I was raised in the old school of coding. My primary “editor” is still a text editor called Editpad Lite. When I’m designing a site for a client I still do the occassional straight code site. Believe it or not, some people still just want a static brochure. It works for them for a variety of reasons, mainly time.

I do a little with Joomla! and Drupal as well. I think I’m more on the Drupal side of the fence now. Still, my main rapper snapper is definitely WordPress.

I’m a big fan of WordPress. I’ve been using it for several years. That might not seem like that long but in web years that’s an eternity. Almost since the beginning when Matt & company created it from b2.

I don’t just use it for blogs anymore either. I use it for entire sites. With all the plugins available, and the ability to build and customize themes, I’ve found I can do just about anything I need to do in WordPress. It works out great for the client too because they get varying levels of CMS ability.

The other great component is security. there is this huge community that is constantly improving and securing WordPress. I still get the occassional IT person that has questions about what is WordPress, who is using it, is it secure, etc?

Well, there are a ton of sites using WordPress. [Will Ferrel voice]Work the google machine on the internets and you might be surprised. The New York Times comes to mind as does, the National Football League and another favorite site of mine Techcrunch. Here’s a link to the stats page for some more.

My new favorite one though. This link to government agencies using WordPress. And now, the tie-in to the title of this post…the National Security Agency. Yes, the NSA. Can anyone fill me in on this…without having to hurt me after of course

I occasionally read articles talking about the declining importance of antivirus. I disagree totally.  Here’s a great write-up from the Download Squad on some free antivirus programs.

I consider myself a more advanced user of the web and of computers. And the biggest, nastiest, sweatiest moments of my computer experience have generally centered around some sort of virus scare.

There is nothing scarier to me then when I’m running my maintenance scan and that warning starts blaring. The system on my main production computer is avast! When it detects a virus a huge nuclear warning like icon comes up with an accompanying siren. Yes, it grabs your attention.

I used to be a big Norton fan but they’ve lost my business over the years. The product got too slow and started to interfere with other valid software. So as usual, I was able to find some free alternatives. I can recommend avast! or AVG Free.

They’re at the top of the list from the download squad and that’s no surprise. They’re pretty popular. So if you’re reading one of those articles that says antivirus isn’t as important as it used to be because everything is cloud based…well, I might have a bridge to see you really cheap

From time to time I need to work onsite at a clients office. This can be problematic to say the least. Not only because I have to eschew my traditional bunny slippers but because I have to leave my command center. Like most people that make their living using a computer, I have a certain setup that I like. All my tools are there and configured just how I like them so when I have to leave, I get a little grumpy about it. Portableapps helps soften the blow. What are portableapps you ask? Well, it’s basically software that turns your USB stick into an operating system that can run certain applications in a portable version. It’s great. Visit portableapps.com and you can download the software and then pick the applications you want to add. I have a two-gig stick that hangs around my neck that has a ton of documents I need as well as OpenOffice, Firefox, a bunch of useful utilities, and, of course, my Texas Holdem game. Good times. Check it out and let me know if it proves useful.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. People use them to share computer programs, music, photos and video among other things. µTorrent is my favorite free BitTorrent client. The great thing about uTorrent is that it’s designed to use minimal computer resources while offering basically the same functionality as larger BitTorrent clients such as BitComet. The program gets great reviews for its feature set, performance, stability, and support for older hardware and versions of Windows. Its been around since 2005 and is my torrent client of choice. What is BitTorrent?

Look no further than GIMP. GIMP is a free graphic editor. People use it as a free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop. Typical uses include creating and editing graphics and logos, resizing and cropping photos, altering colors, converting between different image formats, etc. I especially like it because they have a portable version that can be run from my thumb drive. That way I can edit photos on the road using my laptop. Photoshop is a better application but I can’t run it off a thumb drive and it is a huge memory hog on my laptop. GIMP can also be used to create basic animated images in GIF format. This little guy below is the project’s mascot, Wilber.

So what is screencasting? Well, one of the main features we offer is a very inexpensive content management system for your website. People want to be able to udpate their own content and I’m all for that. Technology shouldn’t be an obstacle preventing you from communicating through your web site. Still, people have varying levels of comfort with technology. So for some of our clients we’ll actually make screencasts.

Screencasting is using an application to record your desktop as you’re using it, including audio, and convert it into a flash animation video file that people can watch in their web browsers. To do this I use a software called CamStudio. It works very well and again, it’s free. Try it out.

then I highly recommend Audacity. It’s free list most of the tools I use. The only software I really pay for is Adobe and Quark. Anyway Audacity is one of the easiest to use and most popular sound editing applications on the web. Very easy to install. After i get the sound file out of Gizmo, I use Audacity to edit the sound file before I upload it to our web server to put the podcast online.

https://online.primopdf.com/

PrimoOnline provides a super-fast way to create PDF files online, without the need to install any PDF software. Simply upload your file, enter your email address, and our server-based PDF creator will quickly convert it to PDF and deliver it straight to your email inbox.

Very useful tool. The great part about it is that it’s online. There is also a desktop application you can download to create pdf’s through your applications. You can find that here.

I’m a big believer in opensource software. Mainly because you generally can’t be the price point. Free is pretty good. Along these lines OpenOffice might be for you. It’s a business application suite along the lines of Microsoft Office. One great thing about it is that you save your documents as Microsoft Office documents. What that means is that someone can send you a word doc, you can edit it, and send them back your edits as a word doc. They’ll be none the wiser that you didn’t spend $250 (approx) for the Microsoft office suite. I’ve used OpenOffice for years and highly recommend it. Visit OpenOffice.org to download the software. Let me know how it works out for you.