May 21, 2005 Meeting

Free Stuff! No Kidding!

John Davey and I collected several examples of everything you would need to create a website, edit and add images, publish it to the web, and host your site, all at no cost. True, some things do involve restrictions. For example, many photos are available for personal or other non-commercial use, but not for businesses. (Some have no restrictions.) Often, a photographer or image creator requests a link or other credit on your website. But html editors, image editors, and ftp programs are readily available at no charge, with no restrictions. Here's a list of the programs and services we reviewed.

• HTML Editors:
• Araneae, from ornj.net
• NVU, from the Linux world. An open source editor with WYSIWYG features,available from NVU.com.  NVU is quite usable - very much like a Front Page, but without all the junky code.
• Web Hosting
• 100WebSpace.com. With more space offered than most and a MySQL database included, 100WebSpace.com is a good deal.
• Brinkster is also a popular free hosting service, with unobtrusive ads supporting the free plan. www.brinkster.com
• Images
• Images of the World is a site created by a photographer who has traveled to many countries and posted thousands of photos. Like many, if not most, free-photo sites, the images are free for personal or other non-commercial use, if a credit link is provided. Commercial use is not allowed.
• FTP Programs
• Core FTP Lite is a powerful, configurable program. It is free for personal or educational use. www.coreftp.com
• FileZilla is an open-source FTP client, not quite as intuitive as Core FTP, but still easy to use. It's available from http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla
• FTP Commander is the free version of InternetSoft's FTP client. The program is free for personal, educational and non-commercial use.
• FreshFTP is one of a set of free (for personal or non-commercial use) applications from FreshWebmaster. Registration is required to use it beyond 11 days.
• Image Editors
• Serif Software offers its older programs for free. Here is the link to PhotoPlus 6. Although PhotoPlus is up to version 9 as of this writing, version 6 works just fine.
• IrfanView is freeware for non-commercial use. As many freeware authors do, the creator has a convenient Paypal link on his site for donations. http://www.irfanview.com.
• Learn more! Check out the W3Schools for an amazing set of tutorials, lessons, resources, statistics and references.

If you would like to discuss any of the issues we have covered, please email John Davey (email: jadavey at comcast dot net) or Reed Gustow (email: mercury at tangoangel dot com)