Free Tools

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 might expect. 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.

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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

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Content Management

• Kumera: An XML-Based Content Management System.
• PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL is a free object-relational database management system.

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GIS Software

• MapServer: MapServer is an OpenSource development environment for building spatially enabled Internet applications.
• FME: FME (Feature Manipulation Engine) is an integrated collection of spatial tools for spatial data transformation and data translation.
• PostGIS: PostGIS is a program that adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database.
• QuantumGIS:QGIS is a user-friendly Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows. QGIS supports vector, raster, and database formats.
• GRASS: GRASS is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics/maps production, spatial modeling, and visualization.

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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

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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.

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Web Server

• Apache: The Web Server from the Apache Foundation.

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