Open Source and Free Software
More or less by accident we started using Open Source and Free Software. Being fed up with the (aggressive) annoyances of companies like Microsoft, HP and Norton we now are completely converted and look for Open Source Software first when we need an application.
Some Programs are extremely good and have large user- and development Groups. In no particular order we have a list on this page of Software Source, User-Groups and Tutorials. Although all this is free and gratis, you can make donations to one or the other Group if you can and will afford it. Obviously people with the right skills can work on these projects as well.
An interesting project is SELF. On their website they write: “SELF (Science, Education and Learning in Freedom) is an international project aiming to provide a platform for the collaborative sharing and creation of free educational and training materials on Free Software and Open Standards”. On their website you can find different materials to use software.
If you want to make a Tutorial or Presentation yourself, Wink is a very nice tool. On Wink’s website is a sample presentation made with Wink. A Tutorial for this program can be found here.
Instead of a Tutorial you might want to create a Help File. A simple programme to this is Shalom Help Maker. Have a look at What is it? on this site.
With Open Source software a number of free packages to create your own Websites or Blogs are available. As soon as you want to make some changes in the templates you want to use, you will probably need some knowledge of CSS. On this Belgium site is a Course HTML and CSS (Nederlands only). For an English Tutorial on CSS you can use this link.
Our first attempt to built a website was with Joomla. This is a very powerful CMS (Content Management System) with lots of users and support. At a certain moment we decided that for our purpose the package contained too much and help was scattered too much over various websites. The software is good though and in the mean they might have better documentation. Looking at a more simple solution we found Wordpress. Within 10 minutes the software was downloaded and running. Using it is very intuitive and it is also easy to find in the help-file information and answers to your questions. This site is build with Wordpress. If you want to know more about either software packages, you can have a look at:
Joomla.org is the main site. Whilst we used the German language we found the best help at Filmanleitungen, Communities at Joomla.de, Joomlaportal.ch, EasyJoomla, JoomlaDasBuch, JoomlaBook. A English tutorial is at Screenbooks and templates can be downloaded at Joomla24.
For Wordpress we generally use only two sites Wordpress.org and Wordpress-Deutschland.org.
The GIMP
A long list of Open Software for Windows can be found on Scourgeforge.