Web Tools

I’ve sent mail to folks to encourage you to try NX to connect to shellx if you haven’t yet because it opens up so many new tools and features.

For those of you who haven’t done so yet, please see:

http://www.eskimo.com/shell/gui.html

It does pain me when people leave without having any idea all of the new things that are available here.  If you develop web pages, there are two tools on shellx that you should be aware of, KompoZer and KLinkStatus.

KompoZer

KompoZer is a web editor that is very similar in terms of look and feel to Dreamweaver.  Dreamweaver has more bells and whistles but this has most of the basics you need and it’s included with the service, no need to buy and install expensive software on your computer.

KompoZer can edit files locally or FTP publish.  That means you can use it to edit your websites here locally and any changes will be made live instantly.  You can also use it to ftp publish, which means you can use it to edit your websites elsewhere as well.

KompoZer features a WSIWIG “Design” view, a syntax hi-lighted “Code” view, or a split screen in which you can see any changes you make in the code immediately reflected in the design view, or changes you make in the design window reflected in the code.

KompoZer has tabbed files so you can open up your CSS in one tab and HTML in another, and JavaScript in third and readily switch between them.

KompoZer can be invoked from the Gnome Desktop as Applications->Programming->Kompozer.

KLinkStatus

Google attempts to provide a good experience for the end user and to that end, they tend to rank sites which are technically correct higher than sites that have HTML errors or dead links.

Content on the web comes and goes and moves around.  As time passes, a percentage of links become invalid for one reason or another.  The page is gone and there is a 404 error.  The page is redirected to somewhere else.  The server is gone and the page times out.  Manually regularly checking link status is a tedious job that consumes a lot of time and often tends not to get done.

KLinkStatus to the rescue.  KLinkStatus will crawl even a large site in just a few minutes, smaller sites in seconds, and find all broken links turning a once tedious chore into a trivial snap.

KlinkStatus can be invoked from the Gnome Desktop as Applications->Programming->KLinkStatus.