I recently upgraded from Mozilla 1.7.1 to Thunderbird and Firefox (email client and browser, respectively). The benefit of the upgrade is increased speed and certain features, especially in Thunderbird, that are useful (such as better search and stored searches (“all emails to and from Doug”, for instance).
Mozilla 1.7.1 is good, but a tad slow, and I have a tendency to have 10-15 windows running at the same time, with lots of tabs in each, three edit windows up at the same time, etc., etc. Since all this is essentially one application, a crash in one forced crashes in everything. Plus, modularity is preferable if you want to stay current.
All of which leaves me without the (annoying but simple) Mozilla editor. I have done all my editing either in Notetab light or in Mozilla, but it is about time I move to a better HTML editor, especially one that supports CSS. Free/cheap is nice, should be able to handle relatively simple web pages and it would be very nice it if could handle synchronization between my hard disk and my web server, as well as helping me manage my many course pages efficiently (especially nice if I could have sub-parts of courses, learning modules, that could be stored so that I did not have to make changes many places). There are lots of them out there – any suggestions?
Of course, I could create a blog for each course. I could also do everything in Blackbored, our lame courseware option. But I like straight HTML and open access to courses. I could also install Macromedia (we have a license at the school) but that is overkill for me, I just don’t want to learn all that. So, what to do?