Useful Linux Tools for Webmasters

1. Introduction

Recently I found two useful tools that should prove especially useful to developers and maintainers of Internet Websites. They are:

- gftp
- kompozer

You will find a short introduction below.

2. The Gnome FTP Client

It is a GNU and OPen Source visual FTP client (similar to Filezilla or to the well known CuteFTP under Windows) with a GTK+ GUI which is released under GNU license. It is mainly for Linux and Unix systems, but it can be used also on Mac OS and Windows.

It supports the FTP, FTPS HTTP, HTTPS, SFTP e FSP protocols; it supports server proxy for the FTP and HTTP protocols and FXP which allows to transfer files between two remote servers via FTP.

The GUI interface has two main panels with the left one for the local machine and the right one for the remote machine. You can choose the directories of the local and remote machine and request the transfer of the chosen files either from the local to the remote machine or the other way round. Under these two panel the program shows a message queue where the user can check the progress status of the transfers.

There is also a bookmarks menu that allows to quickly connect to remote sites.

In the past I used to work with the line oriented lftp, but I found that I could do a lot more and faster by using this GUI based tool.

I installed the tool, without any problem, on my OpensuSE 10.2 and OpenSUSE 11.0 systems by using an RPM based package.

3. The Kompozer Web authoring tool

Kompozer is an easy WYSIWYG HTML and CSS editor. It is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing capabilities found in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs.

The tool has a GUI interface which displays different views of the same document such as the HTML source, the tag or the external view in different panels. You can easily switch between these views and make changes to an HTML or CSS document in the more convenient way. It ihas also an integrated FTP function.

Kompozer is a stand-alone tool with small size and fast speed based on on Gecko, the layout engine inside Mozilla.

I installed the application without any problems on my OpenSUSE 10.2 and OpenSuSE 11.0 systems by using the RPM package which can be downloaded from the kompozer official site.

4. Conclusion

The two products describes above are good examples of functionally advanced applications that can be easily installed on Linux machine

P.S. The article was originally published on http://www.ezinearticles.com
and on http://www.squidoo.com/linuxTools