Tools for information sharing on the web
Here I have listed the tools I found useful building my small Web presence.
It is not in any way a complete list, there are plenty of listing on the Web if you are interested. But I have tried those references for a
very specific type of Web presence, which is to share information about my own work.
An early version of this list has been presented during the March 2nd,
2006 CSCS Brown Bag Lunch, an information sharing talk for internal people, where I present the experience
I have gained building my own home page.
Links and references are subdivided in:
- Web presence hosting
- Web pages templates
- Editors for web pages
- Document importers
- Checkers and validators
- Image manipulation
- Developer tools
- Site management
- Tutorials
- Online references
Hosting
- Regular Web pages
- Blog
- Blogger is an easy place to start. Pick a topic that you are passionate about (technology, photography, wine, beer,
cats, dogs, sports, your kids, or anything else) and commit to posting something every other day.
- One good Blog software seems to be WordPress that offers also free hosting.
- Wiki
- Wikispaces. Not tried, but seems interesting.
- pbwiki. Not tried, but seems interesting.
- Writely, a distributed word processor, and
Xanga, an online community that shares diaries and journals.
- Other social webs
- Share bookmarks: Create delicious.com bookmarks
- Share photos: Share some of your photographs on Flickr
- Share stories: Participate in Digg by submitting a story and digging a few stories that you find interesting. Those sites have mechanisms to review and vote for user submitted content to promote the best news stories to the front page.
- Share movies: Visit YouTube and watch three of the “most viewed” videos of the day. Forward one to a friend.
- Share BibTex references: CiteULike is a nice idea
Templates
Editors
- Nvu: a complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as
well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users. Or better, use its next version called Kompozer.
Interesting, but they destroy your HTML page source formatting.
- SciTE: a multiplatform syntax coloring editor
- Amaya: the W3C integrated editor
- Bluefish: a Linux HTML editor
- CSSed: a CSS editor (incidentally based on the same editor widget used by
SciTE). Development seems frozen, that's a pity, because current version has some small annoyances.
- A good commercial alternative is Microsoft FrontPage. At least it does not destroy the HTML code formatting as Nvu or
Amaya do
- Another cross-platform interesting editor is Aptana.
The only problem? It is deadly slow.
- On the Linux only side an alternative to Bluefish is Quanta.
Document importers
- HTML
Tidy: to clean the page HTML code (see a real life example)
- To import LaTex documents, there is the classical
Latex2html tool, but also
TTH could be a simpler alternative.
- To convert documents to PDF, use some form of PDF printer (like CutePDF).
Checkers and validators
Images
Developer tools
Site management
- Unison: a file synchronizer tool
- SyncBack: synchronize a site with only FTP access.
- sitecopy: to upload and synchronize a website. Works also on Windows.
- rsync: to upload and synchronize a website. Works only on Linux.
- ShinyStat: free web statistics
Tutorials
Online references