Back to school - Freeware for blogging
moneyrelations :: Aug.28.2007
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School’s almost here and I see ads all over the place for back to school sales. This annual ritual reminded me to tune up my own computer and since I had reformatted it, I needed to reinstall everything. So for this post, I’m going to give it the personal finance angle, blog edition. Below is a list of programs and links related to web design / blogging that I have on my Windows XP personal computer. They are all free, so for those who always wanted to learn this new hobby, give them a try!
Free Stock Photos
FTP client
HTML Editor
Notepad
HTML Validator
Image editor
PDF Reader/Creator
RSS Reader
Security
Web Browser
Word processing
Web hosting software / development for Wordpress
This is a great tutorial to install Wordpress on your Windows computer so you can test your own customized templates and any other sort of Apache/PHP/MySQL development.
Another tutorial to restore your SQL database on Wordpress
Give Away of the Day
And finally, for commercial software, I troll around Give Away of the Day. This website offers a new program daily but the catch is that it can only be registered on that day – so if you reformat your hard drive, it’s gone. Sometimes they give away things like screensavers or Z-list games but it’s worth a look. I’ve found some of the offerings actually useful in terms of web design.
Suggestions?
There are lots of other free alternatives that I haven’t listed. This list was compiled according to my personal preference, but perhaps there are other free blogging or design tools that you can not live without?
Free stuff ::
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I love GIMP, I use it quite a bit. Also just found Avast Antivirus. I installed it on my desktop which had come down with a virus my old software couldn’t remove and Avast got rid of it quickly. I always look for freeware, but I must say I have not made the switch to Open Office. Do you like it? I use Google Spreadsheets to track project hours, but that is about it, otherwise I have tended to only use MS Office still.
The knock on Open Office is that it’s slow and bloated. If you look at my personal choice for browsers, you’ll notice that I like small, no-fuss programs. Still, it does its job and I prefer this than plunking down $$$ for MS Office. There are other small and fast word processing apps but I found they couldn’t render simple .doc files properly and then I still had to search for Excel and Powerpoint replacements. I just settled for the OO suite and had done with it.
BTW, I found the GIMP interface really hard to use even though I have decent Photoshop skills. Would you recommend it for beginners? What was your learning curve? I almost crossed it off my list as I found Paint.NET way more intuitive.