I’ve found some excellent tools for work recently. The best part is that they’re all either exteremely inexpensive or free.
The one I’ve been geeking out with the most lately is a web server log analysis tool. A while ago I enabled logging on the work server to see where people were coming from. Unfortunately, as we’ve begun hosting more and more sites, the logs have gotten too big to easily go through by hand. I did a bit of poking around and found an amazingly cool analyzer called AWStats over at Sourceforge. It’s a free tool that generates advanced web, FTP and mail server access statistics. It took me a few hours to get everything configured, but now it’s up and running and it looks pretty good.
The other program is called AquaTint, and it’s from Stick Software. It’s an amazing image manipulation program that uses a combination of curve detection and masking to create 3-d highlights, shadows and transparency on 2-d images. It’s really inexpensive ($15 for personal or $50 for commercial use) and we’ve already used it here at the office to enhance a web button for a client…
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The final thing I’m going to plug for today is some shareware fax software. It’s by Smile Software and it’s called Page Sender. It’s possibly the most full featured fax software I’ve run into, and it’s under $30. Plus, they’ve got a bulk discount thing going on, so the more copies you buy, the cheaper it gets… We got seven copies for the office. That may seem like overkill, but there’s a good reason. Networked printer sharing lets us send faxes from any of our computers to the one computer plugged in to the phone line. I’ve priced out network fax software before and it tends to run around $500. We just got the same thing for less than $200.
Of course there’s a catch. The server analysis software will run on pretty much any platform, but the last two are Mac OS X only.