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YouTube, the ever-present video hosting service just made some big improvements to their web-interface. Among their upgrades are:

For a complete list of upgrades visit the Official YouTube blog. The upgrades look like a welcome addition to an already good service. I don’t personally use YouTube, but I know many who do. Do you YouTube?

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I thought I’d share this freebie I just found. Zinio, a digital magazine distributor, is giving away free, one-year digital subscriptions to PC Magazine. In order to get it you have to sign up with Zinio and download their magazine reader. It actually all works pretty good. Zinio’s reader lets you have easy navigation, plenty of zoom, and the table of contents is linked to the actual stories, meaning you can click on the article you want to read and it will turn right too it.

It’s not as nice as reading the print version, but it’s better then paying for it. If you want to pick up your own subscription, click here.

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While I’m on the topic of Wordpress themes, Twigged.net has just published an article that lists a lot of free Wordpress themes. It is a great resource for those looking for a new theme. He’s grouped them by category such as e-zines, business themes, tech themes, etc. It comes complete with screen shots, and direct links to the preview where available. Quite an impressive list indeed. Check it out here.

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By now most people have heard of JS-Kit, the ever-popular, freakishly simple, non-obtrusive, self-contained, mostly-free widget service. JS-Kit is a ten person company that works full time on creating and maintaining these website tools. Their current selection of services is a Ratings widget, a full-featured Comments widget, Polls, and a so-called Top Rated widget that summarizes data from the Ratings widget. The best part? With the exception of Top Rated, these widgets are free and contain no ads.

This past week I had the opportunity to ask some questions of Khris Loux, CEO of JS-Kit, about the future of his fast-growing widget company. We talked about some of the exciting changes recently made to JS-Kit, as…

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Just saw this one thanks to one of my readers. SitePoint is giving away a free Ruby on Rails book by Patrick Lenz on how to build your own web applications in Ruby on Rails. The book has 12 chapters and 447 pages. You can get the e-book for free, or a printed edition for a generous discount. I downloaded mine earlier. All you do is give them your email and they send you the link. Oh, it’s only free for another month from the time I am writing this. You can download it here.

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So I’ve been looking for an easy plugin that would let me highlight my own comments to help them stand out more. People who comment often have questions or things that I need to address. By highlighting my responses, it can make it much easier for people to find them. There have been number of plugins that do this. The problem is that it usually requires you to access your theme’s comments code and make some edits, a turn off for many people.

Luckily, that process has just gotten much easier. Recently Rob Marsh released a plugin aptly named Highlight Author Comments. It provides an easy, code-hacking free way to highlight your own comments.

After installing, a new…