Other Useful Webmaster's Tools
None of these tools may be essential for you, but you should be aware they exist. You should download them if you feel you may need them, or would like to try them out...
- An HTML Validator like HTML Validator Lite can check your code for errors and ensure your pages load quickly and without problems.
- A Link checker like Xenu's Link Sleuth will check the validity of all the links on your web pages. Yahoo can refuse to add sites if they contain bad links!
See the page on Validating Your Website for more info.
- A Website Download tool - It is possible to manually download web pages one by one from your browser, but this is very slow and inefficient. A website download program will download entire websites from the web, onto your computer...
During this course, you will be referred to a number of offsite documents, such as manual pages or user guides. These reference documents are essential to the programmer, and if you embark on a software project of any complexity using Perl, PHP, Unix etc. then you will need to have these documents to hand.
I recommend that you create a 'Manuals' directory on your PC, and you download all the manuals you are referred to into it using a website download tool.
WebExtractor isn't free anymore. It's free incarnaton was OK. NetSpider still is free and pretty good...
- A Clipboard Manager - I'm currently using Yankee Clipper 3
This tool will keep track of everything you cut or copy to the clipboard, and then allow you to easily paste it back into any document. You can create a list of 'Boilerplate' text that you need regularly.
- If you want to sell ebooks, you'll need an Ebook Compiler there are many choices, but few free ones. I have used ActivEBook, which costs $30. It's good, but has some useability limitations (it doesn't handle subdirectories / file extensions other than .html) A good free one is ebookbuilder4.
>eBookPro packages text, HTML, Flash, audio/video etc. into secure eBooks. It also collects contact information. It's quite expensive at $197, but comes with a lifetime, 100%, no-questions-asked, money-back guarantee.
- As an alternative to ebooks which use the Internet Explorer engine to display their HTML pages, you can use Windows' built in HTML Help system. HTML Help EPublisher is a freeware program for publishing information in Microsoft's own help file format. Microsoft's HTML Help Workshop is available for free download.
- A Personal Organiser is a useful way to keep track of your website info. I use Treepad. It's based on a very simple concept and layout. The freeware version only stores text, but there's a commercial version which is more powerful. I find the free version adequate
- Arachnophilia has adequate multi-file editing capabilities. If the editor you choose doesn't then you'll need a Multi-File Search and Replace Tool - BkReplaceEm is superb - and includes an excellent description of how regular expressions work. Superb! These tools are useful for replacing something in lots of files at the same time. For example if you wanted to change your logo on all 47 of your product pages...
- StarOffice is a completely free Office Suite from Sun.
StarOffice is MS Office compatible - i.e. you can load and save in Microsoft .doc or .xls formats. It has an excellent word processor, which is useful for documentation, letters etc. It can save in HTML format, but unfortunately it adds masses of unneeded extra tags, and reformats your code for you. The spreadsheet is excellent. It is a large download at about 80Mb though.
- Open Office is an Open Source office suite. It's fairly new and I haven't tried it yet.
- A superb open source Word Processor AbiWord. Its only flaw is that it doesn't handle tables.
- A Screen Capture program such as WinGrab will allow you to copy parts of the screen. This is useful if you need to capture anything from your PC screen as an image. (i.e. if you're selling software - you can have 'screenshots' of it!).
You could do without this because in Windows, if you press the 'Print Screen' button on your keyboard, the whole screen is copied into the clipboard, if you press 'alt' + 'printscreen' just the active window is copied.
Most graphics programs (such as Ultimate Paint) can grab parts of the screen.
- A File Compression program will create and extract .zip and other compressed file archives. Ultimate Zip is excellent.
- A Firewall program will monitor all net traffic to and from your PC and will help prevent any attacks from hackers. This is mainly a concern if you're online all the time - if you have a dialup connection, you're not as likely to be 'hacked'. However I'd still recommend using a firewall!
- Flow Diagramming Software - is useful for visualising any process - especially complex ones. There are a couple of really good freeware programs:
...and lots of commercial ones...
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