I am no webmaster by any stretch of the imagination, yet there are times in the course of my work where I need to be able to match the color of something on my screen to a project that I am working on.

There are several ways that I know of to do that. The first is to open up a program and seek out its color matching dialogue and apply what I call the “gosh, that looks close enough!” method to pick out a color. Another way is to copy the item that has the color I want by hitting “Print Screen” and then opening Paint, pasting in the item from the clip board, zooming in on it and then use the ‘Pick Color’ tool. At that point I can copy down the HEX code and I am good to go.

If you’re into programming then you’ll know how much easier it is to use a text editor that has syntax highlighting so that you can see if you left a bracket open, curly bracket open or mistyped something. In this article I will review 3 lightweight free text editors for programmers on Windows.

If you’re prepared to pay for a text editor with a free trial option, there is Dreamweaver and Aptana, Aptana has three software packages Aptana Studio, Aptana Cloud and Aptana Jaxer.

If you don’t want to pay for a text editor and would prefer a free option, read on…

A what?

Yes, it’s a valid question! Well, on the internet, Sprouts are advanced Flash based banners that come in all sizes, containing all sorts of media, can be 100% custom designed or based on a template and, like a paper leaflet, they can contain several independent pages.

Basically, a Sprout can be anything from a very simple banner to a very elaborate mini website.

In my first days of web development it used to be “modify a file - upload using ftp client - refresh browser - repeat from start”. Then I changed this because I used Notepad++ and other tools to skip the ftp part, or at least build it into saving. Nowadays though there are more powerful tools that you can use as a browser addon to modify, check out and analyze pages, like the Web Developer Toolbar Addon for Firefox.

So far I have been using one of the simpler tools for writing code, Notepad++. Due to some recent FTP problems however, I set out on a search for an alternative tool. I eventually came up with Aptana, a free code editing tool which is so bustling with features, it’s amazing.

When I first fired it up it was a bit slow, but after that I was quite impressed. Presentation-wise it looks more like Dreamweaver than Notepad++ or HTML-kit, and this is true features-wise as well.

(1) Image Manipulation

GIMP – Alternative for Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro

GIMP, short for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, has been written about several times before on this site. However, I felt it was worth another mention because of its versatility as a Photoshop alternative.

Whenever I have had to write HTML for a webpage I’m working on, I have always used this online real-time HTML editor. But therein lies the problem - it’s online and if your internet connection blinks out for a while, you are obviously unable to use it. So I wanted an offline standalone application that could help me to write my HTML if I didn’t have an internet connection. I wanted it to be free and easy to use, as well as having a WYSIWYG interface (What You See Is What You Get) You couldn’t begin to imagine how difficult that made it finding something to fit all those conditions.

I have just recently discovered a useful all-in-one tool for testing your website, blog or webpage (or someone else’s) for just about anything you can imagine!

Test Everything

‘Test Everything’ incorporates over 100 (128 to be exact) of the useful website checkers and validators, throughout 8 different categories, all in one spot!

You will find CSS & HTML validators, SEO Tools, Web Proxies, Network Tools, Image Tools, Text tools, a host of really cool Miscellaneous Tools, and you can easily check your site’s popularity on Social Bookmarking sites as well.

Ask any competent web designer or blogger and they’ll tell you that one of the most important aspects of getting a webpage right is the color. Getting the colors right can make all the difference between a hugely successful website and one that goes down the toilet on day one. You need a site that is easy on the eyes if you want someone to stick around for more than five seconds.

Here are some sites I have found which can help you find the right colours, if you are designing a webpage.

Colorzilla

I am currently in the process of learning CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) based web design since it is now the standard foundation of layout for almost all web sites. I have read several books now and I still believe that I am slightly lost when it comes time to applying what I know from scratch. Over the past several months, I’ve been keeping a list for myself of potentially amazing tools and applications (most web based - all of them free) to make my CSS web design experience a snap. I purposely cut out over 30 options from this list, because these are the most user friendly and simplest to use.