Tools Used to Create This Web Site

Graphics | Scripts | HTML Editing | HTML Checking | Misc

Graphics

   XnView

Used for all our graphic file format conversion

    XAT Image Optimiser

Used to reduce the size of our images.

    Microsoft Photodraw 2000

Used to trim, tidy and effect our images

Scripts

    Online tools scripts

I use an amended version of their "easyletter" script for a small mailing list. This script is beta test and is in a closed area of the site, which is why you haven't seen it. 

    Touchgraph

Is our graph sitemap

   TreeMenu

Is our tree sitemap. I looked at so many different scripts for this functionality. I can't begin to tell you the amount that crashed Opera, or only worked under IE or looked ugly as an ugly thing. This one worked fine. I have written a small PHP script to generate the code required to drive the Treemenu JavaScript. The little earth icon on this page is actually part of the treemenu graphic distribution.

HTML 

Editing

    Microsoft FrontPage 2000

All of the essays and main text files that you see on this site are written using FrontPage. 

    HTMLPad 2000 

I use this to edit any PHP web pages.

Checking

    XENU

Is used to check the validity of our links.

    Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0

This is my second browser of choice so I use this when a site fails under opera.

    Opera 6.0

This is my browser of choice so I do most of my checking on this browser.

    Netscape 4.0

This has never been my browser of choice and while the newer versions may well be far better, I use this browser to ensure that the Compendium Developments browser is as backwardly compatible as I can make it.

Misc

    Robot Manager

This is used to construct a robots.txt file to order the spiders about.

    PHP 

Coming from a 'C' background, I find this language to be very easy to code in - admittedly my PHP coding could do with some work but I like the cut of this language's jib. All the Compendium Developments Links and Book pages are generated by PHP from a MySQL database. They are statically generated on the desktop and then uploaded to the server. I was originally using MS Access and VBA but that became a hassle to manage - PHP does the job well.

    MYSQL

I only use the database on my desktop but our web hosting company do provide us with a MySQL database. I'm still polishing my PHP skills before I attempt to do anything with it.