Free Things Every Web Developer Should Know About

The following are a collection of a tools and links that I frequent for various aspects of web development. They either provide a physical product, web service, or knowledge that you’ll be happy to have. I’ll add more if I discover more so keep checking back. And add your own!

Statistics

As a web developer, you are bound to be statistic crazy for some time, wondering who’s visiting your site and from where.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics has been re-designed to help you learn even more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site.
Stable, and it’s Google! Very reliable and provides very detailed information about your visitors. The Ajax-ified interface is very nice to use.

Clicky
This is aimed at smaller sites, with less than 1000 visits a day (for bigger sites, you will need to pay a subscription). Overall, you get less than you have in Google Analytics. However, the power of Clicky is that it is focused on the individual visitors, giving you logs of every visitor to your site. There is a Spy tool which gives you a constant updating list of who is at your website and doing what.

FeedBurner
FeedBurner, a Google-owened operation, provides statistics for your feeds. You will have to “burn” your feeds so users are accessing your feed through FeedBurner. This will provide statistics on the number of subscribers, what items are popular, and more.

Alexa
Alexa provides site rankings, which you can use to monitor site growth. There is also a Firefox plugin that shows the rank of the current site you are at. The precision of the rankings are questionable but are none the less, interesting.

Development Software

Aptana IDE
The Aptana IDE is a free, open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused development environment for building Ajax applications. It features code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, FTP/SFTP support and a JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code.
There is also a version for Ruby on Rails. Plugins are also available to support many other development platforms, including Adobe AIR and the iPhone.

Resources

IconBuffet
You get free deliveries of new icons regularly. Interesting concept.

Things To Read

Smashing Magazine
Posts usually contain a collection of neat links and ideas. Great source of inspiration (from those Top 60 Website Designs and such)
Web Design from Scratch
A well put together site that covers all aspects of making a website. Tips on design, usability, architecture, and more.
North x East
Good tips for bloggers

Miscellaneous Tools

mozy
Free backup tool worth checking out

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