Five Programs I Will Eventually Donate $20 To

I finally fixed my layout woes.  After I had diagnosed the problem (bloody IE and its bloody standards noncompliance *grumble grumble* do you have any idea how long I defended you against Firefox *grumble grumble* how about showing a little loyalty here) I was able to fix the whole problem by passing my entire web directory through an XTML cleaner-upper.  Which reminds me that this project would absolutely not have happened without the following.  I hereby pledge $20 to each of them “in the indefinite future, when I have the money to spend”, because I’ve gotten that much use and more out of them and I am feeling in a profoundly appreciative mood to people who save me time at the moment.

1. NVU – The last web editor I’ll ever use.  It doesn’t have everything I need, but it has 99% of it, and it beats the heck out of notepad.
2. HTMLTrim/Tidy (half to each — HTMLTrim is a GUI interface to Tidy without which I would have had to actually WORK at getting the problem fixed) — The aforementioned automated pretty-print and HTML scrubbing program.  Saved me from having to write gawk scripts to do it for me, which is probably worth four hours of my time.
3. Eclipse – My IDE of choice for this project.  Someday I’ll figure out how to do GUI design the on you, too.  In the meantime, you’re almost as cool as NetBeans and, in my personal experience, more stable.
4. Filezilla – A bog-standard FTP client, except free.
5. Paint.net — Photoshop, on a budget of “free”, for people who have less artistic talent than an avante garde artiste who outsources his creative efforts to housepets.  (A hearty thanks to the person who suggested it to me.)  As to why I don’t use GIMP: I just don’t bloody understand HOW to start using that application.  Paint.net is literally as easy to use as MSPaint, my former image editor of choice.