Let’s face it, many of the today’s website owners and even system administrators are not as comfortable with code, scripts, and command line tools as the generation that come before them. Some may struggle with cloud services like Amazon S3 because of difficult and sometimes time-consuming command line programs.

CrossFTP is an FTP client, but among its features is built-in support for Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront. With it you can upload, download, perform backups, modify metadata, create schedules, and synchronize content with your servers.

The best part of all is that CrossFTP is a graphical client that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers while still providing access to both your remote server and your Amazon S3 remote storage. CrossFTP is free, and Amazon S3 support works out of the box, but there is also a “Pro” version that provides added features. It is available for download from the project’s website.

Photo Source: CrossFTP

Continue reading: Manage Amazon S3 storage with CrossFTP

Domain Name Grabber is a free widget for OS X that lets you quickly and easily research domain names. Simply type in your idea and click “Go.” The widget supports dozens of extensions.

One might argue that there are online tools out there that provide better functionality. That’s definitely true, but Domain Name Grabber sits right on your desktop. You can even configure Expose on Leopard to open the widget upon moving your mouse over any corner of the screen. For the price of free, I’m not complaining.

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Coda is a lightweight HTML editor for the Mac that not only lets you write HTML, but can do quite a bit more. It has a built-in FTP client, preview mode, dedicated stylesheet editor, spell check, and downloadable plugins.

While Coda is undoubtedly one of the best OS X HTML editors out there, it isn’t free at $99. A free trial download is available, though. The all-in-one nature of the application can save a busy web developer quite a bit of time, however.

If you can’t swallow the high price of Coda, a lower-cost alternative is Espresso. For the price of free, one can do basic editing with Smultron.

Sadly, there is no free replacement for Coda. But hey, who said professional web development is cheap?

Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Coda: An FTP client and HTML editor in one

In the hopefully unlikely event that you are unable to access your website, the first thing you should check is your own network connection. You may find that you cannot access any websites. If that is not the case, there is a network problem between your computer and your server.

Normally, your computer must connect through several different connected locations before reaching the destination of a website. With traceroute, you can follow that path to see if there is a problem along the way that might explain connectivity problems. In Windows, run traceroute by opening a command window. Click “Run” and type “cmd”. Then type the command:

tracert domain.com

In Linux and Mac OS X you basically follow the same procedure in a terminal window but type the command as:

traceroute domain.com

There are two things to look for: 1. Sites that take a long time to connect (measured in milliseconds), and 2. Sites that do not connect at all (usually displayed as an *).

Photo Source: Flickr

Continue reading: Monitoring Connectivity with Traceroute

There are a lot of free FTP clients out there for the Mac, but my favorite is Cyberduck. Boasting a great user-interface and support for a wide variety of protocols, it’s a good alternative to the popular but expensive Transmit 3.

The open source software has a number of features that sets it apart from the pack. It works with Amazon’s S3 storage service, supports Growl for system notifications, integrates with a number of editors, and allows for advanced transfer settings using regular expressions. It also has the ability to integrate directly into OS X.

Builds are available for both PowerPC and Intel processors. Popular alternatives to CyberDuck include FileZilla and Classic FTP.

Photo | Cyberduck.ch

Continue reading: FTP files for free in OS X with Cyberduck

Question: I downloaded a script that I want to install on my website, but the file extension is tar.gz. What is it, and what do I do with it?

Answer: That file extension, .tar.gz means that the file has been doubly compressed with both TAR and GZIP. These are both common Unix and Linux programs that have better compression ratios than the typical Windows ZIP files. All you need to uncompress the file is the right software.

If you are running a dedicated server, just upload the file and then run the following command:

tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz

This will extract the file’s contents and preserve any directories inside.

If you are using a shared hosting account and do not have SSH access, you will need to extract the files onto your local computer and then upload them. For Windows, you can download a free and open source application called 7-Zip, which handles tar, zip, gzip, rar, and a host of others. For Mac OS X, try GUI Tar, which is also free of charge.

Continue reading: Linux File Compression