Computer and Web Tools

This page contains links and short descriptions of tools that may be useful in maintaining your home computer, business computer or web site. Some are targeted for the computer user, while others are administrative tools. None of these is developed by us nor do we have any financial interest in them. They are just ones that we have found useful.   Many of these sites with "free" services would also like to sell you something. Resist, unless it is a product or service that you REALLY need.
Updated: 1/20/2008

Links to Free Web-based Tools:

• 4096 Color Wheel - A tool for picking colors for the web
• Color Schemer's color picking tools. Useful to get Hex Numbers for colors, and coordinated colors.
• DomainTools contains many web based DNS tools.
• FreeWebSubmission.com has a good tool to display headers, description, keywords, etc.
• Gomez Site Performance tools  break down where the time is being spent displaying web pages.
• Microsoft's Knowledge Base
• PC Pitstop's PC Tests. Does a good job of checking out your PC.   This requires an ActiveX download. Of course, they would also like to sell you some software. So far I have resisted. Lately the seem to be more picky about just how much fragmentation is too much.
• Rapid System Corp's line speed, Jitter and Packet loss testing tool. Just enter a name then click the "Click to start" button to get it going. While this test is intended to determine if your Internet connection is up to the task of running Voice over Internet Protocol, it also does a good job of checking your line out.
• Speedster's TCP/IPA Analyzer - also displays your IP address. 
• Speedster's WEP/WPA Key generator for WiFi Networks. If you have a wireless network, make sure that it has WPA encryption enabled and has a password for  the router!
• Web-sniffer's HTTP Header Viewer
• W3C's CSS Validation Service
• W3C's HTML Validation Service
• W3C's Link Checking Service
• W3C's XML Validation Service
• What's My IP Address is a tool for figuring out your computers Internet Protocol address.
• Who's Hosting This is a tool for associating a domain name with ISP
• Xinu is a good tool for showing the novice some details about their web page.

Links to Free Down-loadable PC Software:

• Adobe's Acrobat Reader for PDF files.
• Bluefive's PixResize is a program to resize photographs for the web.
• Cygwin's GNU Unix environment for Window allows me to use Unix tools and scripting in a Windows environment.
• Filezilla is an Open Source FTP client for Windows.
• Firefox - The other web browser. For Windows, MacOS and Linux. 
  • The Firefox Web Developer Add-in is very useful for web developers. You can't develop web sites and applications without this tool!
  • FireBug is a debugging tool for Firefox.
  • PlainOldFavorites is an extention that allows Firfox to share IE's Favorites so that they are available in both browsers.
  • SEO for Firefox is an extention that tells you a lot about Google's search results.
  • PDF Download for Firefox gives you more options when dealing with PDF files.
  • IE Tab is an extention that uses the Internet Explorer rendering engine in a Firefox tab, for those few times that a site will only work wit Internet Explorer.
• Google Desktop is a search engine for your PC. Locates files by contents, just like searching on the web. This tool has saved me many times when I have deleted a file, or even content on this web site and Google Desktop has retained it in its cache. However Google Desktop places it very large cache files in your Documents and Settings folder, making it part of your normal backup. In my case this made the backup larger than a DVD and I had to make a choice - Google Desktop or a complicated backup process.
• iespell is a spelling checker add-in for Internet Explorer
• IObit's Advanced WindowsCare V2 Personal is a very good tool that cleans the registry and temporary files, looks for spyware, and performs other useful functions. There is a for-pay version of the tool, but for home uses the free one is more than adequate. They also have SmartDefrag that is allows for scheduling defrag's and performing defrag in the background.
• Microsoft's free Office Converters & Viewers. A "must have" if you don't own MS Office, but still need to read an occasional Office file.
• Microsoft's Visual Studio Express series of software development tools for the web.  These tools are free limited editions of MS's full Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server products. They are very useful for small development tasks and don't have the big price of the full version.
• OpenOffice's suite of tools to compete with Microsoft's Office. if you don't own Office these are a must have. If you do they still may be useful.
• Spybot's Search & Destroy spyware tool for detecting, removing and immunizing your PC has been around for many years and has been my choice for a long time.
• Sun's Java JRE (runtime environment). Required if you wish to view Java
• WinMerge is a graphical differencing and merging tool for text files such as HTML.

Links to the Software used to run our Web Site

• DotNetNuke is the portal engine that does most of the work.
• DNN Creative has provided training videos, skins and great advice.
• Snapsis DNN 3.1 CSS Menu and DNN PageBlaster. Fine products and excellent support.
• ListX from Bi4ce
• Google Analytics