When I can spare time from my library duties at work, I’m developing a companion website for DVD documentary about the Great Awakening produced by ShowForth. The website is built on Omeka, an open-source content management system built by CHNM for libraries, museums, and archives. It will feature essays about the Great Awakening written by historians, collections of sermons and other texts, the context of every quotation from the historical documents used in the DVD, and tips on how to use the documentary in the classroom. I’m mostly supposed to be building the website, but I’m also helping gather the content too, which I’m glad to be involved in.

I’m not a professional web developer, so I haven’t spent a dime on tools, for this project or any other. Instead I’ve found free tools that do the same thing as software you can buy. For the most part I wouldn’t trade up even if I could. (Photoshop and Illustrator would be nice though.) This is what I use:

  • TextWrangler. This text-editor from Bare Bones Software is my essential tool. The three key features for me are (1) syntax coloring, (2) a drawer that keeps multiple files organized, and (3) the ability to open and save files that are on an FTP server without having to manually FTP the files. I know those are pretty standard tools, but they were pretty amazing to me when I switched from a PC with SciTE to a Mac with TextWrangler.
  • Cyberduck. This is the only FTP client I’ve used on a Mac, but it meets all my needs. It’s faster and easier than anything I’ve used on a PC, and it plays nice with TextWrangler. Plus my wife likes the icon.
  • Firebug. Firebug is a plug-in for Firefox. It lets you inspect a website’s HTML, CSS, and Javascript to see how it’s actually working, e.g., how the CSS is being applied to each element. It has some pretty neat features like showing the box model for each HTML element and the ability to change the CSS and see the results instantly. If only Firebug could also show me what in the world IE 6 is doing with my code.
  • GIMP. This GIMP is the poor man’s Photoshop. But it does everything that I need it to, and it has improved greatly since I first started using it. If I need a vector-graphics editor I used Inkscape, which is the poor man’s Illustrator. My graphics skills are pretty limited, so I need to take some time to develop them. Thankfully, for this project I’m working with a great designer who is creating all the graphics.

Are there any other F/OSS web-development tools that I should be using?