Welcome to the final part of the alternative software series. Over the past few blogs we have looked at solutions that will allow you to create content in word processors (in the office suite blog), images blog, video blog with a dramatic audio track, and even designing the leaflets and posters to advertise it all using desktop publishing. Isn’t it time we got to code \o/ (if you are not a coder, or only got into computers after emoticons came out, that symbol is someone cheering, see the little arms \ /, see the head o… I digress, you’ll find this post helpful though)! These days there are a number of WYSIWYG editors out there (pronounced wiz-ee-wig if you ever want to verbally talk about them), web tools to help you get your content on to the web. If you’ve used a blog tool or website builder and it has an interface that looks a little bit like a word processor, CONGRATULATIONS!, you’ve already used a WYSIWYG – did you know they are also available offline?
Then again if you do know a little bit of coding and want to change something in a file, you need the opposite of a WYSIWYG, a text editor, scroll down a little here for some useful freebies that go above and beyond what comes standard on most operating systems.
Once you’ve created all your content it’s time to get it all online. Depending on your solution you might be able to upload your files by logging into the page using your web browser. It’s really easy when you have 1 or 3 files, but what about 50? 100? 1000 files? I suggest you look up if your server supports FTP (file-transfer-protocol) and head to the very end of this blog for software (known as FTP clients) that will allow you to make this transfer, often as if you were simply dragging and dropping to another file on your computer.
WYSIWYG editors
What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors allow the quick production of web pages without needing to know HTML coding language. This list offers open source or affordable alternatives to packages such as Adobe Dreamweaver.
KompoZer
Description: KompoZer is a user-friendly WYSIWYG HTML website editor and designer.
Benefits: Features of KompoZer include integrated FTP file management (upload and edit files on a web server), tabbed editing, and support for forms, tables, and templates.
Platforms: Available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Visual Web Developer Express
Description: Microsoft Visual Web Developer express is an easy-to-use environment for dynamic Web application development.
Benefits: Visual Web Developer can create and manage websites, including file system and FTP-deployed websites. It features a WYSIWYG webpage designer and allows editing of markup as well.
Platforms: Available on Windows.
Text editors
Text editors usually include very basic text formatting (or none at all). Text editors are used by coders and developers to write and manage code; many text editors now assist coding with smart formatting and other tools.
Notepad++
Description: Notepad++ is a free source code editor that supports several languages.
Benefits: Notepad++ offers automatic and user-defined syntax highlighting and folding, a customisable GUI, auto-completion, mutli-view, WYSIWYG printing, and macro recording and playbacks. Notepad++ is also available in a range of languages.
Platforms: Available on Windows.
TextWrangler
Description: TextWrangler is a powerful, general-purpose text editor.
Benefits: TextWrangler provides a clean, intelligent interface to a rich set of features for editing, searching, and manipulating text. Features include grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, function navigation, and syntax colouring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP, and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, and more.
Platforms: Available on Mac.
Brackets
Description: Brackets is a modern, open source text editor with focused visual tools for web design.
Benefits: Brackets is a lightweight but powerful text editor that blends visual tools into editor for ease of use. It offers features such as inline editors, live preview, pre-processor support, and a rich library of extensions to improve functionality.
Platforms: Available on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
FTP Clients
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) clients are used to manage the transfer of files from one host to the other.
Cyberduck
Description: Cyberduck is a free FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3 & OpenStack Swift browser for Mac and Windows.
Benefits: Cyberduck offers users an intuitive interface and the ability to connect to FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Rackspace Cloud Files. It supports editing with external applications, distribution of content in the cloud, and the ability to transfer anything. Cyberduck supports a range of languages and integrates with notification center, gatekeeper, and keychain.
Platforms: Available on Windows and Mac.
FileZilla
Description: FileZilla is a free, open source FTP client.
Benefits: FileZilla is a fast, full-featured and reliable mutli-platform FTP client. FileZilla also offer an FTP server for Windows. FileZilla supports FTP, FTPS, and SFTP. It is available in many languages, offers a powerful site manager and transfer queue, and supports drag & drop selection and external and remote file editing.
Platforms: Available on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, and more.
