Over time I have tried many tools to develop these pages.
I use Mozilla
Firefox currently for browsing, obtaining link information, and
stealing GIFs.
In the past, I used Fetch
3.01(from Dartmouth) for moving to and from my home directory.
Newer versions work pretty well, with drag and drop, even. I still use
this sometimes. When I moved to MacOSX, I used Transmit, instead.
However it shuts down after 15 minutes (I haven't paid my shareware
fee), so I just moved to Cyberduck. I like keeping the remote directory
(images) open.
Editing is much harder. At first I just used emacs on
leland. What a pain!
Then I obtained a really nifty editor, HTML
Pro 1.08. It has two windows so I can edit either the raw HTML or
an almost WYSIWYG image.
Then I used PageSpinner
1.1 from Optima Systems (no longer available). It was much bigger, and
had a complete
assortment of tag creating tools. Unfortunately, it was not as WYSIWYG.
It never hid the tags, just dimmed them. Many features could not be
adequately protrayed. But it did tables, which even Adobe's
PageMill did not do (well, then).
Then I tried the Claris' Home Page.
Very WYSIWYG, has an optional source editor, buttons for links and
anchors and tables and everything you can think of. Much faster
editing. It has a remote use and save which works well with my web
server.
I tried out Netscape Navigator Gold 3.01, but didn't like it. It
modifies too much stuff. Too many bugs.
When I moved to an iMac (first model) and MacOSX 10.2.8 I had to
try doing it all in X. So I tried Dreamweaver X. It works, but the
learning curve is really steep, and it does too much to my pages.
I tried a new program - NVu. It worked much better, but still had
some problems, namely the ability to link automatically to other pages
and image handling was lacking.
Then Mozilla came out with SeaMonkey - and
it does much better than Home Page. I still have to move the images
using CyberDuck, but I can work much faster with the two. SeaMonkey
still does a lot of diddling with the HTML details, but it is
manageable. SeaMonkey is normally just a web browser, but you can edit
any page you can see (though only update those for which you have
permission) using the "Composer". It also does mail and newsgroups,
chat, instant messaging, and maintains its own address book.
When
I
moved to a new Mac (a mini) I tried iWeb but that didn't work for
existing sites off MobileMe. Bummer. Just before this a new version of
SeaMonkey would not let me publish to the web. So I am trying Firefox
with 2
add-ons: Web Developer and FireFTP. Web Developer only allows source
code editing. But the FTP works well, better than CyberDuck! I also
like being able to work directly in Firefox.
