Computing and web resources
Most of these have been employed in development of this website, and the tools it hosts, and are listed in acknowledgement of just how useful they have been (thank-you, whoever you are!):
- w3schools.com is a good one-stop-shop for getting started with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PhP, XML and much more. Note that the site is not affiliated with the W3C consortium and that some suggestions on w3schools would not be considered 'best practice' amongst web professionals (e.g. see here). But for the rest of us, w3schools can be a useful reference.
- The phase diagram movies would not have been possible without the PDF Toolkit, SWFTools, the Ming Library and especially gazbming's excellent Ming Flash Examples and Tutorials using PHP site.
- This introduction to Collapsible Menus and this Use Gmail to Reduce Word HTML File Size tip (scroll down a bit to see it) make publishing documentation online a sinch. Note, however, that the location of the 'View as HTML' option in Gmail has moved; instead click 'View' in your e-mail message to open the attachment in Google Docs, then select 'View' and 'Plain HTML' to get raw and relatively clean code that you can view with 'Page Source' or a similar browser option.
- If you want to automate plotting of MELTS results, say, but do not want to use commercial software, such as MATLABTM, then GMT may be a viable alternative. GMT is the work of Paul Wessel and Walter Smith. It is primarily a mapping program but can also be used for x-y plots, histograms and much more; a Cookbook of 30 example scripts is provided. Windows users who do not want to use DOS batch files or Cygwin might be interested in UGESCE, which is provided by Thorsten Becker. This VirtualBox Linux (Fedora) installation includes, amongst other things, a copy of GMT and a graphical user interface for GMT, called iGMT.
- Jing (for Windows and Mac) and recordMyDesktop (an optional package within many Linux distributions) are both free and easy to use software programs for taking screenshots and recording screencasts. There are other options too.