, 1985, Windows 1.01 is considered the real first version of Windows (version 1.0 having been withdrawn due to an error). Sold at the time for $99, Windows 1.01 was the first “graphical” version of a Microsoft operating system based on MS-DOS. This first Windows did not meet with the expected success and was sold mainly in the United States. It must be said that at the same time, Apple was having enormous success with the Macintosh graphical interface.
Electronic games to play online
The Internet Archive is a goldmine for the history of the Internet, media and electronic games. Regularly, this site whose vocation is to constitute a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural resources in digital form, unveils new collections: DOS video games, digitized vinyls… and today portable electronic games.
Among the pioneers of these electronic games, we find a small, century-old Japanese company: Nintendo and its games. Game and Watch.
And you, what was your favorite tool or website in 2018?
