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Run-Down began as an experiment into the world of web authoring. The learning curve was greatly decreased by the plentitude of helpful sites that are available. Some are tutorials, some are great tools. Hopefully, someone will find these links as useful as I did.
Tutorials
 AbleDesign Web Design Tutorials Written by myself and covering a wide range of beginner to intermediate design skills. Enjoy!
HTML Goodies
A lot of Question and Answer type tutorials. Wide range of levels, but written for the novice. Also an excellent selection of discussion forums.
Teresa Torres' Internet Tutorial
An excellent beginner's HTML tutorial.
D.J. Quad's Ultimate HTML Site
Another very good HTML resource.
HTML Station
A variety of information about HTML and then some.
Creating A Homepage
The first HTML info I ran across. A good place to begin.
DHTML Lab
A fix for a Netscape 4.x resize bug when using DHTML scripts.
Virtual PROMOTE OK, you've read through all these sites and you are now a master web designer. Now what? Promote it! Great guides to search engines, with discussion forums, site feedback, expert tips, etc.
Boogie Jack's Tutorials and free stuff, with an entertaining style.
Utilities
Arachnophilia
Excellent HTML Editor. If nothing else, get it just to read the inspirational CareWare
defintion in the About section. There really are genuinely good people.
gifcruncher.com
Reduce the size of your GIF images up to 90% for free; make those pages load faster. I've used it for every graphic on this site.
gifoptimizer.com
Another free GIF compressor, reductions up to 75%. Offers color reduction and re-sizing. Content is king, but graphics sure look nice.
3D Text Maker
Excellent resource offered by gifoptimizer. Near limitless options!
gifwizard.com
Analyze your overall site. Mine started at 34% efficiency, now it is 98% (would be 99-100% if not for one uncompressed image).
Free Stuff
Evan Delay's Free Internet
Ever wonder how you ran across a site in the first place? Well, I don't have a clue how I found this one! It's the one that got me started on this whole endeavor. A great site with dozens of well categorized free services, although the site is currently unavailable...
freebyte.com
More free services, tools, etc., with very thorough descriptions.
Kevin's Animated GIF's
Very nice selection; you should recognize some of mine.
Cliff's Perl Script Collection
Well written free CGI scripts; easy to install.
CGI Resource
Hundreds and hundreds of scripts, written for a variety of platforms, categorized for easy browsing, and including reviews.
DHTML Scripts Free Dynamic HTML scripts from Dynamic Drive. They're the source of my old Slide In and Drop Down Site Map menus, which I am no longer using. Adds a very nice look, but sometimes causes problems with older (and newer -- Microsoft's Internet Explorer, for example) browsers.
ClipArtConnection Extensive selection of animations and clip art.
Web Hosting
Here are the web hosts that I have experience with:
FutureQuest Run-Down's new and permanent home! Unmatchable for customer support, honesty, reliability, features, and a sense of community. I am very impressed with all that FutureQuest brings to the web hosting environment and highly recommend them to anyone.
MassLinux/Linuxbox I moved to Masslinux from addr, and for the most part was quite happy. Excellent combination of features, service, reliability, and pricing, although there were some problems with the server going down for extended periods. Not to mention the company unexpectedly going out of business...
Addr.com My first paid host. Inexpensive, great packages, but my impression with their service deteriorated rapidly. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they stopped answering customer service inquiries, or changing customer files and not following through on promises to change them back, or was it the daily downtime that exceeded their annual claims?!
WBS.net The first FREE host I used. No banner ads, only a small ad at the bottom of each page, and unlimited space. However, far too much down time.
WebJump My second FREE host. Excellent service, 25 MB space, very large frame based banner ad which causes some search engine problems (although they appear to have that straightened out). One of the quicker servers for the freebies.
VirtualAve Seeing a pattern here? My third FREE host... 20 MB space, as I recall. Most importantly, offers a working cgi-bin as well as Server Side Includes (very rare for a free host). You must put up with a medium sized banner on each page which loads fairly slow. Good service, with a fairly quick server and excellent up-time. The best of the free hosts, from what I've seen.
CyberCities I never actually used this FREE host, although I do have an account with them in theory. They do not require banner ads, but they are apparently so swamped with requests that their response time is dismal, to say the least. It took them three weeks to write back to me with my account acceptance. Then I found my FTP password didn't work! I haven't heard back since.
CGI Scripts
And here's where I give credit to the scripts (many of them free) that I am currently using on run-down.com. Obviously, I believe that they are each the best of their type:
Links SQL This one has earned itself top-billing! Highly customizable; by the same maker as DBMan (below). Pretty difficult to install, but the end result is well worth the effort. The Run-Down running links originally used Links 2 (free for non-commerical use, $150 otherwise) but now utilize the much more powerful Links SQL package ($450).
MyCalendar A PHP/MySQL calendar that strives to be the best in every aspect -- a simple goal! Written by yours truly.
Matt Kruse's Calendar Used for quite some time on Run-Down, but replaced in 2001 by MyCalendar (above).
Dbman Database Super easy to set up and use searchable data base. Check out the Training Partner/Resource Locator and Free Monthly Contest based on it. Free for non-commercial use, $100 to register.
Birdcast Site Recommendation Script Let word of mouth be your friend. Click on "Tell a Friend" on any page to see.
Cliff's Search Engine Position Analyzer The same thing many companies charge hundreds of dollars for!
WebAdverts Banner Ad Rotator I'm still testing out some aspects, but it looks to be a keeper ($50).
AXS Logger Site Statistics. A beautiful and powerful package.
Random Quiz See my running quiz in action here.
Greetings Cute little script on the home page that greets visitors based on the time of day.
Discus Discussion Forum. See mine in action here.
Subscribe Me Mailing list. You can sign up for the Run-Down newsletter on the main page.
RobPoll Voting System. Polls are scattered throughout this site. See the Archived polls here.
Random Text and FormMail Excellent and simple scrips by Matt Wright. FormMail does pretty much what the name suggests and is behind my contest and running stories pages. Random Text powers many of the book links you see throughout the site, as well as being partially responsible for the featured sites page.
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