Internet, Database, and Software Tools

Tools you may need to view some of our files may be found at the sites marked with a » . A combination of tools most webmasters should have to develop and manage a web site are marked with a » 

Web file development and management utilities

  1. » Mozilla — Superior combination of browser, email client, newsreader, chat client, address book, HTML editor, and ftp uploader (publisher). The open-source freeware successor to Netscape Communicator, without many the security vulnerabilities of MS tools. But the ftp function and address books are a bit limited.
  2. » BlackWidow — Spider to analyze, browse and copy a web site, show structure and statistics, and identify broken links. Now if it could only fix them. But could use some report/export functions.
  3. WebCopier — Copy entire web sites to your local drive, to be viewed offline or preserved if the site goes down. Good user interface. May not retrieve some CGI-managed files.
  4. » iOpus — Internet macro tool for automatically accessing web pages and extracting information from them.
  5. » InSync — Synchronize files and directories within a machine or across a network. Good for making backups, including of websites.
  6. » 3D-FTP — Upload to and download files from web and ftp sites. Has many advanced convenience features, and high speed.
  7. Netmanage — PC and Unix connectivity tools that enable PCs to interoperate like Unix hosts.
    1. » Ecco Pro — Ultimate personal information manager for PCs.
    2. » Z-Mail — Best email client other than Mozilla, but has a lot of advanced features.
  8. Hushmail — Secure web-based email and document storage system, featuring transparent, end-to-end 2048 bit encryption.
  9. CAcert — Free digital certificates for email clients and servers. Supports secure transactions and messages.
  10. Thawte — Free digital certificates for email clients. Encrypt and authenticate your messages.
  11. » Tidy — Tool to clean bad HTML, such as that produced by Microsoft Word and Frontpage, but can't handle all the problems with that HTML, so may need to combine it with a good HTML editor like HoTMetaL Pro. You may prefer the TidyGUI version for MS Windows.
  12. » Webinator — Local search engine you can install on your web server. Free for small or educational sites. Plugins for commercial versions can also index PDF and word processor files.
  13. Everyfind — Another local search engine you can install on your web server, but not free for nonprofits.
  14. ht://Dig — Search engine you can install on your site and use to search a finite number of sites and subsites.
  15. DiskDB — A utility for maintaining a searchable database of the contents of computer disks, to keep track of where your files are and what is on each disk. Useful for managing backup disks.
  16. World Time Server Atomic Clock Sync — Free utility to set your computer to Universal Coordinated Time. Useful to keep all your computers synchronized so file time stamps match, to facilitate file synchronization and backups.
  17. WorldMerge — Mail server for your PC that can merge data into each message to customize and send directly, bypassing your ISP's mail server.
  18. ArGoSoft Mail Server — Set up mail server on your own local machine. Can be used to send email bypassing your ISP's mail server and its restrictions. If you have a fixed IP you can also use it to receive email to multiple accounts, and thereby avoid paying extra for multiple email accounts provided by an ISP.
  19. WebStar Mail Server — Set up mail server on your own local machine. Also have other useful tools. For Mac OS.
  20. GhostMessage — Pushes messages directly to ranges of IP addresses, hides sender's identity. Ultimate spam tool, but may be justified for civic messages from reformers.
  21. PaperCut emailStripper — Allows cleaning up multiply-indented email messages, restoring to original state.
  22. VisualRoute — Allows tracing of web accesses and emails along all the hops to their source or destination, identifying bottlenecks and disabled servers, and network and server performance. Combines ping and tracert functions. Allows tracking sources of spam. Displays routes on a world map.
  23. LiveCounter — Page/site counter using Java to present near-real-time count as it changes.
  24. Wusage — Site visit statistics software for Unix hosts.
  25. PC Locator — Migrate software and data from one PC to another, running Win 95 or higher, without having to reinstall it on target system from original installation media.
  26. Move2Mac — Migrate software and data from one PC running Win 98 or higher to an Apple Mac running OS 10.2 or higher.
  27. Winamp — Free tool to produce and play network audio and video streams.
  28. Replay Radio — Internet radio recorder can save and replay programs as MP3 files or save to CD, for PCs.
  29. RadioLover — Internet radio recorder can save and replay programs as MP3 files or save to CD, for Macs.
  30. OpenOffice — Free, better than Microsoft Office, and runs on Linux and Mac as well as Windows.
  31. Mizar Project — Language and libraries for representing, finding and verifying mathematical proofs.
  32. GraphCalc — Graphing calculator.
  33. Calc98 — Downloadable scientific calculator you can put on your desktop. Useful for doing some of the calcuations involved in site management.
  34. HiDigit —Scientific calculator and graphing tool, proprietary.
  35. HylaFAX™ — Free client software for fax sending and receiving.
  36. Spybot-S&D — Shareware to detect and remove spyware that can lurk on your system and report on your activities to remote sites.
  37. IncrediMail — Enliven your messages with special effects.
  38. DataJunction — Converts data files from one format to another, and can be used to clean them of garbage.
  39. Progress — Ultimate database management system that supports thin-client browser access.
  40. MacroExpress — Allows user to define complex macros across multiple applications on a Windows platform, useful for repetitive activities.

Documentation and Digitization Tools and Services

  1. » Finereader — The OCR software we use to render books into web pages. Does a better job with rough originals such as old books.
  2. » HotDog — Good HTML editor. Also have other tools for web development.
  3. HoTMetaL Pro — Our favorite HTML editor. Validates that HTML is correct, and can convert to HTML from other formats and correct bad HTML, such as that produced by MS tools. But no longer sold or supported.
  4. XMetaL — XML editor, from the producers of HoTMetaL Pro, with which it can be used in combination.
  5. XMLSPY — XML development environment, including XML editor and HTML-to-XML conversion tool.
  6. » UltraEdit — Excellent programming editor. We use it to prepare the text versions of files.
  7. » MultiClipBoard — Provides multiple clipboards, useful for repetitive copying and pasting.
  8. » WordPerfect — Use to convert files between formats, and a better word processor than MS Word.
  9. » Jafsoft — Have an excellent ASCII to HTML file converter. We use it to convert text files to HTML.
  10. » PDFtoAll — Has Adobe Acrobat plugin to convert PDF-character files to HTML or text, PDF-image files to JPEG.
  11. PDFcreation — Utilities and plugins to convert PDF and other formats into each other.
  12. » Adobe Acrobat — Use to produce and read files in PDF format.
    1. Online PDF to HTML converter — Enter web URL and get HTML version of file, which you can save to your local disk. But only works for character-PDF, not image-PDF, and not on local PDF files.
  13. PDF Factory Pro — Convert files into PDF ready for printing.
  14. TK3 — Ebook viewer and author tools, to enable delivery of multimedia content online and optionally capture payment for it.
  15. PrintKey2000 — Print or save to image files your screen or any part of it.
  16. Djvu — Superior image compression and viewing tools.
    1. LizardTech — Commercial versions of DjVu editors, browser plug-ins and other tools.
    2. Document Express — Main DjVu compression and editing tool.
  17. AfterScan — Advanced spell-checker and automatic proofing and correction tool. Can use after OCR with Finereader.
  18. WinZip — Compress files to save space and speed transmission.
  19. SC UniPad — Unicode editor. We use it to prepare foreign language text within our HTML pages.
  20. Doczilla — Offer a full SGML/XML browser/publisher as an enhancement to Mozilla.
  21. dia — Free open-source software much like the commercial Windows program Visio. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and simple circuits.
  22. MonarchCharts — Shareware to produce 2D and 3D graphs and charts in Java. Also offer MonarchGraph for producing things like flowcharts, entity-relationship diagrams, etc.
  23. Terrain Tools — Software for surveying, mapping & drawing terrains. Have freeware for simpler applications.
  24. ImageMouse, from Eyecom — Scanners for microfilm and microfiche.
    1. ImageMouse, from Mead & Associates — Scanners for microfilm and microfiche.
    2. ImageMouse, from Zytron — Scanners for microfilm and microfiche.
  25. 4DigitalBooks — Offer a scanner with page-turning robot arms for high-speed unattended scanning.
  26. Book Collector — Database for maintaining catalog of books and other materials, can retrieve information about them from Internet.
  27. Eraser — Freeware to thoroughly remove deleted files from storage media.
  28. Digital Divide Data — Digitization and rendering services, based in Cambodia.
  29. Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) — Digitization services for scholars, at University of Michigan.

Web page display tools and fonts

  1. » AlternaTIFF — TIFF viewer plugin you may want to view some of our graphic image files. But you may need to disable QuickTime for TIFF files to prevent it from pre-empting AlternaTIFF.
  2. » American Academy of Religion (AAR) Fonts — Some of the best Hebrew, Greek and other fonts, for PCs and Macs. We use the SPTiberian (Hebrew), SPIonic (Polytonic Greek), and SPEdessa Syriac fonts.
  3. SGreek & SHebrew — Shareware Greek font from Silver Mountain Software
  4. » Fonts for Freaks — This is where we got the Old Gondor font we use in some of our pages. They have versions for Mac as well.
  5. » Old English Fonts — This has the Junius Saxon font used in Blackstone's Commentaries.
  6. » German True Type Fonts — This is where we got the Fraktur Germanic font used on our site.
  7. Titus Cyberbit Basic Unicode Greek — One of our favorites.
  8. Unicode Polytonic Greek for the Web — Solutions for editing and viewing polytonic (ancient) Greek on web pages.
  9. Greek font Athenian — This is one place to get an Athenian Greek font used by many scholars.
  10. Ancient/Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Typefaces — Many fonts for various versions of Hebrew.
  11. The IPA-SAM phonetic fonts — Used to represent the sounds of words in every language.
  12. Hebrew In Netscape — Plugins for Netscape on PC, Mac and Unix platforms to display Hebrew characters.
  13. Historical English Fonts— Links to sites with free fonts.
  14. Google Toolbar — At time of this writing it only works in Internet Explorer but urge them to get it to work with Mozilla and enable it to limit searches to subdirectories of a site, defaulting to the subdirectory the browser is in at the moment.
  15. JAWS — From Freedom Scientific, Windows screen reader to enable the visually-impaired to read web pages and other computer screens.
  16. Window-Eyes — From GW Micro, Windows screen reader to enable the visually-impaired to read web pages and other computer screens.

Internet Resources

  1. Freeware Central — Executables, sources, and links to all kinds of useful software you don't have to pay for.
  2. Simtel.Net — Shareware and freeware site.
  3. Download.com — Gateway to free and try-and-buy software.
  4. Dynamic Drive — Free DHTML scripts, cross-browser.
  5. JavaScript Kit — Free javascripts.
  6. Request Code — Free javascripts.
  7. Freewarejava — Free java applets and tutorials.
  8. W3C Link Checker — Enter a web page and it will check the validity of all the links on it. Use it to find dead links.
  9. Local search engines — Directory to several local search engine products.
  10. Google Groups — Read and post to Usenet newsgroups. Searchable archive of newsgroup postings back to 1995. In case you want to get everything someone posted on every newsgroup, you can find it here. They bought out dejanews.
  11. Mail2News — Send message with subject "help" for instructions on how to post email to newsgroups.
  12. The Phone Company's Remote Printing Service — Free service to send faxes via email to most parts of the world.
  13. MIDS Internet Weather Report — Maps show latency of various parts of the Internet. Should have MPEG viewer for best results.
  14. Internet Health Report — Does not yet provide full coverage but a good start. Includes traceroute functions.
  15. OANDA Currency Converter — Allows you to convert units of any national currency or precious metal into units of any other, for any date back to 1990, one at a time.
  16. Scientific Calculator — Online tool.
  17. SnipURL — Add button to your browser to convert long, complex URLs to shorter, simpler ones that go to the same page.

Open-Source Operating Systems and Connectivity Products

  1. Linux — Links to sites on the leading contender to replace Unix and MS Windows. Check this page for products that compete with those listed above.
  2. Plan 9 — Network OS.
  3. Inferno — Small, efficient operating system used in embedded systems and distributed applications.
  4. Vita Nuova — Provider of embedded systems and distributed applications based upon the unique and revolutionary new operating systems Inferno and Plan 9.
  5. unununium — Organic operating engine, using no static code.
  6. Freenet — Anonymous file exchange and archiving system, similar but better than Gnutella and Napster.

Non-open-source Distributed and Connectivity Products

  1. NetWin — All kinds of server and client software to enhance your web site. They have a great webmail.
  2. United Devices™ — Distributed computing software and services.
  3. Santronics Software — Offer Wildcat! interactive net server, to host a web site on your home system.
  4. Software for Teleconferencing — Collection of links, but not updated since 1997.

Methods

  1. HTML Version Text Version How to render documents — Short manual on scanning printed documents and converting them into web pages.

See also the Security and Privacy page.

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Original URL: http://constitution.org/intrtool.htm
Maintained: Constitution Society
Original date: 1995 October 15 — Updated: 2004 July 18