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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<link rel="StyleSheet" href="main.css" type="text/css">
<link rel="StyleSheet" href="nn4_layout.css" type="text/css">
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
@import url(real_layout.css);
</STYLE>
<title>Windows Tools: Gnuemacs, Link Checker, HTML Validator etc.</title>
<meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(pics-1.1
"http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" comment "ICRAonline EN v2.0" l
gen true for "http://home.earthlink.net/~ellozy/" r (nz 1 vz 1 lz 1 oz
1 cz 1) "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l gen true for
"http://home.earthlink.net/~ellozy/" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>
<meta name="keywords" content="windows unix html emacs gnuemacs validator link checker">
<meta name="description" content="UNIX-like Tools Used to Build this Web Site">
</head>
<body>
<div id="header">
<h1>Tools Used to Build this Site</h1>
</div> <!-- header div -->
<div id="main">
<!-- table of contents start -->
<H2><A NAME="toc"></A>Table of Contents</H2>
<UL>
<LI><A HREF="#tocref1">GNUEmacs text editor</A>
<LI><A HREF="#tocref2">U/WIN Tools: Unix for WINdows</A>
<LI><A HREF="#tocref3">Linklint for Link Checker</A>
<LI><A HREF="#tocref4">HTML-Tidy for Checking HTML</A>
<LI><A HREF="#tocref5">HTML Goodies Primers and Tutorials</A>
<LI><A HREF="#tocref6">The Web Design Group as Major Reference</A>
<LI><A HREF="#tocref6a">Remotely Hosted Tools</A>
<LI><A HREF="#tocref7">Tools that I do Not Use</A>
<UL>
<LI><A HREF="#tocref8">GUI FTP Clients</A>
<LI><A HREF="#tocref9">Preprocessors</A>
</UL>
</UL>
<!-- table of contents end -->
The tools I use to build this site reflect the tastes and prejudices
acquired during a lifetime of computing. I have been using UNIX since
1978, and have come to take the functionality it provides for
granted. Nevertheless, when retirement approached, I decided
<I>not</I> to run Linux on my computer, since most of the time I would
have no need for that functionality. Instead I collected a few
packages that would allow me to access a UNIX-like environment when I
needed it.
<P>
I am describing a system that works well for me. I am <I>not</I>
saying it will work well for anyone else. Many will prefer either a
pure Windows or a pure Linux system.
<P>
One decision that I made very early in developing this site was to
write in HTML directly, rather than use an HTML editor. The following
<A
HREF="http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/basics.html#editors">quote</A>
fits in well with my general computing philosophy:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Keep in mind that typically the less HTML the tool requires you to
know, the worse the output of the HTML. In other words, you can always
do it better by hand if you take the time to learn a little HTML.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
Finally, let me put things in perspective. I have retired to have
more time to enjoy the outdoors, not to run a computing system <IMG
SRC="images/smile.gif" ALT="Smile!">. I do not spend a lot of time
tweaking the system, but am grateful that the tools are there
when I need them.
<H2><A NAME="tocref1"></A>GNUEmacs text editor</H2>
<A HREF="http://www.gnu.org/graphics/agnuhead.html"><IMG ALIGN =
"left" SRC="images/gnu-head-sm.jpg" ALT=" [image of the Head of a GNU]
" WIDTH="129" HEIGHT="122"></A>The most important tool for building a
web site when you are directly writing the HTML is a good text editor.
As a long time user of the UNIX operating system I found the choice
easy, <A
HREF="http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html">GNUemacs</A>. It
is available on the <A
HREF="http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/faq2.html#where-precompiled">GNU
ftp site</A>, a <A
HREF="http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html">FAQ</A>
for the Windows version is also available there.
<P>
The next requirement was a spell checker that would work from within
emacs, the standard one is <A
HREF="http://www.gnu.org/software/ispell/ispell.html">GNU Ispell</A>.
<P>
The 'e' in emacs stands for "extensible", and there are an immense
number of <A
HREF="http://www.anc.ed.ac.uk/~stephen/emacs/ell.html">elisp
functions</A> that can add functionality to the editor. For starters
I got the <A HREF="http://www.cua.dk/cua.html">CUA-mode</A> function,
which (among many other things) allows the Cntrl-c, Cntrl-x and Cntrl-v
functions to work as they do in the Windows environment (copy, cut and
paste respectively).
<P>
For specifically editing html files I use an old html-mode.el file
that seems to have disappeared from the net. The more modern function
is <A
HREF="http://www.santafe.edu/~nelson/tools/">html-helper-mode.el</A>,
and while writing this page I ran into a tutorial on using it for <A
HREF="http://www.tech.irt.org/articles/js136/">HTML Editing with
Emacs</A> that seems useful.
<P> In addition to the main html editing mode I use a small function
to create a table of contents, which unfortunately has disappeared
from the net.
<H2><A NAME="tocref2"></A>U/WIN Tools: Unix for WINdows</H2>
<CENTER> <A
HREF="http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/"><IMG SRC="images/Uwin.gif" HEIGHT=70 WIDTH=494
ALT="UWIN logo"></A></CENTER>
<BR>
You may have guessed that <A
HREF="http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/">UWIN</A> in meant to
be pronounced as "You Win!!". It provides several UNIX shells and a
vast number of the standard UNIX utilities, including perl. It is one
of several products that provide such an environment, another one that
is highly recommended (I did not try it out) is <A
HREF="http://cygwin.com/">cygwin 32</A>.
<P>The distribution includes the basic man pages which do not
adequately cover many of the details. For <I>awk</I> and <I>sed</I> I
have downlaoded the GNU book length manuals from <A
HREF="http://www.gnu.org/manual/gawk-3.1.0/gawk.html">gawk manual</A>
and <A HREF="http://www.gnu.org/manual/sed-3.02/sed.html">sed manual</A>
respectively.
<P>
Those who have spent many years using a UNIX environment will
certainly appreciate what it does to help the development of web
pages. Let me give a couple of examples.
<UL>
<LI>At the bottom of every file there is a navigation bar. As the
site grows that bar changes, and has to be changed in many (currently
nearly 50) files. All it takes to change all 50 files is a couple of
lines of shell scripting surrounding a line or two of sed!
<BR><BR><LI> I often begin putting tabular material in an Excel spreadsheet,
then want to convert it to an HTML table. It is possible to save a
spreadsheet in HTML format, but it will contain a lot of formatting
material that I do not want. Instead I save it as a tab-separated
text file, and run an awk script to make the table. The following is
a very basic script to do so:
<BR>
<PRE><CODE>
BEGIN {
FS = "\t"
printf "<TABLE>
}
{
printf "<TR>
for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) {
printf "<TD>%s</TD>", $i
}
printf "</TR>\n"
}
END {
printf "</TABLE>
}
</CODE></PRE>
It can easily be refined to use TH rather than TD for the first row
and column and so on, but even in this simple form it will do the job!
</UL>
<H2><A NAME="tocref3"></A>Linklint for Checking Links</H2>
<A HREF="http://www.linklint.org"><img src="images/linklint.gif"
alt="Checked by Linklint" border=0 WIDTH="74" HEIGHT="29"></A>
<BR><BR>
<A HREF="http://www.linklint.org">Linklint</A> is a link checker
written in perl that can check the links in part or all of a site,
either local or remote.
<P>
Regularly checking links is essential, as web sites disappear or get
reorganized, and pointing to a dead link is a quick way of alienating
visitors to your site. There are many sites from which you can check
your links (including the WDG site discussed below), but I prefer to
have a checker on my own computer.
<P>Recently I found another, apparently similar, checker. It is
called <A
HREF="http://www.remote.org/jochen/software/flinch/">Flinch</A>, and
is also a free perl program. It seems more modern, using modules, but
since Linklint does everything I need I did not explore it any
further.
<H2><A NAME="tocref4"></A>HTML-Tidy for Checking HTML</H2>
<A HREF="http://tidy.sourceforge.net/">HTML-Tidy</A> is a C program
that will check and, if you allow it to, correct your HTML code.
Checking the validity of the HTML that you write against the language
definition is very important. Most browsers will attempt to deal with
invalid constructs, so just checking your page with a browser is no
guarantee that it is correct. However, different browsers will allow
different invalid constructs, so the fact that your page displays
as you intended with browser X does not mean that it will display
similarly with browser Y, or even with the next release of browser X.
<P>
I use Tidy from the UWIN command line, usually as part of a shell
script which will filter out warnings that I choose to ignore. I use
it on all files after major revisions, and often (alas, not always)
use it before moving a changed file onto the server.
<P> It is also packaged in a few other ways, none of which I have
seriously investigated since the command line approach works well for
me. As noted above, there is an <A
HREF="http://discus.anu.edu.au/~kahlil/emacs/tidy.el">emacs
interface</A> to HTML Tidy. There are also at least two GUI-based
programs that use it, <A
HREF="http://perso.wanadoo.fr/ablavier/TidyGUI/">TidyGUI</A>, a free
Windows GUI version of HTML-Tidy, and <A
HREF="http://www.chami.com/html-kit/">HTML-Kit</A>, a full-featured
text editor designed to help HTML, XML and script authors to edit,
format, lookup help, validate, preview and publish web pages.
<H2><A NAME="tocref5"></A>HTML Goodies Primers and Tutorials</H2>
<A HREF="http://htmlgoodies.earthweb.com/"><IMG
SRC="images/masthead_goodies.gif" WIDTH="100" HEIGHT="78" BORDER="0"
ALIGN="left" ALT="HTML Goodies"></A>
There is an enormous amount of information about HTML on the web, so
much that I found no need to use a book either for learning or for
reference. A good short list of resources is the <A
HREF="http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/starting.htm">Getting
Started with HTML</A> page on the <A
HREF="http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/index.html">Index DOT
Html</A> site.
<P>
Of the many sites that provide tutorials I have come to rely on <A
HREF="http://htmlgoodies.earthweb.com/">HTML Goodies</A>. The
author's style takes some getting used to (a typical tutorial is
called <A HREF="http://htmlgoodies.earthweb.com/tutors/table.html">So,
You Want A Table, Huh?</A>), but apart from style the presentation is
good, and the basics are very well explained.
<P>
I do not claim that this site has the best tutorials, just that they
were good enough that I had no desire to shop around other sites.
<H2><A NAME="tocref6"></A>The Web Design Group as Major Reference</H2>
<A HREF="http://www.htmlhelp.com/"><IMG SRC="images/wdglogo1.gif"
ALT="The Web Design Group" ALIGN=left WIDTH=250 HEIGHT=74></A>
Of the many sites with substantial HTML references this is the one
that I have used most often. It has extensive references on the
syntax of HTML and CSS, and these can be downloaded to your computer
and hence used offline.
<P>It also has a variety of tools for checking both HTML and CSS
syntax, as well as a link checker. Since I have local HTML and link
checkers I do not use their remote checking capabilities often, though
I sometimes like to compare their HTML checks to mine.
<H2><A NAME="tocref6a"></A>Remotely Hosted Tools</H2>
I use a few remotely hosted tools to improve the services that I offer
users, and to manage the site.
<H3>Search and Site Map Capabilities</H3>
<A HREF="http://www.freefind.com/"><IMG
src="images/bic0006b80.jpg" WIDTH="40"
HEIGHT="70" ALIGN="left" BORDER="0" alt="Free search
engine"></a>
The search and site map capabilities are remotely hosted by <A
href="http://www.freefind.com/">FreeFind</A>. The service is free,
supported by advertising that I find unobtrusive, and quite simple to
set up. From the reports that the site gives me I see that this tool
is not used very much, but I feel that it is worth the small effort it
took me to install it.
<P>In addition to being of some use to visitors on my site, I have
found it a useful tool for understanding how the site works. The site
map has shown me clearly how the pieces fit together, when the fit
seemed bad it helped me improve it.
<H3>Forum</H3>
<A HREF="http://www.voy.com/"><IMG WIDTH=124 HEIGHT=68 BORDER=0
ALIGN="left" SRC="images/voylogo.gif" ALT="VoyForums Home"></A>
There are a large number of sites that offer free forums, supported by
advertising. I chose <A HREF="http://www.voy.com/">VoyForums</A> for
the simple reason that I was a visitor at a site which uses it. An
email to their webmaster brought the response that it was easy to set
up, and that it had a good record for uptime. From my experience on
various forums I knew that I wanted HTML capability (I use it a lot),
and I wanted the thread with the most recent posting to float to the
top. VoyForums provides both of these capabilities, so I was
satisfied. Life is too short to comparison shop amongst free
services!
<H2><A NAME="tocref7"></A>Tools that I do Not Use</H2>
There are thousands of tools that I do not use! In this section I
discuss two tools that I thought of using, and then decided not to.
<H3><A NAME="tocref8"></A>Other FTP Clients</H3>
As a long time UNIX user I have little enthusiasm for GUIs when they
are not really needed, and have had no problem managing my site with
the command line version of ftp. Periodically, however, I think that I
want something more sophisticated. Mainly I often feel that it would
be nice to have something that would automatically synchronize the
server with the files on my PC.
<P> The problem is that, most of the time, I do <I>not</I> want to do
that. I usually have several files that I am working on, and only
upload those that are ready to be shown to the world. Furthermore, I
have not seen anything yet that really would work for me. Still, I
think of it often enough that it should be mentioned here.
<H3><A NAME="tocref9"></A>Preprocessors</H3>
At the bottom of each page there is the same navigation bar. As the
site grows that bar changes; in the last revision I added the Articles
and Adventures sections.
<P>
One way to make sure that the navigation bar is identical in all
files, and to change it easily, would be to put it in a separate file
that would, somehow, be read into each page. There is quite a long
discussion of <A
HREF="http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/design.html#include-file">that
issue</A> on the WDG site.
<P>A major problem with that approach is that the HTML can only be
viewed after preprocessing, so the typical cycle "Edit, Check" becomes
"Edit, Preprocess, Check", which, for me, is just not worth the
trouble. Also, as noted earlier, the UNIX tools allow me to make
changes in all files with little effort. I did, however, spend some
time looking at various products. The one that looked most attractive
is <A HREF="http://www.lifl.fr/~beaufils/gtml/">GTML - an HTML
pre-processor</A>. Another one is <A
HREF="http://www.kessels.com/Downloads/htmlincl/">htmlincl</A>.
<BR><BR>
<HR>
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Main Sections:<br><br>
<P CLASS=navbar>
<a href="index.html">Home</a><br>
<a href="bagging.html">Peak Bagging</a><br>
<a href="lists.html">Lists</a><br>
<a href="nhnotes.html">Routes to Peaks</a><br>
<a href="general.html">Guide to Resources</a><br>
<a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a><br>
<a href="articles.html">Articles</a><br>
<a href="adventures.html">Adventures</a><br>
<A HREF="highpointing.html">Highpointing</A><br><br>
</P>
Navigation tools:<br><br>
<P CLASS=navbar>
Use <a href="sitemap.html">Site map</a> or<br>
<a href="http://search.freefind.com/find.html?id=6372974">Search
this site</a><br><br>
</P>
Articles:<br><br>
<P CLASS=navbar>
<A HREF="articles.html">Main Articles Page</A><br>
<A HREF="strenuous.html">Blue Hills Hikes</A><br>
<A HREF="strenuous2.html">Middlesex Fells Hikes</A><br>
<A HREF="moderate.html">Moderate Fours</A><br>
<A HREF="carcamping.html">Winter Car Camping</A><br>
<A HREF="review.html">Review of 4000 Footers Book</A><br>
<A HREF="solitude.html">Hiking far from Crowds</A><br>
<A HREF="roysbushwhacks.html">Bushwhacking NH Fours</A><br>
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-->
</P>
Routes to Peaks:<br><br>
<P CLASS=navbar>
<A HREF="washington.html">Mt. Washington</A> <br>
<a href="spresi.html">Southern Presis</a><br>
<a href="npresi.html">Mt. Adams & Mt. Jefferson</a><br>
<a href="madison.html">Mt. Madison</a><br>
<a href="franconia.html">Mt. Lafayette & Mt. Lincoln</a><br>
<a href="liberty.html">Mt. Liberty & Mt. Flume</a><br>
<a href="garfield.html">Garfield Ridge & Twins</a><br>
<a href="bondrts.html">Bonds & Zealand</a><br>
<a href="otherpemi.html">Other Pemi Peaks</a><br>
<a href="kinsman.html">Kinsman Ridge</a><br>
<a href="mt_moosilauke.html">Mt. Moosilauke</a><br>
<a href="waterville.html">Mt. Tecumseh & Mt. Osceola</a><br>
<a href="sandwich.html">Sandwich Range</a><br>
<a href="carters.html">Wildcat-Carter-Moriah Range</a><br>
<a href="northern.html">Mt. Cabot & Mt. Waumbek</a><br>
<A HREF="mt_mansfield.html">Mt. Mansfield</A><br>
<A HREF="camels_hump.html">Camels Hump</A><br>
<A HREF="vt_4000_footer.html">Other Vermont 4000 Footers</A>
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