The purpose of this page is to give you an idea how the freeware tool chain can play a role in the creation and maintenance of a personal web site (or even larger sites).

CSS style sheet is used to create a consist look and feel of the whole site. The use of graphics has been minimized to make the page load faster. Image file format used in this site is PNG and JPEG. GIF is not used due to its patents problem. Some non standard techniques such as java applet, flash movie, java script extension are avoided since they can only be supported by certain browsers and are slower to load. Jan Daciuk put a page on why not using java script. I'm fully agree with him.

All the pages are encoded in UTF-8 so I can display some Chinese characters when needed. I use vim to edit all these files in an xterm. They both have a good support for UTF-8. Various vim plug-in are used to make the edit process a little more fun. They can be found on my vim page.

A HTML precompiler LeoHTML is used to maintain a consistent layout through all pages. LeoHTML is a powerful HTML precompiler features macro expansion, custom tag, advanced menu tree, easy file and image maintain and more. All the HTML files are generated from corresponding *.lhtml template file by LeoHTML. With the help of LeoHTML, the whole site achieves a consist layout including header, menu tree, footer... without the need of some dynamic web server extension like SSI, PHP.

When the number of web pages grows, it's inefficient to generate an HTML file each time its template is modified. Fortunately, GNU Make can be used to automatically maintain the up to date HTML file. All I need is to write a Makefile with some dependency rules.

In event of unpredicted data loss, all files are protected under CVS (Concurrent Versions System).

As a non-native English speaker, I use Aspell to make sure I do not make spelling mistake in my pages. There is a vimspell plugin for vim editor that can do spelling checking on the fly (check my vim page). However, I can not find a good grammar checker under unix.

Finally, sitecopy is used to keep web pages in remote web server and my hard disk in sync. It's also a smart file upload program.

As you can see, freeware are really powerful tools and can make your life easier.