Ton van Hattum
Rua Uberaba 370
Belo Horizonte
First published: 10/6/06
Last update: 4/4/07
A selection of links to Information sites and software, with a short description and explanation of why I like these software applications and information sites. The selection is based on what use because I need or like it for my profession or interests.
Clusty (used to be Vivisimo) is my favourite search engine. Search results are "clustered" as they call it. These clusters are represented in a tree-format in a panel on the left. This makes it much easier to select interesting or relevant pages from the bulk of search results. Another useful feature is keyword search in the clusters. Entering keywords, clusters and sub-clusters containing these keywords are highlighted in the tree.
With the search engine of Google, one often can find sites which don't show up in Clusty. The crawlers of Google search the whole Internet for sites and seem to index almost everything.
Many entries in the free web-encyclopaedia Wikipedia are well written and have a good level of detail. Since it is written by volunteers, one can't be sure of the reliability of the information, it's wise to check. All in all it is a good place to start looking for information because of the links to sources and to related pages.
Some characteristics I think good software should have.
There are many examples where freeware options are better in performance and size-performance relation than commercial equivalents.
Normally, when you ask information about a new computer, software is referred to as an add-on, as something useful to have. To sell the computer, the dealer normally installs copies of necessary software for free. If you'd have to buy all the software you need to be able to use your computer properly, the total price easily gets so high that the hardware becomes an add-on to the software.
Free dictionary for several forms of English. You download software and database to install on your computer. Not perfect in all definitions but very useful for being extremely fast (select word, press ctrl-alt-w and results appear in an instant) and having many search functions like: nearest, synonyms, type of, types, replace.
Because I do a lot of copying and pasting and often have several pieces I need to copy repeatedly, I use Clipboard Recorder It stores up to a hundred text fragments and image's that can be copied and pasted between all windows programmes. You can even set it to store clips to the HD when you close the computer.
Email client I use because it has good default settings and is very mouldable. Here are a few important settings I use.
Mailbox and settings files, are placed in the user directory. This has the advantage that when backing up the user-directory, emails and settings of Eudora are also backed up.
Setting the software to leave emails on the server for two weeks, keeps recent emails available in case I am not home or when my computer crashes.
I've set emails to be filtered to mailboxes which open. This makes it easier to see if I have important new mail.
Although support has stopped since quite a while, I still use it.
http://www.eudora.com/download
For me Opera is the easiest and fastest browser. Many say Mozilla is the best. I've tried it but don't agree. It has many useful and practical features others don't have or incorporate much after Opera. A few examples. Navigating through sites with "Mouse Gestures" including opening links in a background tab. Downloads are not only fast but they start as soon as you click on the link instead of after you determine where to save the file. Sometimes it takes me a while to decide where to save something in order not to lose it in the bulk of files on my drive. In many of these cases download was already half way or even finished by the time I had decided in which folder to save.
Older versions of Opera used to crash a lot but now I don't see that problem anymore.
Since long WordPerfect is the best wordprocessor for me. It has good default settings but is also very mouldable. It's easy to change things like layout, fonts, styles. Most of the special things I want to do with my text or to facilitate the use, I can, and it isn't difficult to find out how to do whatever I want.
WordPerfect's trump feature is "reveal codes". A perfectionist in layout inevitably comes to the point where a text starts to have a will of its own. It can for instance start to indent flush, left or right and no way to tame the thing. Press Alt-F3 and a window appears showing all codes like bold, indent, language, font size, graphic line. In this window you can edit these codes. You can for instance delete, select-cut-past and place the cursor between elements where you couldn't in the normal edit window or in other wordprocessors.
I still use WordPerfect version 8 which, was distributed for free by Corel, with computer components. I got mine with a motherboard. It serves me much better than newer versions of other wordprocessors.
The best file-browser and -manager I've found is Xplorer2. It is similar to the famous old Norton Commander Has several useful features like tree and two panel view, compare panels, preview. It comes with Editor2.
Editor2 is a simple small fast text-editor. It has practical features but is small and easy enough. I use it for simple text files and to make small changes to HTML files.
SequoiaView gives visual representation of the size of files and directories. It shows in a glance which files or directories take up much disk space, helping to chose which to delete or move if necessary.
http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview
I use the database of the famous CNET-Download.com mostly to check on the quality of software suggestions I get. I often find the user reviews most useful. As a matter of fact, I found some of my favourite software in these user reviews as alternative suggestion for the software I was checking on.
I used to have a subscription to one of their e-mails. I cancelled it because they became to much M$ loving to my taste. I think there database has become to big to be practical for finding good stuff. Things got worse because "freeware" and price indicators as well as the "freeware" filter have been removed from their software listings.
It seems this site hasn't had any updates since mid 2008 and seems to be taken down in april 2009, unfortunately.
In general they are more selective in the software they include in their database. Sometimes it seems the description is not much more than a repetition the publisher's description. When I find something interesting at Tudogs, I go to Download.com to look at the editor and user reviews there. They also include links to interesting sites not related to software like about teaching, (cosher) cooking.
http://tudogs.com
To find software, I now look around the several available freeware sites but unfortunately I haven't found any that offers what the above mentioned sites used to offer.
Nowadays malware protection software is almost as important as an operating system. These are programs I use to protect my machine.
What is often said, I've seen on my computer. Apart from an anti-virus and firewall one needs more than one additional anti-malware. None find all threats. Having two you have a good chance that one finds something the other doesn't.
What is the best firewall or anti-virus changes from time to time. Normally I keep switching between two. I use one fore a while and then I start to see things happening that make me doubt whether the one I have is still doing the job well enough so I check on the Internet and come to the conclusion it is time to switch. After a while the same happens and I switch back.
ZoneAlarm, used to be a practical good easy to manage firewall. Some time ago I started to receive update messages which are actually advertisements for the payed package. After that the bar showing which software is communicating over the web disappeared. This one of my favourite features disappeared. That's why I took an other good look at the software and saw it has become part of "Checkpoint". For now I've switched back to Sygate.
http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/home.jsp
For now I've switched back to Sygate although only old versions are available. The Filehipo version dates from February 18, 2005; Tucows from Oct 28, 2004. I'm looking for something better
For virus protection, since long I switch between Avast and AVG. At the moment I'm using Avast, http://www.avast.com/
Ad-Aware is, as the name says, to get rid of advertising software that may slowdown the computer and send private info to the Internet,
http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware.php
a-squared, tackles some more malware like Trojans.
Winpatrol is an application that, among other things, checks if software wants to register itself and if some programme is not responding (is jammed) killing it (switching it off) is easy and fast.
Below software and services I use or have used to build and maintain this site. Some of them also helped me to learn how to do it.
Stone Webwriter is an easy to use HTML editor, free for noncommercial use. It helped me a lot with learning HTML and to get me on my way with site building.
http://www.webwriter.dk/english/index.htm
HTML kit is a free but less easy to use HTML editor. It has interesting feature: a function for checking and correcting HTML code, according to the standards of www.w3.org.
Now that I have my site built and I use existing pages as models for new ones, I'm using Notepad++, a general editor popular with programmers.
Core FTP is the free ftp-client (software) I use for up and downloading files for my site. Very good. No adds or nag-screens.
http://www.coreftp.com
StatCounter provides useful statistics about your site such as page views, unique visitors, where visitors came from, how they navigated through your site (visitor path). It's free and doesn't place ads on your site. You can choose whether you want to place their logo or banner on your pages or not.
It is of course important to know whether your site is up or down. There are several possibilities. I use Internetseer.
Internetseer checks once an hour (free version of the service) whether it can access your site. When your site is down you receive an email and when it is back you receive another email. Once per week you receive an email reporting uptime.
Clicking a link to find out it takes you nowhere is a nuisance. Searchengines recognise this and punish for dead links. If you have dead links on your site you can end up lower on their lists.
This is where Linktiger comes in handy. After registration, you receive weekly emails informing the quantity of dead links on your site, which you hope of course to be zero. On the dashboard you can see details like which links are working which are dead on which pages dead and live links are.
Most of what I know about building web sites, HTML, php, SQL, I've learnd from these and similar sites.
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/
http://www.w3.org/2005/03/slideshow.html
http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html
http://www.searchtools.com/robots/robots-txt.html
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/css/
http://www.w3schools.com/
Copyright © 2006- 2010 Ton van Hattum
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