Here is my hardware and software inventory, if you are interested in being a web publisher

We have 5 computers in our family and sometimes they let me use them. We all have bunches of software - some we never use. Here is what I routinely use to in to get web sites published:

Computer

• Built by Gim Computers in Atlanta, Georgia. I don't think this is cheaper than a traditional Dell, Gateway or whatever, but they build to order and know their stuff.:
• P4P8X motherboard
• 2.8 gig P4 processor
• 512megs RAM
• 70 gig hard disk
• 40 gig hard disk
• DVD/rw / CD/RW combo drive

Monitor

• Gateway 200 Vivitron 21 inch. I bought it for $100 used at Gim Computers. It's a monster, I love it, and I would buy it again today. JoAnn has a flatscreen. It's quite nice if you are sitting in front of it. I occasionally have clients at my desk. The 21 inch CRT allows both of us to see the screen clearly.

Scanner

• Memorex 6142u. It's a $100 scanner and quite adequate. I've scanned ordinary photographs, t-shirts and photos in the frame through the glass. I'm impressed. I wonder what a $70 scanner would do?

Printer

• Hewlett Packard Photosmart 7660. This one cost me about $140. It is fast enough and does a great job with pictures. It has a built-in memory card reader that accepts every brand of digital camera card. I take the memory card out of my camera, plug it into the printer, and my PC opens it as if it was another disk drive.

Internet Connection and Network

• Comcast broadband with the cable modem they supplied.
• Linksys Wireless G Broadband Router. A high quality device. It has 4 "wire" ports and all the wireless we need.
• Netgear RP614 router. It's a spare now. It take its input from the cable modem and has 4 ports for our family network. We don't do file or printer sharing though.

Camera

• Fuji FinePix 2650 with 2 megapixels. It's the best camera I've ever had but you know how quickly things have improved. I'd prefer a $500 camera but don't really need one right now.

Software

• CityDesk Professional Edition 2.0.19 is web publishing software. I use it for 99% of my sites. It's a desktop content management system with scripting language that allows great flexibility in managing pages. CityDesk does not have the design features of a Dreamweaver or FrontPage. But you can use these programs with CityDesk for certain design tasks.
• Microsoft FrontPage 2000 4.0.2.2717 was my first web publisher. Once I found CityDesk I no longer publish sites with it. However, I continue to use it to edit CityDesk templates and to analyze web sites. It helps me answer the question: "How do they do that."
• CuteFTP is an inexpensive file transfer program (File Transfer Protocol). FTP moves files between my PC and the web servers. FTP is built in to CityDesk but I still need stand-alone FTP from time to time.
• Adobe Photoshop Elements is a small subset of Photoshop. I use it to enhance, crop, drop shadow, and optimize pictures. One or two clicks can make a fair picture into a good one for the web or for printing.
• Easy Thumbnails is a free thumnail generator. It's very handy.
• Icon Edit produces "favicon.ico" graphics images that appear in the address bar a bookmark folder of some web site. It's a special graphics format that most programs can't produce.
• Memorex Scan Manager is the scanning software that came with my scanner. When you ask Photoshop to scan, it calls this scan manager.
• Picasa is a free picture manager. I accumulate thousand of pictures and it's often hard the find the one I want. Picasa helps a lot! It can also crop and enhance pictures. It might be all you need if you have a digital camera.
• Screen Calipers v2.2 is a very cute and handy tool to measure things on the screen. You can never know what sort of monitor or screen resolution surfers use. Sometimes I have to measure screen widths, element sizes and pictures.
• Notepad is part of Microsoft Office. It's a no frills text editor. When you move text from a web page or word processing document, you can drag around a lot of html garbage with it that compromise a consistent format in your web site. I often copy stuff into Notepad and from Notepad into CityDesk to remove the garbage.
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 is my primary browser because it's almost everyone's primary browser.
• Netscape 7 is a secondary browser. All browsers aren't the same and all web pages don't look the same in different browsers.
• Mozilla Firefox is another browser that's I'm using more and more. I test my pages here. For surfing it has some great features that Internet Explorer doesn't. My favorite is opening multiple bookmarks in tabs. I scan about 20 sites each morning. I open the Firefox bookmark window, right-click the folder that contains my 20 sites, and select "open in tabs." Volia!
• Netscape Messenger is part of Netscape 7. It is my e-mail client. I don't use Outlook.
• AOL has been there from the beginning. I keep and pay for it to maintain our family's many AOL e-mail addresses. Some folks don't like it. I've found it to be very reliable and predictable.
• Microsoft Office 2000 is not in daily use for doing web sites. I do need it when customers send me Word documents.

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