Web Authoring Recommendations
A Guide to Publishing on the Web
(for almost free)
Where the Truth Lies
| Website Hosting | Tripod. Amazing. 50MB free private sites with lots of extras like CGI interface. One-time pop-up advertising when a Tripod site is first accessed, but this is nothing compared to other webhosts that put banners on each of your frames, or block content (like GeoCities), or subject you to pop-up hell (like AOL). Free. |
| Browser | Netscape. Yeah, get real, MicroSoft played hardball and won the browers wars. But Netscape has real advantages for Web developers, such as the ability to see the document structure (View/PageInfo), and directly open the source code of individual frames (View/Source, OpenFrameInNewWindow). The disk cache is also much more intuitive (making it easier to recover an image from those pesky diabled-right-click pages). Our favorite is still Netscape 4.7x -- everything you need, without the corporate sell. Free. |
| Basic Web Instruction | Webmonkey. Great, easy to understand tutorials on HTML, javascript, and other basic building tools. Free. |
| Image Manager | PolyView. This image manager handles everything including organizaiton, resizing, changing image format (e.g. from BMP to JPG), thumbnail pages, even creating animated GIFs. Free trial, $25 full-function version. |
| Yahoo. Lots of decent free mail services, but Yahoo has been very stable over the last four years (I've never lost a note) and it offers some nifty Spam-blocking features. You'll start with 4MB storage, but it will automatically expand to 6MB if needed.. Free. | |
| File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Utility | WS_FTP. After you start developing pages, you'll want to build and test them off-line, then quickly upload to your WebSite host using a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) utility. WS_FTP is free, stable, and features an intuitive interface. Free. |
| Cookie Manager | Cookie Crusher. Web sites drop hundreds of small bits of code, known as "cookies", during every browsing session. (If you're using Windows, look in your Windows/Temporary Internet Files folder -- you've probably got thousands of cookies.) MicroSoft will tell you that cookies are there to "personalize your Web experience", but what Cookies do mostly is to spy on your browsing habits, so your personal information can be sold to marketers (or worse). Cookie Crusher will block all cookies, will prompt you when a cookie offered, or will allow you to selectively accept cookies from trusted sites. Free trial version, $15 license. |
| HTML Editor | WordPad. Seriously, learn to write HTML code manually, rather than rely on some crap like FrontPage that is larding down the Web and making it difficult to use any but MicroSoft tools. Any basic text editor will work just fine. Free, you've already got it. |