Site Admin Stuff

Stuff I depend on as a webmaster and web developer (all on one page)

Go home. A text only version is also available.

Number of resources currently on this page: 326 in 45 sections. Thanks to all who have suggested stuff.

Jump down: (X)HTML | Apache | Blogging | Color | Content Management Systems | CSS | Customer service / Support | Design, Style & Useability | DNS | Domains | ECommerce | Editors & IDEs | Firefox Extensions | Fonts | Forum Software | Freelancing | FTP / SSH / Telnet | Google | Graphics | Hosting | Javascript / AJAX | JS WYSIWYG Editors | Mailing lists / Listserv | Maintenance | Mobile accessibility | Monetization | Perl | Php | Promotion | Python | Reg Ex | Robots / Spiders / Search | RSS/Atom feeds | Ruby / RoR | SEO / SEM | Servers | SPAM | SQL | Statistics | Tcl | Tools | Tutorials, Examples, Code & Reference | Validation, Cross-browser checking | WebDAV | Webmaster Forums

(X)HTML

Hypertext Markup Language

Apache

The Apache webserver. Sorry, I don't have any experience with IIS or any of the others.

Blogging

Be a blogger. See the RSS section too.

Color

Color schemes
  • Wellstyled Color scheme generator. Mono, Contrast, Triad, Pastel, Strong- lots of options. Gives you a 4-color scheme as output.
  • Visibone 216 web-safe colors with contrasting colors
  • Colorblender Match colors & design a palette
  • CPick Little Windows program to easily pick any color from your screen (with magnifier), then manipulat & ouput as you want. Scroll down & you'll find it.
  • Colorblender Input 2 colors and get up to 10 colors blending the two. [Thanks Patrick C.]
  • Colortoy Input a base color and get a 9-color color scheme to choose from.
  • Yafla's Color Tool Create color schemes and do RGB/HSV Conversion.
  • Color Palette Generator Input a photo and this tool analyzes the colors and suggests a color scheme

Content Management Systems

Easily manage your content with these systems :)

CSS

Cascading style sheets, separation of church and state- oh I mean separation of content and presentation.

Customer service / Support

Providing support, customer service & help to your customers
  • OTRS Open Ticket Request System- built to accommodate support, sales, pre-sales, billing, internal IT, helpdesk, functions
  • RT Open source trouble ticket software from best practical. Popular. [Thanks Chris F.]

Design, Style & Useability

Create usable sites for a modern age :)

DNS

Domain name servers

Domains

Domains, registration & transfers.
  • Sedo Domain parking
  • Country code list Top level domains (TLDs) per country
  • 3Char domains
  • ICANN Acredited $9/year (but they usually have sales) DNS services
  • ICANN Acredited $7/year, DNS services
  • Dynadot ICANN Acredited $8/year DNS services
  • How to get an expiring domain How to use the backorder services
  • Whois & much more
  • ICANN Acredited. Approx $15/year
  • ICANN accredited. $6/year
  • ICANN Accredited $5/year + DNS services.
  • ICANN Accredited, $10/year DNS available
  • Domain lookup Ajax-powered instant domain search

ECommerce

Selling / buying things
  • OSCommerce Open-source eCommerce solution
  • VirtueMart Open-source
  • Zen Cart Open source shopping cart system
  • CRE Loaded Open source ecommerce package. Havn't used it, but looks quite promising. [free and pay versions avail.]
  • Cube Cart eCommerce package, looks pretty popular. Free & paid versions available. Not open source. [Thanks ScurvyD]

Editors & IDEs

Text editors, & integrated development environments for web development.
  • Textpad I use this powerful text editor several hours of every day :) Has syntax hiliting & + [shareware]
  • Emacs FAQ
  • Editplus Text editer, Syntax hiliting, Commercial, Haven't tried it :)
  • The Vim editor and its docs. Used by many. [vi improved]
  • BBEdit Awesome text editor with all you need for web dev. [Mac] [commercial]
  • Site Aid HTML Editor
  • Matrix Y2K Free HTML editor
  • Max's HTML Beauty Full-featured HTML editor [free]
  • Notepad++ Full featured source code editor [free, Windows] [Thanks Ron E.]
  • PSPad Freeware text editor for Windows [Thanks Ron E.]
  • JSide JavaScript Editor/IDE. Written in Java.
  • NetBeans Open source Java IDE from Sun. [Win/Linux/Mac/Solaris]
  • NetBeans Javascript Editor Adds Javascript & CSS editors to the Netbeans IDE. Lots of features incl. code completion.
  • Aptana Open source Javascript, CSS & HTML IDE. [Win/Linux/Mac]
  • Notepad2 Another (free) text editor [Win]. I had seen this years ago, but thanks eSommer for remiding me.
  • HTML-Kit Create, edit, validate, preview and publish web pages and scripts. Free & paid versions available. [Win] [Thanks DonL.]
  • Crimson Editor Full featured, free programmer's editor
  • tsWebEditor Free, open source editor for web programming languages.
  • Quanta Open source editor, full of features [Linux]

Firefox Extensions

Firefox extensions that are helpful to webmasters

Fonts

Forum Software

Have a community
  • Vanilla Open-source standards-compliant discussion forum (Php/MySQL)
  • Commercial, but one of the most popular forum packages (Php/MySQL)
  • PhpBB Open-source. Reputation for being buggy/insecure (Php/MySQL)
  • SMF Simple Machines Forum. Free, but not OS. (Php/MySQL)
  • IPB Invision Power Board - Commercial, but pretty popular (Php/MySQL)
  • Phorum Open-source, nice product (Php/MySQL)
  • bbPress Forum software from the makers of Wordpress. [free]

Freelancing

Find freelance programmers, designers, translators etc. Or find work :)
  • Elance Don't know much about 'em
  • I've had good experiences at GAF.
  • Guru One of the biggest, and supposedly one of the best
  • Scriptlance

FTP / SSH / Telnet

File transfer & server connections/control
  • Sitecopy Keep the remote site sync'ed with the local site (Win, LInux, FreeBSD, & others)
  • Smart FTP Easy Windows FTP client. [free for personal use]
  • PuTTY a Free Telnet/SSH Client
  • WinSCP free SFTP and SCP client [windows]
  • Beyond Compare Folder/file comparison. Local & remote. Includes FTP abilities. [commercial] (but awesome)
  • Filezilla Open source FTP client (and server too). [Thanks greguly]
  • Poderosa Tabbed terminal emulator for Windows. Nice. [Thanks Dave P.]

Google

Google gets its own section :)

Graphics

Tools for creating/manipulating images & sources for images
  • AjaxLoad Create an AJAX "loading" animated .gif
  • Favicon Chami's online tool for creating favicons from other images
  • PhotoMatt On how to create a favicon
  • Dynamic Drive Favicon generator. They also have a button maker, a gradient image maker, and an image optimizer.
  • Corbis Royalty-free & commercial images (req. registration)
  • Image splitter Slice and dice your images
  • Image Embellisher Add special effects to your images (online tool)
  • Browsershots Test your webdesign in different browsers. Free screenshots/thumbnails of URLs.
  • Thumbshots Free, (with attribution) hosted thumbnails of your website. Sites to get thumbnails for must be in Dmoz
  • The GIMP GNU Image Manipulation Program. Like Photoshop/Fireworks only better & free.
  • Imagemagick examples Examples, tutorials & basic how-to.
  • Imagemagick Command-line software suite to create, edit, compose and convert images to and from many formats.
  • iStockPhoto Good selection of reasonably priced graphics & stock photos. Commercial. [Thanks Mike C.]
  • Trout's gif optimizer Pare down the size of all those gifs on your site. [freeware, Windows]
  • Yafla's Pure jpeg A Command-line app to reduce jpg filesize by removing unnecessary information (EXIF, thumbnails, comments etc) [free, Win]

Hosting

Got to have someplace to host. Of course there are hundreds of other hosting companies, but these are the best (subjective of course).
  • From about $5/month. Haven't used them.
  • From $7/month. I haven't used them for hosting, but I've registered domains with Omnis.
  • As cheap as $3/month, not sure about quality.
  • Jump on the 1&1 bandwagon! From $3/month & free domain under some circumstances.
  • Web hosting $10/month and up.
  • I've been happy with them for a year now. Outrageous bandwidth available.
  • A Small Orange I haven't used them, but I've heard *lots* of good things.

Javascript / AJAX

Javascript is not Java, and the ubiquitous AJAX is Javascript.

JS WYSIWYG Editors

Javascript editors to place on your pages or in your web app.

Mailing lists / Listserv

Manage mailing lists & Listservs. The ones marked "Listserv" are for email discussions among many users, the others are for you to email to the list.

Maintenance

Keep your site in tip-top shape

Mobile accessibility

Stuff to help you make your site accessible to mobile (phone, pda etc) users
  • Mobi Ready Report Evaluates your site on accessibility issues for mobile browsing devices
  • Handheld media type test (CSS) Go to this in your browser and it will evaluate to "screen", go on your phone/pda and it will evaluate (or should) to "handheld"
  • Phone emulator Test your site with a Nokia & Sony Ericsson phone emulator
  • Pukupi mimic Emulate your site on Japanese/European iMode phones.
  • Wapsilon Browse WAP pages with your regular browser.
  • Opera Mini Emulator This is a live demo of Opera Mini that functions exactly like it would when installed on a handset. [Java Applet]

Monetization

How can you make money with your website?
  • CPC, Contextual FAQ
  • Yahoo Publisher Network YPN
  • MSN Adcenter - Adcenter blog.
  • Jensense Jennifer Slegg talks about contextual advertising
  • Sell text ads on your site.
  • Casale media CPM ads
  • Automatic system for selling links on your site
  • Link Adage Sell links
  • Pro blogger How to make money with your blog.
  • PhpAdsNew Php-based ads management system
  • CJ Thousands of affiliate programs
  • Amazon Affiliate program

Perl

Larry Wall's dynamic programming language.

Php

Php the web programming language
  • Official Php site Search the php function list right from the main site, or better yet, download the complete docs.
  • Php Classes.org Learn by using the example scripts they have (req. registration)
  • Hot Scripts Php scripts
  • Predefined variables See what's in the $_SERVER array etc
  • CakePhp Like rails is to ruby. A rapid development framework for Php.
  • PEAR A framework of reusable Php components.
  • Smarty template engine A good template engine. I usually find them unnecessary, but Smarty has it's fans.
  • ezSQL A database abstraction class for Php. Works with lots of DBs.

Promotion

Get the word out about your site.
  • Link Adage Buy / barter for links
  • DP's Get links from many sites [free]
  • PRWeb Press releases [commercial]
  • Google's ad network. Quick & easy to get started [commercial]
  • I Newswire Free & Paid press releases
  • 24-7 Press release Commercial press releases
  • PR.com Free press release service
  • PR Free.com Another free one.
  • PR Leap And another :)
  • Pressbox UK-based press release service. Looks like it's free

Python

Google's favorite programming language.

Reg Ex

Regular Expressions

Robots / Spiders / Search

Handling robots or adding search to your site

RSS/Atom feeds

Learn about syndication. See also the blogging section. RSS => RDF Site Summary / Really Simple Syndication.

Ruby / RoR

Ruby is a programming language, Ruby on Rails is a simple open source web application framework written in Ruby.

SEO / SEM

Search Engine Optimization & Marketing & Online marketing / promotion in general
  • SEO Book Aaron Wall's weblog
  • SEO Moz Rand Fishkin's blog
  • Matt Cutts Google employee
  • Copyblogger Copywriting tips for online marketing success.
  • Keyword suggestion tool See what keywords you should target. Integrates Overture & Wordtracker data
  • Keyword tracker Monitor your SE rankings
  • Free advertising on many sites
  • Overture keyword tool Now part of Yahoo
  • Wordtracker Keyword research (commercial)
  • Shoemoney Jeremey Shoemaker's Blog
  • Dave Naylor AKA DaveN
  • SEO Buzzbox Another SEO Blog

Servers

Servers and server administration stuff. See also the Apache section.
  • Lighttpd A light-footprint, efficient HTTP server.
  • XAMPP A nice package for development work. Install Apache, MySQL, Php, PhpMyAdmin & more all in one go.

SPAM

Dealing with SPAM

SQL

All about SQL (mostly MySQL-specific stuff)

Statistics

Server stats can be really useful
  • AWStats Open source stats generation
  • Analog Stats / logfile analyzer
  • Report magic Post processing for prettier output for Analog.
  • Google Analytics Formerly Urchin. Nice free analysis opportunity
  • Pollywog Java-based log analysis application [new]
  • Tracewatch Real-time stats & log analysis [free]
  • The Webalizer fast, free web server log file analysis program
  • Visitors GPL'd web log analyzer. Source code is free, compiled Windows binaries aren't. You can compile the code yourself, if you want. [Thanks Bren] Glad my visitors don't come from outer space.
  • Firestats Web statistics system. Integrates with different CMSs.

Tcl

Tcl, Tcl/Tk

Tools

There are lots of tools that didn't seem to fit in the other categories

Tutorials, Examples, Code & Reference

This is for sites that have lots of examples and tutorials, but don't fit into one category for JS, CSS, Php etc.
  • Brainjar Tutorials for Javascript, DHTML, Asp, .NET, Java, & CSS
  • W3C Schools Tutorials & Reference on: HTML, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, DOM, Php, WML & more.
  • DevShed Sections for all major programming languages
  • WDVL Web developer's virtual library
  • Code Project's web scripting section.
  • Dev Guru Quick references for most of the technologies in use for web development. Very useful.
  • GoToAPI Search a bunch of programming reference sites at once.

Validation, Cross-browser checking

Make sure it validates and works in most browsers. See also the Mobile accessibility section for phone/pda-specific validators.
  • HTML 2 Txt See what your website looks like to a text-only browser such as lynx and some search engine spiders
  • W3C HTML validator
  • Jigsaw W3C CSS Validator
  • Backwards Compatibility Checker Delorie's tool to see what your page looks like with various browser features disabled (Frames, JS, CSS etc)
  • Header Checker See what HTTP headers your site sends out, check for correct mime types, 301 redirection etc
  • Walidator Validate CSS, HTML, RSS, RDF, XHTML, etc
  • WebXCACT Test your site for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues
  • Favicon validator Make sure your favicon file, link etc are all working cross browser.
  • Selenium Test your web application across a wide range of web browsers. [free, open source] (Thx Ricky L.)
  • Vischeck Simulate different types of color vision and colorblindness to see what your webpage looks like to people with these conditions.
  • Color Filter See what a webpage looks like to the colorblind.

WebDAV

Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (Thanks Dan M. for suggesting this)

Webmaster Forums

Talk about what you're doing

Please report broken links and resources that you think bite.

Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This page might be ugly, but it's valid HTML 4.0 Strict and CSS. Yay!
© Copyright 2005-6. A David Production.

You may not copy, transmit, redistribute, publish, modify, create derivative works or exploit in any way any of the content of this website without permission, except where expressly permitted by copyright law. Thank you.