Web Concepts

By Mitch “Link Crawler” Keeler

Finding broken or inactive links in your web site can be a painful thing for any big web site to do. If only you had your own little crawler that would check through all of the links to make sure that all of them were in working order. Well thankfully there is such a free program, or I would have lost my sanity doing this by hand a long time ago.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a free program, that does a great job checking web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets.

Xenu Link Sleuth Pro: Makes a painful process a whole lot easier.

Xenu Link Sleuth Con: Could use a more user friendly interface.

Download Xenu Link Sleuth! | Visit Xenu Link Sleuth’s Web Site

If you need any help in installing or using the product, be sure to check their official web site for more information in that regard. I think that Xenu Link Sleuth is yet another freeware download you can not miss if you spend a lot of time and money managing your own digital empire on the Web.

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Has Cascading Style Too!” Keeler

If your in the need for a style sheet creator that does a ‘bit of everything well and says “Free!” in big blog letter on the price tag, then you might be the perfect candidate to try out Cascade DTP. This free program allows you to visually layout and design a CSS powered web site with little to no effort at all.

Cascade DTP pushes itself as a composition tool for the web that harnesses both the powerfulness of cascading style sheets with the ease of use that any other WYSIWYG or HTML editor would provide. It also has addons that can help you extend the usefulness and flexability of it even further.

Cascade DTP Pro: Easy to use, lightweight and free!

Cascade DTP Con: Might need to know some about CSS before you get started.

Download Cascade DTP! | Visit Cascade DTP’s Web Site

With full control over the design, a live preview feature and the ability to save designs without publishing them (to work on a project in private) Cascade DTP is an impressive freeware CSS editing application. If you need an example of the type of site you can build with this tool check out Cascade DTP’s official home on the Web.

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Galleries are my Thing” Keeler

Lets say you have a folder of images on your desktop and you are just dying to get them on the Web. Now you could just upload them to your Lunarpages hosting account, but where is the fun in that? You want to create a neat gallery that your friends and family members can view right? Web Picture Creator allows you to create easy to publish albums of your own.

Point the program at your pictures, and it will help you with the messy side of resizing, coding and HTML generation. You can add descriptions to each image, edit the thumbnail sizes and output a web site worth checking into.

Web Picture Creator Pro: Very easy to use, perfect for beginners.

Web Picture Creator Con: Wish there were more options for editing the final gallery created.

Download Web Picture Creator! | Visit WPC’s Web Site

If you need an absolutely free way to create a gallery of images for the Web, the Web Picture Creator is worth trying out. You can create a very simple photo or image album, and your friends will think you spent hours on generating your final project. Don’t tell them your secret though, let them think your an HTML guru for a day or so.

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Mr. Google” Keeler 

I highly encourage all the webmasters that I know to create a Google Sitemap for their web site. This way you can submit it to Google and they have a fool proof way of checking your web site content. Sometimes though, when not using a content management system like WordPress or Joomla it can be hard to create this sitemap on your own. That is where a helpful download like Gsitemap comes into play.

Gsitemap gives you the tools necessary to create a Google Sitemap that can be used with your Google webmaster account to help improve the indexing of your web site in the powerhouse of search engines. From link to link, the program spiders though your content and collects everything Google might need. Once you are done, you can FTP it up to your hosting account and let Google know about it.

Gsitemap Pro: Makes it very simple to create a XML sitemap

Gsitemap Con: Wish it had an upload feature, where all I would need to do is plugin my FTP info

Download Gsitemap! | Visit Gsitemap’s Web Site

This program is a simple and free way to get yourself a golden ticket into Google. Some of the other features included are gzip compression, view by last modified, change the frequency and the priority of pages. If you have a static site and you need to create an XML sitemap, there is no program that does it better than Gsitemap.

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Stylin’ & Profilin’” Keeler 

Have you been looking for a freeware productivity suite of tools to help you with your CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)? There are many programs that promise good results, but the only free one that delivers well is Free CSS Toolbox. It is a simple CSS editor, formatter and beautifier.

The usefulness of this product does not end there. It can easily re-format your CSS code, adjust somebody else’s CSS to fit your style of formatting and will also check to make sure your CSS code is valid. This free tool does a little ‘bit of everything and does it all well.

Free CSS Toolbox Pro: Very user friendly interface the helps you along the way.

Free CSS Toolbox Con: Might want to upgrade to the paid product Rapid CSS 2007 if it doesn’t cover all your needs.

Download Free CSS Toolbox! | Visit Free CSS Toolbox’s Web Site

The Free CSS Toolbox gets the job done, and does so in a manner that is not confusing nor hard to master.

Bonus: If you need more features and support, you might try out their professional end solution, Rapid CSS 2007. It delivers much of the same with even a few more features to love.

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Not Going to Make a Porta Potty Joke” Keeler

If you are looking for a lightweight program that will help you create a great looking photo gallery look no further than Porta. Porta can turn any directory filled with images into a neatly formatted photo album for the web.

This program is not only lightweight, it is also fast, simple to use and it produces pages that are simple in nature. They are not cluttered up with a lot of junk you do not want or need and look absolutely awesome in any modern web browser.

Porta Pro: Super easy to use. If you can fill in text boxes, you can create a beautiful gallery.

Porta Con: Wish it came with a way to upload the images to the server.

Download Porta! | Visit Porta’s Web Site!

The hardest thing about using Porta is browsing to the directory your images is in. That is it! The rest of the process is so easy I can not put it into words. You can also caption pictures and put in a footer message too (such as a copyright notice). Overall I have to say I am super impressed with Porta and would suggest it to anybody who needs help creating a simple gallery of images.

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Smart FTPer” Keeler

I remember SmartFTP being one of the first really professional looking FTP clients I ever used. Even today, the visual aspect of the product is second to none. It is not just eye candy though. SmartFTP also has man features that make it one of the best free FTP solutions out there today.

It supports multiple connections, transfer queue, proxy/firewall support, drag and drop uploading, custom commands and a lot more. Check out their full list of features to get a better idea of what all this product does.

SmartFTP Pro: The visual design of the product is just hands down better looking than most in the same category.

SmartFTP Con: I remember being nagged a lot by having the unlicensed version. Eventually you learn to ignore it.

Download SmartFTP | Visit SmartFTP’s Web Site

It is free to use for personal use, and if you do use it and enjoy it - you can purchase a yearly license $36.95. That will cure some of the nagging that it does when using the unlicensed version. Give SmartFTP a whirl and see if it does the job for you.

It is a secure and efficient FTP program.

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch ???Quanta Leap??? Keeler

Some people have been angry because I haven’t reviewed any Linux friendly applications here. Well, I decided to make them happy and do a little write up about Quanta Plus.

This freeware download is much more than just your standard HTML editor, it is a full blown web development environment. With its design based around how people deal with editing rather than just tossing in as many features as they could, Quanta Plus takes the cake as an awesome text editor for your web site files.

Quanta Pro: Out of all the ones I have reviewed, Quanta Pro has the best organization of features.

Quanta Con: Some of the more advanced features can seem a little scary. If you are using Linux as your computer’s OS it might not be so scary to you though..

Download Quanta Plus! | Visit Quanta Plus???s Web Site

Quanta Plus is yet another award winning text editing masterpiece that is hard to beat. The only downside to this product is it is one that only the Linux people will be able to use as it has not yet been ported over for Windows users. It is part of KDE, a Linux desktop environment, released in the Kdewebdev package.

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “M2K” Keeler

I remember Y2K just like it was yesterday. Computers were suppose to stop working, cows were going to produce cheese instead of milk and other oddities were suppose to happen. None of them did of course, and everything was just fine and dandy. Speaking of fine and dandy, that is also how I would describe the HTML editor - Matrix Y2K.

The free download offers all the usual features such as: HTML Tidy, Documents manager, Tag Library for PHP and HTML, quick access to commonly used tags, completion proposal, multi-document interface, syntax highlighting (highlighters can be adjusted and personalized), search/replace, character map.

Matrix ͼK Pro: Quick, Lightweight, and the 3 pane interface is nice.
Matrix Y2K Con: Wish there was more support documentation on the web site for it.

Download Matrix Y2K! | Visit Matrix Y2K’s Web Site

Over all this download might not be my top favorite HTML editor, but it does offer a nice alternative if you are not happy with some of the other more popular solutions out there. It gets the job done and it will not cost you a single cent. What else could you want from a piece of software?

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “FTP(it is my middle name)” Keeler

CoreFTP might be overlooked by some, but it too is a grand way to get your files from your PC to your hosting account and back the other way. If fully supports all the FTP bells and whistles and has both a great paid and free version.

Features for the CoreFTP download include site to site file transfers, auto try failed transfers, one click transfers, keep alive functionality and more. It also has a site manager where you can keep all your own web sites and favorite FTP sites saved without having to re-type your information each time.

CoreFTP Pro: Simple 2 pane interface is easy to use and understand.

CoreFTP Con: Interface could be a little more on the pretty side.

Download CoreFTP! | Visit CoreFTP’s Web Site

They offer both a free and a paid version of the product. If I was to make a top ten of my favorite FTP clients, CoreFTP would at least be in the top five. It is a client that gives you a reliable way to update and maintain your own digital domain.

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Original post by Mitch