For hardware, I have a 15" MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.6.8 and a 3rd gen iPod Touch running iOS 5.1.1.

I’ve used a few different programs over the years along for writing web pages in addition to hand-coding. In the mid 1990s I shared a virtual domain with a friend so we could put up personal pages and that’s when I started learning how to code HTML, JavaScript, and Perl. That previous domain is where I started a site for my chemistry classes around 2001 until I switched in 2004 to DreamHost for hosting the site and they have been wonderful. Programs I’ve used in addition to using a text editor to hand-code web pages:

I never devoted enough time to learning Dreamweaver and the site soon became a mishmash of code. Finally, I wanted a program that was something in-between doing everything for me and a text editor. I also wanted something that had numerous prepackaged themes since although I can do HTML and basic CSS, I’m terrible with page layout design. In June of 2011 I started using RapidWeaver which does the heavy lifting as far as basic page layout and themes are concerned along with file management while allowing me to add my own HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I have a number of excellent O’Reilly books I use for reference.

For the lecture podcasts, I use Camtasia to capture and audio annotate my lectures which were created using Microsoft Office 2011 PowerPoint. Camtasia is wonderful and very easy to use. The Mac version doesn’t do speech-to-text like the Windows version for captioning so it’s time consuming but the process is easy to do. After I’ve captioned a podcast, I export it as a text file in the SubRip format and then use Subler to package it into the M4V container. Camtasia will create both the M4V video file and an MP4 video file that can be viewed with Flash. Finally, I use VLC media player to convert the M4V video file to the Ogg Theora format that can be viewed in browsers that support both HTML5 and the Ogg formats.

Not all of the podcasts have a Flash option because I originally used a program other than Camtasia. I am slowly rerecording those older podcasts.

Additional software I find useful:

As I tackle the Tutorials and recode the JavaScript for all of the quizzes, I’ve decided to use a JavaScript library called MathJax that helps display math properly in a web page. Here are a couple of links that discuss math and the web:

Validate XHTML