Free Tools

Below is a selection of free tools and services offered by ArsDigita.

Grand Integrated Software

• the ArsDigita Community System, described in Chapter 3 of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. This contains modules for user registration, grouping of users by company or interest, discussion, classified ads, news, calendar announcements, banner ad serving, ecommerce, and more. If you're impatient, you can start with this document explaining how to build various kinds of Web services using the toolkit. The ArsDigita Community System is available in two flavors, one which uses Tcl for its presentation layer, and a 100% Java version which can be run in any J2EE compatible servlet environment. Both versions can be downloaded from the ACS Repository.

Simpler standalone software

• a catalog shopping system that bills credit cards in real-time via the Cybercash system: ArsDigita Shoppe.
• to collect survey/quiz data from users (see the ArsDigita Quizze page to download the software.)
• a system to produce daily, weekly, and monthly server log reports from multiple Web services on the same computer: ArsDigita Reporte

For Nerds Only

Server Monitors

• Cassandrix (Unix monitor)
• ArsDigita Keepalive
• ArsDigita Enhanced Keepalive (improved diagnostics, web interface, AOLserver 3.0 compatible)
• MTA Monitor (SMTP monitor)
• ACS Monitoring, a module that is part of the ACS, includes:
  • Cassandracle (Oracle monitor)
  • Watchdog (error log monitor)
• Watchdog server (standalone error log monitor, deprecated)
  
  (the integrated usage of these products (along with Cassandracle and Watchdog) is described in http://eveander.com/arsdigita/asj/arsdigita-server-architecture)

  Database Connectivity

• An Oracle driver for AOLserver. This lets you use the world's most popular RDBMS with the world's highest performance Web/DB integration tool.

  Web Connectivity

• The ArsDigita AOLserver 3 distribution contains patches that have not yet made it into the general AOLserver release.
• Our mod_aolserver Apache module lets you run the ACS with the Web's most popular server.
• Our AOLserver ISAPI Filter for IIS lets you run the ACS with Microsoft's Internet Information Server.

  Miscellaneous

• Traffic Jamme (load tester)
• Redirecte An HTTP redirect server. This software is free and runs on AOLserver 2.x and 3.x.
• Site Profiler (scans a site for server errors, broken links, and performance problems)

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Services

If you don't have the time, talent or inclination to configure and support your own installation of the ACS, you can still enjoy a few of the benefits by using some of our free services:

• WimpyPoint: build and use a slide presentation in WimpyPoint from any Web browser anywhere in the world; replaces desktop bloatware such as Microsoft PowerPoint. If the freight plane carrying your laptop crashes into the UPS truck delivering your PowerPoint slides, you will still be able to give your presentation anywhere in the world that you can find a connected Web browser.

• Spam: let users add themselves to a private mailing list to which only the administrator (you) can send email.

• BooHoo: let users to contribute related links to your pages; administrator (you) can determine which pages can have links added, can delete irrelevant and/or offensively commercial links, and can even blacklist links with specific text, e.g. "*shamelessmaterialism.com*". The BooHoo system also works its way through the links every night or two, weeding out unreachable links (in a recoverable fashion).

• Loquacious: collect user-contributed comments on any of your pages.

• Lusenet: run a public or private discussion forum for your web site (either in Question-and-Answer or threaded discussion format). Users can sign up for email alerts to be notified of contributions to the discussion.

• Clickthrough.net: find out exactly how many people follow links from your site to sites that you recommend, without once having to analyze your webserver's "referer header log." The service redirects the user to the requested URL, and then generates a nice report for you.

Our software is generally copyright by ArsDigita or the author. It is licensed to the public under the GNU General Public License, available from http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.

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