The Webmasters Must Have Software Toolkit
The focus on this list is for the beginning webmaster starting out with all 100% free software and using a windows based PC.
FTP Client: The best choice here is Filezilla. Filezilla has now been around for many years and has the benefit of being free, and is continually being updated. I have used Filezilla personally for around 6 years and it has performed flawlessly for me. This is one great piece of software that happens to not only be free, but also open source.
Graphics Software: For graphics I would recommend Paint.net. Another really nice free program that is always being updated and refined. Paint.net has grown from a quite simple “paint” replacement into a powerful graphics tool. It is a light and fast program for simple image creation or editing photos. Paint.net also supports plugins that can enhance the functionality even more.
Text and HTML editor: A really nice simple text and HTML editor I would use Notepad2. For a simple no-nonsense editor that is miles ahead of the standard notepad.exe, notepad2 is a great choice for starting out with simple HTML and web-editing. It is one of those pieces of software that is installed right away on any new computer I use. Once installed, just be sure to active the line numbers feature.
Web Browser: Add a few great extensions to the Firefox browser, and you have an awesome browser and webmaster assistant all in one. So along with the basic Firefox install, this short list of extensions are ones that I use daily to assist in web design development and programming. (Just to note I use quite a few more, but those are great for getting started)
- The Web Developer Toolbar
- Search Status
- Live HTTP headers
Wordpress image uploader crashing Firefox
If you are having trouble with Firefox crashing when you go to try to upload an image using the WordPress flash-based image uploader. Here is a quick fix.
Go into your Firefox addons. (Tools – Add ons).
Find the Google Gears entry.
Click Disable button, and restart your Firefox Browser.
Good Ridance Geocities!
Wow, talk about unloading a bunch of crap off the internet. This will be like cleaning the back corners of the internet that no one visits.
10 million spots now freed up in the Google index!
Drinking Fountain Feed
Wow, you know you spend to much time on the internet when you look at the drinking fountain drain and see an RSS feed there…
Some thoughts on TypePad
Being a fan of WordPress for it’s well written, and very active development community for code, plugins, and themes, and also because it is free and open source. I have always been a little mystified why anyone would want to use typepad, because it is missing many of those components listed above.
The big questions for me on Type Pad has always been:
1) Why pay for the right to use blogging software?
2) Why be pour your blogging to a domain you do not own? To me that feels like remodeling a rental house on your own dollar.
So here is the answer:
The major benefit of using a service like Type Pad is ironiclly the same reason as the reasons not to. It comes down to this, if someone is paying a fee to a service to run their blog, then the content is likely going to be higher. All you have to do is look at all the lousy blogs on blogger and blogspot, etc… You are not likely to find nearly the same ratio of quality blogs to spam blogs on a service like TypePad.
Any blog on typepad domain is likely going to get a natural boost for this reason.
Wordpress Automatic Update with 1and1
How to make the automatic update work with your Wordpress blogs that are hosted on 1and1 shared servers. These are blogs that you set up yourself, not the blog that 1and1 can install for you.
The problem I was having was the update would start, and then just stop after a few seconds.
Then in my wp-content folder I would see a bunch of failed downloads. They were the update zip files with a 0 byte size.
Add the following lines to your .htaccess file in the root directory of your blog.
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
This will enable PHP version 5 + on your blog and then your update should take off.
The udpate to PHP 5 should also make your blog run a little faster and better.
Now that WP 2.9.1 is out, it is a good time to test out the automatic upgrade!
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