friends of dufferin grove park
Website - Technical - Software

For routine operations, use your existing browser, occasionally Microsoft Paint, and download the EvrSoft HTML editor (free), IrfanView (free), and a File Transfer tool (cheap). Use the free Validator website for HTML code page validation.

Browsers

We use the following browsers for testing:

Internet Explorer has about 94% of the market. The rest are based on the Mozilla/Gecko rendering engine. AOL has announced discontinuation of development for Netscape Navigator. Firefox (this writer's favourite) comes out of the Open Source movement. Opera has a reasonable following.

Microsoft has announced discontinuation of Internet Explorer for the Mac. Safari seems to be mentioned often for the Mac environment.

Cross browser incompatibility is notorious. Although we believe we have established a set of approaches that is reasonably compatible across browsers, it never hurts to continue to gather feedback.

HTML Editing
HTML Editor

We use the free Evrsoft 1st Page 2000 HTML Editor. We have hacked the Netscape 1 Extensions Tag List and replaced it with our own, which makes using our custom CSS definitions much easier. To install our custom tag library to Evrsoft download [ns1.tag] (right click / Save Link to Disk), and overwrite Program Files\Evrsoft\1st Page 2000\ns1.tag. Then configure the utilities pane of the product as in the image to the right for access to the tag list. Double click to the right of the cursor symbol in the Tag column to have the tagset added to the current HTML file being edited in the program.

Validator

To validate HTML code, go to validator.w3.org.

Mapper

We use Coffee Cup Image Mapper ($20 shareware) for the specialized task of identifying co-ordinates for the <map> and <area> HTML elements. See the map on the City Rinks List page for an example. We also used it for the home page.

Image processing

For simple image processing we use IrfanView. It easily crops, converts from one format to another, resizes, and does touchups of colour depth, brightness, etc. Free.

Microsoft Paint available with the Windows operationg system, supports bitmap processing, including minor touchups, image combination, etc.

ImageWalker provides thumbnail browsing of image directories, easy re-organization, and a wide variety of image touchup features.

PDF File Creation

Adobe Acrobat looks like a printer to applications on your computer, but instead takes the printstream as input and creates a PDF file as output. Not cheap, but very useful. The Adobe Reader, which lets users read the created file, is distributed free worldwide, and is loaded on most computers.

File Transfer

We use CuteFTP for file transfer between our own computers and the web server. Free to try, $40US to buy.