m i s t y - d r e a m s . o r g

Here are all the programs, sites, and other resources that I personally use for my fansite, and are great tools for all webmasters to think about. :) These are all accesible - anyone can get them.

Fantastico: Coppermine, 4Images, phpBB
What's a fansite without a gallery? If you happen to have access to cPanel for your fansite, use Fantastico to install a gallery script for your site. It's easy and very painless. Customizing is a bit trickier, but I'd suggest only if you're really bent on making your gallery all prettyful and whatnot. Fantastico can also install some forum scripts, so if you want your visitors to interact with each other, Fantastico is also there to help you.

PowerDVD & Irfanview: The Amazing Duo
If the subject of your fansite is a movie star, or a television star, even, you'll need a good screencapping program to capture their moments on DVD. The program that I use for screencapturing is PowerDVD - it makes great caps at the size you specify, and all you have to do is click a button to capture a file. The only bad thing is continuously clicking and capturing the right moment. Another problem with PowerDVD is that it saves all its images as BMP files, and Coppermine doesn't exactly accept BMP files. That's where Irfanview comes in - you can download it from www.irfanview.com. Irfanview is an amazing program that can do batch file conversions and rename hundreds of files pretty quickly. I use it to convert all those BMP screencaps to JPG files. It's very fast, although sometimes it slows down your computer in the process.

Free Image Resources
Unfortunately, most of us are students and don't have the time to stalk people and take pictures while they're eating at a restaurant or shopping at a mall. There are, however, many sites that post candids and videos daily. Just Jared has many candids and snapshots of celebrities. The notorious Perez Hilton also posts candids, although the pictures sometimes have graffiti and comments on them. Image forums are the best resource; people post high quality and medium quality pictures there all the time. A lot of them are invite-only though; just to name a few: The Celebrity City, Hollywood's Best, SP Regulars, HQ Paradise, Lime-Light.org, and much more.

The International Movie Database
I think everyone knows about IMDb.com - it has tons of information on every movie imaginable, and a forum for each movie or actor. Visiting the forums once in a while doesn't hurt, although you have to register. People post news, rumours, pictures, etc. on the forums quite often.

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