I still haven’t re-installed FireFTP, since I’m still happy with Filezilla when I need ftp, but I can report that on the new Vista machine we have in our office, Firefox has been the least of our problems. I’m running 2.0.0.5 with different extensions for different users, and so far it’s been running rock-solid.

Thought I’d better set the record straight for anyone who saw the earlier posts.

There are some great commercial products out there, such as WS_FTP Home and WS_FTP Pro. In fact, so far as I know, these are the gold standards for ftp client software. I’ve used them both and highly recommend them to anyone who has $39.95 or $54.95, respectively, to shell out. What’s more, Ipswitch will give you 30 days each to try them out before you buy, so you have nothing to lose.

But personally, with four websites underway, I’m running on a shoestring until at least one of them starts turning a profit!

Even if you’re happy using FireFTP as I was until recently, Filezilla is definitely worth the effort to download if you’re not going with one of Ipswitch, Inc.’s premium products mentioned above. The interface is slightly different from FireFTP’s–primarily that it’s drag-and-drop rather than select file(s) and push a button–but it only took me a couple of minutes to figure all that out and get going with it.

The thing I like best about it, I guess, is the fact that it’s a standalone program, so aside from it not bringing down my entire browser and any pending emails should it crash, the interface just feels roomier. I always have so many tabs open in FireFox and so many toolbars active that FireFTP feels like it’s crammed in and lacks adequate space compared to Filezilla. (Of course, I originally went with FireFTP so that I wouldn’t need to run yet another standalone program–don’t think I haven’t recognized the irony of that yet.)

The Ipswitch products are faster and have more features, but I think I’m going to be using Filezilla for a while now as my primary ftp client. Sometimes second best is good enough.

filezilla
FireFTP

Until recently.

I don’t know if the problem is that my Firefox installation has become bloated with all the new stuff I’ve downloaded for clipping and bookmarking (especially the so-called “social bookmarking”) and this is interfering with FireFTP’s operation, or what. (I seem to have a congenital inability to visit the Forefox Addons page without downloading something.)

All I know is that lately, FireFTP has been behaving strangely. It often doesn’t load cleanly and needs to be loaded more than once (separate tabs).

When I then attempt to close the now-useless perpetually loading tab, Firefox tends to crash. In fact, the crashing is quite reliable(!). Having lost a lot of partially finished emails and that sort of thing, I’m now in the process of installing Filezilla to see what that has to offer. I like the convenience of FireFTP, but want to try isolating the problems.

Has anyone else had similar difficulties with FireFTP?

FireFTP

Well, I’ve been planning a website (Techismo) and have been working on it in various capacities for over a year now. I’ve done design work—including coding the usual infuriating hacks and workarounds, because I just cannot accept that it’s gonna look different in IE and possibly others no matter what I do!—planning, conceptualizing, writing, gathering sources and so on.

In some ways, no doubt, I went considerably overboard. For example, I designed an original CSS cum Javascript menuing system that at this rate I may never put to use. (But it sure is purty, and it was an exhilarating challenge to write.)

Meanwhile, I’ve started two blogs (this and Health Spectator) and gotten another website/possibly blog (Spotless Form) partially off the ground. In fact, if I hadn’t fallen in love with an idea for the opening page of Spotless Form that requires consent from a so-far non-responsive Latvian photographer, it would be publicly posted by now. As it is, it may be weeks or months before I actually make pages public, but there’s some copy in the can. Meanwhile, I’ve ordered some original Chinese watercolors that convey the mood I was trying to capture with the photograph. So after some scanning and Photoshop work, I should be ready to go. I’ll redesign the opening page as soon as I have a chance.

So the work goes on.

But what I wanted to talk about here—in keeping with our “what happens while you’re making plans” theme—is that I’ve discovered blogging software. (Yeah, I know—I wasn’t the first.)

Somehow, I now realize, I always thought of using blogging software as a cop-out. Or cheating. Not that I didn’t think it was appropriate for actual bloggers–whom I defined vaguely as people whose primary purpose was news, gossip, or commentary and who were less concerned with visual aesthetics than with message.

Which is to say that I basically knew nothing about it. But with three different sites under construction, I was starting to get desperate.

A lot of that was because I was suddenly presented with situations or news opportunities that actually lent themselves to blogging, or at least a blogging approach. For example, it was difficult to pass up the announcement of Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer relapse as subject matter for Health Spectator. Not as a news announcement per se—it didn’t even occur to me until about a week after the occurrence that this was an opportunity to summarize the latest in cancer knowledge and cures. So a general advice column for those facing either primary or secondary cancer seemed in order, given the national attention the issue had just received.

Next thing I knew, I was working on a blog post to cover this aspect of Health Spectator’s coverage.

Meanwhile, Techismo covers the general beat of music delivery technologies, among many others. Thus, the Copyright Royalty Board’s decision to increase Internet royalties to the point where small, independent Internet radio stations (just the kind we like!) would no longer be able to survive became not just a matter of newsworthiness, but a matter of social responsibility. So I began working on a pre-launch editorial that would inform any readers who stumbled upon my blog.

Urging people to contact their congressmen (congresspeople? yech!) er, congressional representatives and so on seemed like the least I could do. The effort would support an excellent cause, even if reaching instant readership for the piece itself was a longshot.

So next thing I knew, I was investigating blogging software. If you’re in the same position, I can recommend this Blog Software Chart to allow you to compare features across packages. There’s also a similar chart provided by the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. Or, you can take my word for it and go straight to the Wordpress site.

This is not a full-fledged review, so I’m simply going to let you have a look for yourself (I have nothing at stake here) and tell you that Wordpress does just about everything you could want it to do and is well supported with plugins and extensions. Also, there are several plugins for Mozilla Firefox that allow you to post from your browser. (You do use Firefox, don’t you? If not, click here.)

What’s more, installation is a snap if your web hosting service happens to have a script that does it for you, like mine. All I did was go to my cPanel login, select Fantastico under the heading Plugins/Addons, then select Wordpress from a list of blog software, tell Fantastico where I wanted it installed, and that was it. I was up and running. It actually takes more time to read about it than to do it.

I’ve also since noticed that upgrading will be even simpler. When I clicked through to confirm the exact sequence of steps mentioned above, I found that Fantastico was already telling me that there was a more recent version of Wordpress available and all I have to do is click on the supplied link to install the upgrade. My individual sites are listed in the Fantastico panel with the versions of Wordpress I have installed. Talk about easy!

But just as important for me, Wordpress is free, and that part won’t change. It’s covered by the GNU General Public Licensing agreement, so even if the current band of developers decide to abandon the project, someone else (maybe even you!) can pick it up and run with it. What’s more, since the source code is publicly available, you are free to alter it as you wish (not high on my personal priority list, thank you, but for some this is key!).

Another item not to be overlooked is the wealth of user support for Wordpress. In fact, browsing through the support pages of the Wordpress site, you might easily think you were dealing with a commercial package. Then there’s Lorelle’s site devoted specifically to Wordpress, and so on. The product really has user-community support. There’s even at least one book on the package.

So all in all, if you’re still hand-coding web pages (and God bless you if you are–this site is for you!) but need to crank out a blog as well, Wordpress gets my vote for the way to do it. It’s also versatile enough that you can eventually give up the hand coding if that’s your interest, but if you’re like me, website design can give a sense of hands-on satisfaction not unlike, say, woodworking.

And there’s so much less sawdust.