KompoZer and Other Tools

KompoZer is my primary web-authoring tool but there are two other tools that I use every day. KompoZer is a WYSIWYG editor for creating page layouts. I still need something to capture and prepare images to insert with KompoZer. The process reminds me a lot of the good old days when we would literally cut and paste to create a hard copy layout.

Photo Capture and Edit

FastStone Capture is a cool tool I use every day when working on web pages. My 5.3 version was free but in checking for updates I find the 6.0 version limited to a 14-day trial. Since I believe that free, as in free beer is good, I went looking for a free replacement for FastStone Capture.

I found an extension for Firefox that does some things FastStone Capture does. FireShot does pretty well with capturing but I ran out of patience trying to get it to crop and edit like FastStone. Maybe the full application, Screenshot Studio, has the editing features I was looking for but at $24.99 it is not a low cost replacement.

Screenshot Studio looked pretty good in a price comparison with Snagit at $40.00. In all fairness I didn’t spend a lot of time comparing Snagit and Screenshot Studio because we are talking about a $20 decision to continue with what I'm use to using.

FastStone Capture does everything I need to do to get images ready for web pages. I have a choice of capturing something from the screen or opening an existing file. The image can be edited and annotated in FastStone Capture then saved in a number of formats. The feature I really like quickly resizes an image. KompoZer will allow you to specify a custom size but I’m told browsers don’t do well with that instruction. I try to have the image the right size before I insert them with KompoZer. Guess my twenty bucks goes to FastStone.

All of the software mentioned runs on Windows. As you will see in the image below most of my visitors use one of Bill's operating systems.

StatCounter Hit Counter

StatCounter has been mentioned a couple of times here because it is another of my "daily use" tools. StatCounter will track 500 most recent visits for free and you can monitor more than one site. It does a great job in showing data useful in aligning your site to visitor interests. I can look at the KompoZer Table Tutorial to determine if visitors need to go to the help page. I can also tell where in the sequence of a visit help was necessary. I have shown other informative data from this hit counter several times in this blog.

Like everything that runs on a computer StatCounter is getting ready for an upgrade. I don’t know what they are planning to improve it because it is already clear and concise in what it provides.

Another hit counter, Google Analytics, is also available for free. I have that running on one of my sites to understand how it works. You do not need Ad Sense or Ad Words from Google to use Analytics. Maybe if I had ads on my site or was selling product Google Analytics would be more appropriate for me. It could be too that, like my evaluation of capture software, I just haven’t taken the time to learn the tool. StatCounter has met my needs.

The one aggravating thing about StatCounter is their code. It does not pass W3C muster and second, it has some sort of redirect that makes some SEO software nervous. I like to test my pages at W3C and at Sitening to make sure I’m in the ballpark for standards compliance and optimization. I don’t care about a perfect score but I do want to be in an acceptable range.

Even More Tools

I have a number of other tools in my KompoZer workshop including some that I use once in a blue moon. So many links have accumulated that it is hard to keep track of them or to remember how the link helps. I have started to add the good ones to the Wysi Wiki primarily to help me find them. You can use them as well.

Wysi

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