Note: This page and other articles from older editions is no longer available on the Microtimes site. This copy is courtesy of the current Microtimes Webmaster. Note that this was written years ago and there is no guarantee possible that any of the links work.

By A. Lizard

Web Power Tools

Site Management And More For Windows

Is your business or personal site big enough that maintaining it is getting to be a pain? You want to add those neat-looking guestbooks or internal search engines to your site and you don't know how? Your users are complaining of broken links all over the place and you don't even have a list of your links, let alone the time to find out which really are broken? Did you just spend hours changing the background/text colors on every single one of your pages?

All of those things have happened to me recently in the course of getting my first commercial Web site (no longer exists) and upgrading my personal Web site (www.ecis.com/~alizard). I'm sharing my experiences in print so you don't have to replicate them for yourself.

These solutions will work in Windows 3.x as well as Win95/NT, for those of you that can't or won't upgrade or whose boss's MIS dept. won't allow an upgrade. You won't find Web authoring tools here. There are plenty of reviews of these products all over print and Web media, and I avoid using them due to unpleasant surprises I've seen in the code they generate. While I wait for something I like, I generally use a DOS programmer's text editor called QEDIT to generate raw HTML.

I'll throw in some helpful hints as well, based on what I've seen in a former life as a professional Web surfer. For instance, try to make sure your Web site is compatible with both Netscape and MS Internet Explorer, no matter which one you use. Usually the best approach is to avoid the use of HTML tags unique to one or the other. The neatest proprietary tags will find their way into competitive browsers, but I don't bet on this. Most people will probably be browsing your site with browser versions a generation or two behind the latest and greatest.

Some solutions to your problems won't require any software on your side at all. Some companies provide guestbooks, internal search engines, even chatrooms that require just a willingness to cut and paste HTML code from your provider's page into yours.

A note on Java applets and JavaScript for enhancing your site: At this point, use with care. Some take a very long time to load or, in some cases, like that of CPU intensive applet on a slow machine, run. Some will crash various browser-machine combinations. This isn't to say not to use them--some are neat. If you've got an older machine gathering dust, pull it out, put Netscape and MSIE on it, and use it to dial up your site. See if your site eats all the CPU cycles on your trusty old 486-33.

This might be a good practice in any case. If the results annoy you, they will annoy your audience even more.

Virus Alert

The tools recommended here are shareware/freeware. Most come from sites not under the control of the developers. Virus scan anything you download! If you don't have a virus scan, go to the McAfee site (www.mcafee.com) and download the virus scanner for your operating system, there's a version for every major platform.

Miscellaneous Tools

Just about all software available online is in compressed form (archived) so it'll download faster. Programs for DOS/Windows are either in executable file form, meaning in this case you run it and it decompresses itself, or in ZIP format, meaning you get to decompress it.

WinZip 6.3 is one of the nicest archiving (it compresses and decompresses) tools around. It handles ZIP, LZH and some legacy DOS formats, Z and other UNIX archive formats. The new version handles disk spanning; if a file compresses to more than one disk, it'll split the ZIP file up for later reassembly. If you've got DOS PKZIP 2.04g, don't throw it away, the PKUNZIP decompression program handles damaged files much better than WinZip does. Get it at www.winzip.com .

Devsearch is a specialized search engine for Web developers. You can find it at www.devsearch.com . Go there; it's a distinct improvement on using general purpose search engines for finding Web-related information. There, the links you find in a search may be the wrong ones, but they'll be wrong ones that unquestionably have something to do with your topic.

New Web Browser: Opera from Opera Software (www.operasoftware.com). I think this is still Windows only, but hopefully, this will change. The advantages of this Web browser for developer use are:

* It reads standard HTML and only straight HTML. If this browser will read it, so will everyone else's. Though there's no guarantee that it will look exactly the same, a page that reads okay in this should look okay regardless of browser.

* It loads fast. Of course, compared to Netscape and MSIE, most things do. This is the main reason I recommend it; if you want to casually check one of your files with this, you'll be looking at it in seconds. It should load fast, the download is only about 1MB.

* It appears reliable and stable.

* It supports Netscape plug-ins and helper apps. It uses a method of adding new applications similar to the one in earlier versions of Netscape, which I prefer to the one in Netscape 4.x .

* It gives you a chance to opt out of one religious war, MS vs Netscape. (If you're a professional Web or multimedia developer, you're still going to have to explain to the non-initiated why you're still a Mac user.)

Image Tools

GIF Construction Set: It's a neat GIF viewer. Get it at www.mindworkshop.com . The really interesting thing about it is that you can turn a series of GIF files into a single animated GIF. This worked the second time I tried it.

Hint: There are any number of morphing tools that allow you to load a start image and an end image, and will then output a sequence of in-between images. Or, draw a series of slightly different images in your favorite graphics tool.

Another Hint: Start with very small files. Making an animated GIF means adding every image frame that goes into the GIF into a single large GIF file. This can take a while to download.

Yet Another Hint: Don't tell it to loop continuously; once, or at most, a very few times is enough. One of the most annoying things a site can do is to continuously load an animation while you're trying to depart the page, as you find your browser is too busy loading the loop to listen to your command to go somewhere else. When this happens, I generally leave and never return, especially if I find myself having to reload my browsers or worse, reboot to get out of your site.

GIF Wizard (www.gifwizard.com) is a Web site, not a software package. You give it a Web-accessible URL for an image or a site and it will process that GIF image(s) into a form which will reduce file size and optimize it in other ways which make graphics that load faster without noticeable changes in picture appearance. With this, you tell the site what you want done by clicking on check boxes. After it's done, you pick up copies of the changed image files, if you like them, replace your originals. If not, try some different options and rerun it.

Hint: The best way to handle large, complex images is link them to thumbnails on your main page and let people decide for themselves from looking at the thumbnails if they want to see the whole image or not.

SuperClip for Windows: This gives you actual control over what goes into the clipboard and how. This will let you capture screen dumps, including the top menu of the window of the application you are in, or perform more selective screen capture using ordinary highlighting. It has some fairly powerful image manipulation functions. This also lets you save the contents directly to disk in a number of graphics formats. The filename is SCLIP250.ZIP. One source is www.winsite.com/win3/desktop/page14.HTML .

Color Picker: This is a very simple tool. You pick colors for background, text, links, visited links, etc. and it'll show you what they will look like together on a page. The best use of this is that it should prevent you from making one of the biggest and most common mistakes of Web writers: generating pages which are simply unreadable due to insufficient contrast between text and background. If users can't read it, it doesn't matter how pretty it is, they will leave and they won't be back. If you're planning to change the colors on your site, use this first. You can get it as part of the HTML Library package at www.arachne.net/HTMLib . The HTMLibrary is a Windows help file containing a fairly complete and current dictionary of HTML.

HTML Page Text Tools

Text Editors: QEDIT. It's DOS. It's a programmer text editor that lets you do things your regular text editors won't, such as moving your text in columns; its search and replace is more flexible than you'll find in just about anything else. You can run it out of a DOS window if you set it up correctly. I generally write my pages with it. You can find out how to do that at my personal Web site, on the www.ecis.com/~alizard/q-edit.html page.

The program has been renamed TSE Jr. You can find it at www.cnet.com/Resources/Swcentral/PC/Result/TitleDetail/0,160,0-18434,00.HTML .

Search and Replace: If you plan to do more than a handful of pages, get a search-and-replace tool. While your HTML editor, word processor, or text editor (I use all of the above in producing Web pages) probably contains search-and-replace, using it on one page is easy and fast. Two or three aren't so bad. Twenty or more goes beyond painful--it encourages mistakes.

The tool I use is called FindPP; the filename is FINDPP22.ZIP; get it at http://simtel.saix.net/Win3/fileutl-pre.HTML . Note that if you don't specify the search string and replacement strings exactly and correctly, you can use this tool to make a bigger mess in seconds than you can fix in hours. (Yes, this happened to me.)

The more limited your use the better--e.g. fixing a single color from #FFF000 to #000FFF--and test your replacement plans on a single page first. Make sure the S/R settings do exactly what you want them to do, otherwise, FindPP will do what you told it to do.

Link Verification

Links go bad faster than telephone numbers do. If your users find too many broken links on your site, they'll go somewhere else where the links do work.

You can check your site links by going to the right Web site and following the instructions, running software on your PC, or via PERL or C scripts running on your ISP server. I admit that my personal site is something of an extreme test. It has 42 pages and over 600 links.

You can find many free link verification Web sites that return results via the Web--enter the URL you want checked and wait a few minutes. None of them worked on my personal site. You can find quite a few of these in the Link Validation section of this page: http://planet.fef.com/gwif/web_tools/.gwif.HTML . It's also a good place to look up other things; one disadvantage of using even a good search engine is that it helps to know exactly what one is looking for. The table of contents layout of this site may suggest to you things or information you need and didn't know that you needed.

The next level of power is sites that return results via email. Some are free, some charge.

Recommended Site: NetMechanic at www.netmechanic.com . Their demo version didn't cover my site completely (it probably would do yours). They have two types of service: one returns results on the Web (okay for very small sites) and another "background" mode, goes through your site and returns results via email. If your site is too large for background mode to work, consider paying them for a higher level service.

I am now convinced that link verification is best done by software, either running on your PC or scripts running on your ISP's Web server.

Linkbot: AVOID. One of two Windows 3.x link verifiers. It's from Tetranet Software. Unfortunately, the 3.x editions are time-expired. You can download them but can't open them. Their new edition is Win95 only. They don't bother answering mail from magazine reviewers. Assume that they will pay even less attention to you if you need help with their product. That's why their Web site isn't listed in this article.

Cyberspyder: I found out about this too late to review it. It is Win3.1 compatible. It's also a long download, about 4MB, and probably decompresses to 8 megs (www.cyberspyder.com). Definitely worth looking into.

Server Scripts: These are applications that run on your server (your PC's OS is irrelevant) that connect to your Web site in some manner. They are used for a number of things, ranging from page counters to link verification. Many ISPs do not allow users to run scripts; you might be able to use one on your paritcular site with the assistance of your sysadmin.

Scripts that affect your system as a whole are set up by your sysadmin. One example of this is a script file that will check everyone's site for bad links and send email to people whose links don't work. One place where you can get quite a few scripts, links, and more, is Matt's Script Archive (www.worldwidemart.com/scripts) .

To add scripts to your site, find out which OS your ISP is using. Most scripts are written in PERL for UNIX environments. Some scripts are written in C programming language. There's software your ISP can use to allow running PERL in an Windows NT environment and probably on Mac servers; only your ISP knows whether they're installed, so ask your provider about it.

This might be the best overall solution--these programs can be run automatically on a daily basis, to email you when problems are found. Problems will be found.

HTML Verification

Most browsers are pretty forgiving. Fix the mistakes on your page anyway. There is no way to know just which of your coding errors will crash the next release of the browser everyone will be using. Also remember that as as a Web developer, your mistakes are out there for anyone with access to the Web to find. It's better to have clean code.

There are a number of sites for this, such as the WebLint Gateway at www.ccs.org/validate . Link verification by email sites will flag your most egregious coding errors on every page the link verification engine covers. The good thing about doing this on the Web is that you can do this no matter what platform you're using.

Web Site Power Tools

These are Web sites which can add functionality to your site by allowing you to run "Web Applications." These appear to run on your site, are largely under your control, but actually are written by professionals and run on a different server, usually commercial.

In return, they usually want you to run a small logo on your application page. The alternative is to either find PERL or C scripts that'll do the job and figure out how to customize them or write your own from scratch. Most people are better off putting up with the logos.

Some Web app provider ads are considerably more annoying than others. I don't recommend the Beseen chat setup (www.beseen.com), because having animated ad banners continuously running in a frame is simply too intrusive when there are better alternatives. Some sites let you customize the look and feel of your Web app via a form on their Web site and will send you the HTML script to insert in email or let you copy it from a page. Some applications are added by cutting and pasting text blocks onto your Web page; others are direct links which pulls a Web counter into your site. These will work for you regardless of your personal computer's OS.

Once you add a Web app to your site, check it on your browser to make sure it's doing what you intended it to.

Assorted Web Applications

The Toolroom site at www.toolroom.com looks very good. They offer a guestbook, a page counter, a chat room, scrolling marquees, and sound (you can tie sounds to your user's action, e.g. a specific sound when a user opens an internal link).

These applications appear to be industrial strength, with many, many customization options. Even the page counter lets the user pick their own digit styles. Color (background, text...) security, etc. Toolroom is the next best thing to doing this yourself via custom CGI script. All you have to add in your page code is a single line consisting of a link to their CGIscripts like this:

<img src ="http://www.toolroom.com/isuite/bin/counter.cgi?UIDxxxxxx&APPID=WebCounter">Some of these items will be on my personal site shortly.

Find more at The Server Corporation Web site (www.server.com/webapps). Their applications so far are guestbook, discussion server (allows setup and operation of discussion forums on your site... like having an internal Usenet newsgroup), and a mailing list application; this is to make it easy for you to set up and administer a mailing list and make it easy for your users to join your list.

Warning: It doesn't support the digest option, which makes it unsuitable for anything but low-volume mailing lists. If you're planning a high-volume list, talk to your ISP and see if they run majordomo or other mailing list support tools in a form you can access.

They also have a calendar application, which you customize for event announcements, etc. A Web form generator that lets you have a page which will allow users to drop in and simply create a form with the usual text boxes, radio buttons, check boxes, etc. and have the resulting HTML sent back to them.

Banner Exchange

This puts your Web advertising banner on the sites of other members of the banner exchange group in exchange for letting them put their banner on yours. What you get out of this other than that depends on who you go with. I'm using LinkExchange (www.linkexchange.com). The advantages of using LinkExchange are free advertising; a free and invisible Web visit counter which will provide not only a raw count, but other related information (e.g. when people visit, etc.) displayed on password protected pages on their site; and a fairly good mailing list for professional Web developers, which has occasional good how-to tips, both for commercial marketing and for pointers to interesting tools. It's not so strong on HTML tech tips, but there are plenty of places to find those.

Internal Site Search Engines

If your site is big enough, you'll want something that'll do a keyword search of your site. Hotbot lets you do this.

Go to their "Hotbot Tools for Your Page" page, (www.hotbot.com/tools/index.HTML) find the page that matches your intentions, then paste in the block of HTML text appropriate to your purpose. When you go to your page to do this, open it with a text editor, highlight the code you want in the browser window, cut, and paste to wherever you want this to go on your page. If you simply paste into your Web authoring tool window, the results will be unpredictable.

If you insist on using an authoring tool for this, use the View/Edit Source command. Which puts you into a text editor. If you haven't already done the customization by filling out the form on the download site, use the text editor on your local machine to customize the application. If you're customizing in the raw HTML, the instructions will usually be in a REM statement in the HTML source or on the page from where you got the code.

Search Engine Listing Help

There are also Web sites which will take your form information and submit it to multiple search engines, reformatting as necessary. Many reviewers recommend Submit-It (www.submit-it.com). I don't. You enter the initial form, and then you have to customize it for the sites you want, then you have to submit the entries one at a time. It isn't a whole lot less work than simply going to the individual search engines.

It is probably best to submit to the major search engines one at a time (Altavista, Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos, Excite) because their requirements are sufficiently individual and their customer bases are big enough to make it worth doing. Do this after submitting to Broadcaster (see below); hopefully, your personalized version is the one that hits the database. With Infoseek, remember that only the URL you submit will be added to the database; the rest of your site will be added when Infoseek gets around to it. To get around that, submit the URL for every single page on your site.

There are hundreds of minor search engines--you can't cover them all. You can cover many by using Broadcaster (www.broadcaster.co.uk). It'll submit to 200+ search engines using one form, one button push. Its site categorization is a trifle strange. When I tried it, the report I got said 87 sites accepted my URL. Not as good as 200, but a lot more fun than going to 87 sites one by one and filling out 87 different forms.

Most of these sites are ones I never heard of. I regard this as no problem; I want users with an interest in what I have to offer to find my site, whether they check Yahoo or the Decibel Rebel's Link Page.

Here's a sample of the email you'll get back from the demo version:

OKDan Bryntze Free For All Link Page (Miscellaneous)
OKDecibel Rebel's Link Page (Miscellaneous)
OKDennis Le's Homepage Links (No Category Required)
NO RESPONSEThe Eclectic Diner (Miscellaneous)

This is the demo for their commercial service. It costs $77 per year (single site subscription) and will automatically resubmit your pages at frequent intervals to ensure that the engines won't forget your existence. Based on their demo, I'm inclined to recommend their commercial service.

While there is software that will do this job as well, I'm not terribly interested in it. Outside the major services, the scene simply changes too quickly; software for this would have to be updated and distributed even more often than virus software.