Sunday, September 21, 2008

Promising Linux Programs for Web Development

I've been spending most of my computer time lately on "web development" for a new project. One aspect of this has been selecting appropriate software. Lest I mislay this knowledge, I'm posting it here, in my virtual junk drawer. I'll be able to find it again, and you never know who might want to rummage through my collection of good junk someday.

There are many, many interesting Open Source tools for building and maintaining Web sites, and I've been making lists of things that might solve some of my problems. Here are some .deb packages (available from Debian sources) for programs new to me.

  • iGal: igal is a quick and easy program for placing your images online with just one command-line. It generates a pretty good-looking set of W3-compliant static HTML slides even with its default settings. To try it out just run igal in a directory with jpg, gif or png files and check the output in a web browser. You can adjust the appearance of the image gallery with the many options listed below or (if you know a bit of HTML) by modifying the .indextemplate.html, .slidetemplate.html and igal.css files that appeared in your image directory.
  • Imageindex...a digital photo gallery tool. Imageindex generates standards-compliant static HTML galleries of images (usually JPG photos, but can deal with images of just about any format).
  • llgal - Command-line online gallery generator: llgal is an easy and fast on-line gallery generator based on iGal. Its primary goal is to NOT require any boring useless expensive feature in your webserver, such as PHP, JavaScript, SQL, ... Thus, llgal generates static web-pages.
  • owl-dms: Owl is a multi user document repository (knowledgebase), document manager and/or document management system (DMS) written in PHP for publishing of files/documents onto the web for a corporation, small business, group of people, or just for yourself.
  • sitemap: Makes an HTML site map from meta tags from other HTML pages. This Python script reads the META DESCRIPTION tags from all HTML files under a directory and generates a site map from them. It can be easily configured with a simple dotfile. The site map of catb.org, known to most Linux users, is an example of what this script can do.
  • webmagic: WebMagick provides a means of easily putting image collections on the Web. It recurses through directory trees, building HTML pages and imagemap (GIF or JPEG) files to allow the user to navigate through collections of thumbnail images (somewhat similar to 'xv') and select the images to view with a mouse click.
  • WordPress Web publishing platform--useful for many things besides blogs.
  • www-mysql: a WWW interface for the TCX mySQL database www-mysql is a web interface for the mySQL database. SQL commands can be embedded into web pages; these are executed on the server by www-mysql and the resulting web page sent to the browser. All SQL commands and queries supported by mySQL can be used via www-mysql.

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