Web Safe Colors | Free Software | Content Management | GIS Software | Graphics Software | Languages | Web Server

Web-Safe Colors

Designing a web site? Do you know about web-safe colors? All colors do not display the same on all browsers. And there are more browsers out there than you imagine. What to do? Use web-safe colors, wherever possible. Web-safe colors are a limited palette of colors that should display identically on all browsers. Web-safe has been questioned, but it's still widely accepted practice. There's a handy chart we use when we do web design work, and thought you could use it too.

Click here to use the web-safe color tool.
The code for this chart is available here. You can download and install it locally, or feel free to use it here. Click on a color swatch to change the page background, and see how a color works.

Free Software

Spatial Focus depends on freely distributed technologies and resources. The software listed below includes only software we've used for this site, simply to make it more manageable. We use free and open source software for almost every company function. We ran across most of them at sites we visit regularly. Our favorite free software sites include:

• FreeGIS
• Freshmeat
• Grime
• SourceForge

Content Management

• Kumera
  

  An XML-Based Content Management System

GIS Software

• MapServer
  

  MapServer is an OpenSource development environment for building spatially enabled Internet applications.

Graphics Software

• The GIMP
  

  The GNU Image Manipulation Program. If you use Windows, you'll want to visit GTK+ and GIMP for Windows. We've used both the Linux and Windows versions of this excellent program.

• The GIMP-Savvy Site
  

  Training and Resources for the GIMP

• Image Magick
  

  Image manipulation tools

Languages and Extensions

• CGI.pm
  

  CGI.pm is only one of a variety of simple, reliable, portable web technologies from Lincoln Stein. This one is a Perl module that handles CGI, generates XHTML, and does everything but the dishes.

• Perl
  

  The Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, aka the Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.

Web Server

• Apache
  

  The Web Server from the Apache Foundation.