Eat My Business

I wonder what that means?

In my youth I was always wondering what was the software to use to:

• make music
• 3d graphics
• edit videos
• typeset publications
• etc

If you ask a professional what is the key tool to use, they will often say “Well there is no one piece of software, but I use…xyz”

I’d like you to tell me what you use.

I’ll start off with my kit list:

As a website developer - I would struggle without the following:

Basic Local Platform

• PC + Windows XP - (with two screens)
• Laser printer + paper
• Any old email client - but prefer: Outlook with,
  • Spambayes plugin to filter spam
• AVG or Norton anti-virus
• Winzip - always handy
• MD5 Checker (TSoft Ltd) - for checking downloads
• WhitSoft File Splitter - to make those big log files more manageable

Web Development on Local Machine

• Firefox Web Browser, with Add-ons for analysing performance:
  • Live HTTP Headers
  • Firebug
• Adobe Dreamweaver -for:
  • HTML editing,
  • Searching and ‘find & replaces’ of code
  • CSS editing, experimentation
• Adobe Fireworks - for graphics
• Adobe Flash - rarely used, but handy for those moments when I need to do something flashy
• Professional File Editor - PFE - simple text editor often used as a clipboard
• PhpED - for editing PHP
• WS_FTP
  • for big FTP jobs
  • ’seeing’ & downloading hidden files on the server
• Tigris Tortois SVN
  • As a client to work with the SVN repository
• Putty-SSH - for remote access to my hosted servers

Remote Platform
Hosted WebServer with:

• Linux (any flavour)
• Apache 2+
• PHP 5+
• MySQL 5+
• PLESK/Virtuozzo - for easy administration of mutiple-domains

Somewhere - either on Host or Local, 3rd party

• Subversion Repository - To keep version controlled repository of my code
• Trac - personal wiki - to write my notes about things I will forget

After writing that list i realise that much of the essential toolkit is open source software that is freely available - “long live open source”!

I’m interested in your comments. What pieces of software have become the essential tools for your trade?

Other resources:

Another list of tools for web designers:

http://website-development-design.blogspot.com/2008/08/best-web-development-tools-to-make-web.html

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Open Source, checklists, 3rd party software, PHP, MySQL, Apache, installing software, SSH, practical webmaster tips, web design, Subversion, email accounts, ftp, Subversion for webmasters, PLESK, Microsoft, Dreamweaver, css, linux, windows, bug tracking, issue tracking tools, feature request management, browsers, Personal Wiki. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.