Tiffany B. Brown

a mish-mosh of stuff

Open source favorites

I should mention that — except where noted — all of these packages are either web-based, or cross-platform.

I use quite a few open source applications in my day-to-day tinkering and freelance gigging. What open-source apps do you use regularly (or not-so-regularly)?

Firefox
My vote for Greatest Browser Ever.
WordPress
Kick-ass blog publishing software. Also available in a multi-user version.
OpenOffice.org
A full-featured office productivity suite that rivals Microsoft Office at 1/400th the price.
Audacity
Open source sound recording and editing software with support for MP3, WAV, AIFF, AU and Ogg Vorbis.
phpCollab
Web-based project management and tracking software written in PHP.
MediaWiki
It’s the PHP-and-database-driven wiki software that powers Wikipedia.
FreeMind
Java-based tool helps manage brainstorms.
FileZilla
FTP/SFTP client for Windows.
PuTTY
Telnet/SSH client for Windows.
jEdit
My new favorite text editor can extend into an integrated development environment with the help of some nifty plugins.
Aptana
Aptana is a front-end coder’s dream, with auto complete and debugging for HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Aptana has also added support for Ruby and PHP in recent months.
CocoaMySQL
A desktop-based open source graphical user interface for the MySQL database. Mac OS X only.
  • http://www.rashidmuhammad.com/ Rashid Z. Muhammad

    Firefox, OOo, Filezilla, and PuTTY are all essential for sure.

    A few more:

    CDEX – CD Ripper
    CVS – Source Control
    Ethereal – Network Protocol Analyzer
    Apache + Tomcat / PHP / Mono / JBoss – App server

  • http://www.rashidmuhammad.com Rashid Z. Muhammad

    Firefox, OOo, Filezilla, and PuTTY are all essential for sure.

    A few more:

    CDEX – CD Ripper
    CVS – Source Control
    Ethereal – Network Protocol Analyzer
    Apache + Tomcat / PHP / Mono / JBoss – App server

  • Susan

    What’s your thought on Drupal vs WordPress ?

  • Susan

    What’s your thought on Drupal vs WordPress ?

  • http://www.tiffanybbrown.com/ tiffany

    I like WordPress’s ease of configuration. It’s very easy to get up and running, and very easy to create your own theme. Think of WordPress as a blogging package that can be massaged into a CMS.

    Drupal is too big a package for just blogging. It’s very full-featured, and very good for sites with lots of content or that need a workflow. Think of Drupal as a CMS that can be massaged into blogging software. And it’s much, much harder to develop themes for Drupal. I can launch a custom-designed WP site in a weekend. I can’t say that about Drupal.

    WP also supports clean URLs. I’m using funky numeric URLs here to preserve my existing URL structure. But with WordPress you can have URLs such as ‘http://domainname.com/this-is-the-post-name’ instead of the ‘http://domainname.com/node/234′ URLs you get with Drupal.

  • http://www.tiffanybbrown.com/ tiffany

    I like WordPress’s ease of configuration. It’s very easy to get up and running, and very easy to create your own theme. Think of WordPress as a blogging package that can be massaged into a CMS.

    Drupal is too big a package for just blogging. It’s very full-featured, and very good for sites with lots of content or that need a workflow. Think of Drupal as a CMS that can be massaged into blogging software. And it’s much, much harder to develop themes for Drupal. I can launch a custom-designed WP site in a weekend. I can’t say that about Drupal.

    WP also supports clean URLs. I’m using funky numeric URLs here to preserve my existing URL structure. But with WordPress you can have URLs such as ‘http://domainname.com/this-is-the-post-name’ instead of the ‘http://domainname.com/node/234′ URLs you get with Drupal.

  • http://bkaeg.org/blog AG

    Hmm… Regarding Drupal, I do agree that it has a fair amount of complexity, as it was not designed to _only_ be a blogging publishing engine. It is a quite simply a collaboration tool. If you only want a blogging publishing engine, go get MT or WP. I wouldn’t consider MT or WP to be turn-key collaboration tools. So Drupal vs. WP is like comparing sheep and moose ;)

    That said, it is uber powerful and it _does_ handle path aliasing when you use the appropriate modules. Actually, I found an excellent Drupal videocast for newbies. That site is chock full info on all things Drupal.

    Heh, FOSS favorites.. There are many,but I’ll only bless you with a few. The last two are Java apps, so they’re really not ‘free’ as in free speech.

    Ekiga – SIP phone and much more
    Evolution – email client
    Gnucash – Personal finance tool
    amaroK – Music application rivals iTunes
    Beagle – Desktop indexing application
    azureus – P2P BitTorrent application
    Limewire – P2P Gnutella network application

  • http://bkaeg.org/blog AG

    Hmm… Regarding Drupal, I do agree that it has a fair amount of complexity, as it was not designed to _only_ be a blogging publishing engine. It is a quite simply a collaboration tool. If you only want a blogging publishing engine, go get MT or WP. I wouldn’t consider MT or WP to be turn-key collaboration tools. So Drupal vs. WP is like comparing sheep and moose ;)

    That said, it is uber powerful and it _does_ handle path aliasing when you use the appropriate modules. Actually, I found an excellent Drupal videocast for newbies. That site is chock full info on all things Drupal.

    Heh, FOSS favorites.. There are many,but I’ll only bless you with a few. The last two are Java apps, so they’re really not ‘free’ as in free speech.

    Ekiga – SIP phone and much more
    Evolution – email client
    Gnucash – Personal finance tool
    amaroK – Music application rivals iTunes
    Beagle – Desktop indexing application
    azureus – P2P BitTorrent application
    Limewire – P2P Gnutella network application

  • http://www.tiffanybbrown.com/ tiffany

    Thanks AG, I figured there was a module somewhere. But WP does it out of the box.

    You can do collaboration to a degree with WP and MT. But I agree that Drupal was designed to be a collaboration tool first, while WP and MT were designed to blogging tools with collaboration features.

    It really depends on what your needs are.

  • http://www.tiffanybbrown.com/ tiffany

    Thanks AG, I figured there was a module somewhere. But WP does it out of the box.

    You can do collaboration to a degree with WP and MT. But I agree that Drupal was designed to be a collaboration tool first, while WP and MT were designed to blogging tools with collaboration features.

    It really depends on what your needs are.