Ron and I thought we’d share a handy list of software and tools we use on our various computers. All of these are freely available.
For internet browing, we really like Firefox. We also use Thunderbird for email. Switching is easy: all your bookmarks, preferences, emails will all be transferred over at the click of a few buttons.
You can get the Mozilla Suite as an all-in-one package (complete with a web page editor) but as I understand it, there are slight differences. The Mozilla Suite is *not* Thunderbird and Firefox bundled.
One of the bonuses of Firefox, aside from the handy tabbed browsing, inherent secureness and pop-up blockers, is the availability of extensions. This way, we can tweak our browser slightly in order of our own preferences. The changes can also be made in people’s independant profiles. The handiest extension I use is the Web Developer’s Toolbar which is within the ease-of-use range for even beginners. One click, and every div on the page is outlined.
To produce this website and others, we use WordPress, a blog publishing platform. I’ve used or tried other blogging platforms and have found this one to be one of the easiest to learn and efficient use.
When I am designing a new layout or working on someone else’s site, I either do it live in WordPress, or use a generic text editor. A couple of hosts we can recommend are:
Small Packages for small sites
- starts at $20 per year for 25megs
Site5 for bigger needs.
At some point, you may need to handle some graphics. Gimp is a good choice. It may look overwhelming, but it is quite comparable to programs that cost hundreds of dollars. From my own comparisons, it has almost all the functionality of Paint Shop Pro.
And of course, there is our love of Open Office. It contains a word processor, spreadsheet, database component, and a mathematical function creator as well as a vector drawing tool.
There are other websites and programs we use, but these are the ones that make up the basics.
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