The Best Freeware of 2008 for the Fansite Owner

Though many people besides those who operate fansites will find this programs fun and helpful, this article is targeted at fansite owners. As one myself, I've found these programs particularly helpful and time saving with my fansite needs.

1. VLC

If you run a fansite for an actor or actress, you probably know that movie screencaps are a big draw for visitors. And if you run a Mac, the built in DVD Player won't even allow you to do a computer screenshot while it's open. Your solution: VLC. It is very basic and easy to use.

VLC is available for free download for both Macs and Windows at Videolan.org:

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

2. Rawker

VLC is great, but it saves the screencaps as PNGS and not only may PNGS not show up for users running older computers, but they take up a lot of space. Most people will go with a Coppermine photo gallery for their fansites because of its great features, etc.. but the Coppermine Gallery itself takes up some space to run AND doesn't use PNGS. I ripped my hair out opening every screenshot I'd taken in Photoshop and resaving it into JPG format until I finally found Rawker. Rawker is an awesome little program that converts batches of files into another format at one time. You can convert PNGS to JPGS, Tiffs to JPGS, JPGS to PNGS, etc... and all in record time!

Rawker can be downloaded from BrotherSoft.com:

http://www.brothersoft.com/rawker-download-144637.html

3. GifBuilder

Every big fan wants to use an avatar of their favorite person on the forums they use and what better than an animated one? GifBuilder is a simple, free, easy to use animation program. You make the various frames in Photoshop, save them as gifs, and then animate those gifs in GifBuilder!

GifBuilder can be downloaded from tucows.com:

http://www.tucows.com/preview/206447

4. Really Simple Text

Skinning and CSS are two of the key elements in awesome fansite design. And hardwoking fansite operators know there's at least a little coding to do, even with Dreamweaver or GoLive to help. And if you want to write of some stylesheets, it can be annoying with programs like TextEdit which won't allow you to save with the .css exstension. That's where "Really Simple Text" comes in. This program is exactly what the title implies. No annoying unnecessary gadgets you find in other text editors. Those things get in the way of a real coder. But Really Simple Text is great.

Really Simple Text can be downloaded from VersionTracker.com:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17754