Software used for the website’s construction
For the Gibitrains website’s construction, I don’t use WYSIWYG software nor CMS, and this by pure interest in the internal mechanisms of the web. With one exception
(PDF-Xchange Viewer), the software used is free.
I haven’t listed some tools like those allowing to minify the files, or Google Search Console that doesn’t need for advertising!
Note that I use Pages perso Orange as an Internet service provider. The advantages are: free
(provided you subscribe Orange of course…); no advertising; large free space (6 GB, which I currently use less
than 700 MB, admittedly with optimized images). Some disadvantages are: no server-side scripting language (PHP);
no possible use of .htaccess file to declare
URL redirects for example.
Update of August 2023
The Pages perso have been discontinued by Orange, as have almost all their free services
(the Cloud, and more recently the sending of SMS messages from computers, etc.). So I subscribed to a paying
host, PlanetHoster.
The big advantage over the previous solution is the ability to use PHP and an .htaccess file for redirects.
Text Editing
Text editor with of course syntax highlighting suitable for many languages, macros, etc.
Multi-file search / replace with many filter options and regular expression management.
Spelling and grammar proofing. In English, it manages the difference between British and American English.
File Management
Comparison / Merge for different versions of files.
File renaming with many options.
Image Processing
Image editor easy to use and yet powerful enough. Ability to create new commands with a scripting language.
Image (basic) editor and management. Batch processing with the possibility of scripts.
Simple stacking software, although a rather confusing use. Development stopped.
Fills a gap in Paint.net: the perspective correction of an image.
PNG image size optimization by Drag and Drop.
PNG file chunks (basic PNG structures) editing.
Image Metadata Management
Edit EXIF, IPTC, XMP metadata, etc. Development unfortunately stopped.
Command line creation, display, editing of metadata.
PDF Creation, Viewing, Printing
Very simple PDF printing.
Successfully replaces Adobe Acrobat. In the
Pro version (paying), allows PDF edition with many
options. Note : PDF-Xchange Viewer doesn’t exist anymore, replaced with
PDF-XChange Editor.
Audio-Video Processing
The best known free video editor. Not very friendly, but very powerful.
The best known free audio editor.
Editing and managing video subtitles, following the timeline.
Metadata viewer for video files.
Audio-Video File Conversion
Command line audio-video file conversion, with very fine, but complex, conversion settings.
Multi-format audio-video file conversion. The conversion settings are not necessarily very flexible.
Online multi-format audio-video files conversion.
Small utility for lossless MOV to AVI conversion, very handy to work with Virtual Dub which doesn’t like MOV files.
Website Management
Apache local server. Very useful for testing the website before publishing. But the installation is complicated.
FTP server. Manage the content of the website. Very easy to use, despite a perfectible colour management.
Search for broken links, local or on the Web. Don’t be afraid of the disturbing look of the logo!
Command-line
html5 validator. I suggest you a
simple command file, zipped, to easily use this validator.
Sitemap (xml, text or other) file generator, with the ability of specifying the last modified date of each file.