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 “The Developa” Keeper

When you talk about awesome tools for Firefox to make your web development job just that much easier you can’t overlook the Web Developer toolbar extension. The best thing about this freeware download is that it mixes two great things into a handy tool to keep close at hand (Firefox and the Web Developer tools).

Once installed the addon will add a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. You can mess around with CSS, forums, resize the window, view the source and more. For a total rundown it might be best to check out the official site for every single feature because there are just too many to name right here, right now.

Web Developer Pro: The king of the mountain when it comes to Firefox/web dev tools.

Web Developer Con: Kind of bulky toolbar, but can always be hidden away.

Download Web Developer! | Visit Web Developer’s Web Site

The Web Developer toolbar for Firefox is a must have for those of us out there that both use Firefox and spend a lot of time hacking away at web sites, trying to make them better than they were. It has all the tools you would ever want right there in one simple toolbar and it will not cost you a penny to use.

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “All About the Tabs” Keeler

When it comes to having a solid navigation, that looks good as well you can get no better than a few well styled tabs. Now with the power of HTML and tossing in some CSS you can have awesome tabs on the side or top of your web page. With CSS Tab Designer though, you won’t have to lift a finger to get them made.

CSS Tab Designer takes all the hard work out of designing your own CSS styled tabs for your web site navigation. You can pick from over 60+ styles and colors, and it generates strict XHTML compliant code to copy into your domain.

CSS Tab Designer Pro: Makes creating CSS powered lists as easy as picking what you want and filling in the blanks.

CSS Tab Designer Con: I wish I could create a whole web site like this.

Download CSS Tab Designer! | Visit the CSS Tab Designer Web Site

Truly a unique freeware download, this software will help you create a CSS powered list and tab that will require you learning absolutely no programing or designing knowledge. When your friends and family go check it out, they will think you are a web designing master and as long as you don’t blab, you don’t have to tell them about our secret.

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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 “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 “Alive and Well” Keeler 

Programs that promised to help me update my blog stopped being interesting the first time I tried one. Why? None of them seem to do it all. That was my point of view before I found Windows Live Writer and I have to say, I am happy that Microsoft was able to make me give this software genre another chance.

Windows Live Writer is great. All you do is plug in your WordPress information, and it figures out and does that rest of the work for you. Then you can write you posts as you would in any other word processor-type program. You also can format images, save drafts, edit tags and categories and more.

Windows Live Writer Pro: Best blog updater program out there - by far, for Windows.

Windows Live Writer Con: For some reason, you can’t center images. Have yet to figure that one out.

Download Windows Live Writer! | Visit Windows Live Write Web Site

The icing on the cake is the various previews you can generate. You can edit and write via the standard interface or via an interface that gives the appearance that you are writing there on your own web site. The Web Preview feature is also good to show you what the post’s format will look like once it goes live.

I can’t say enough good things about Windows Live Writer. If you are blogging on your Lunarpages hosting space, then you really need to give this free download a shot.

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Original post by Mitch