FileZilla and WinSCP- free FTP programs. Lets you look at files on your PC and web server at the same time. Looks like file manager, can easily upload and download files from/to the server. Mostly using WinSCP now because it can handle larger files.
Brothers Keeper - My genealogy program of choice. It is shareware, free to download and try out for as long as you want, but pay if you want to keep using it. My experience with version BK5 years ago was this: you get everything free except the register report. You do get to print the register report with a "key" they give you, but the program nags you about buying. Since the register report was my favorite report, I bought the program to stop the nags.
This is a sample screenshot of a fast way to navigate. It's plain, but very easy to navigate through the family members. Note how many names are on each screen. On many of the fields (even sources) I can type an = mark, and it will automatically copy my previous entry, so saves me a lot of typing and typos. It has all the normal descendant and ancestor reports, charts of all sorts, and while I'm looking at a person, I can click one button to show their pedigree chart. It works on everything from Windows 3.1 on up.
2024 update - since I wrote the above paragraph, I've upgraded to the BK7 version and am currently using Windows 8.1 Pro until all my favorite programs stop working on it. I have a Windows 10 machine, but DO NOT like Big Brother tracking every single thing I do and feeding me advertisements to boot. Still like the Brothers Keeper program as much as I did in the beginning.
Drupal - a free open source Content Management System (CMS) for web sites. A little complicated to set up, but well worth it. A lot of documentation, but simple answers are hard to find. The DescendantsOf website is a Drupal website. Instead of storing data on html pages, it stores data in SQL tables, then creates the pages on the fly based on how you've done your page layout. You can quickly change a page layout or background without re-writing every web page. It runs on my web hosting server, and apparently a lot of people use it on their home computers, too.
2024 - an update on Drupal. We migrated my fossil site from Drupal 5, to Drupal 6, then to Drupal 7, and each time the conversion got more and more complicated. D7 is reaching end of life at the end of 2024/ Jan 2025. The conversion from Drupal 6 to D7 was so complex, it took my son and I over 3 months working basically non stop to get it converted. He wasn't willing to help with the genealogy site, so it "broke" and has been broken since 2015, and even I couldn't see my site. Drupal has been moving more towards larger corporations, requiring extensive IT departments to maintain their websites. Drupal programmers get paid very well.
While I was moaning and groaning about both my websites going away, and looking at costs, it appeared that conversions of small Drupal websites was going to cost $50,000 or more, and mine is considered medium to large, conversion cost would would start around $100,000. Not going to happen. Tried WordPress, didn't let me lay out the site the way I wanted, trying to import existing pages made a mess of the url's, and they nickeled and dimed me to death. The "basic free" version of add-ons was so minimal it was basically worthless for my needs, you need the "paid Pro version" to do that. Constantly. For multiple add-ons. And pay a yearly fee. One I purchased was only good for 4 months, and if you wanted support, had to pay again. But life got better earlier this year, when I found Backdrop CMS.
Backdrop CMS - A fork of Drupal 7, but sleeker and less bloated. Being built out and Drupal modules ported over daily. The people who created this fork are targeting smaller groups, like non-profits, colleges, and hobby groups who have limited money to do a nice website, and tiny or non-existent IT departments. They were able to guide me through transferring my Drupal 7 fossil site to a new Backdrop site, and even showed me how to get my TOTALLY BROKEN GENEALOGY SITE back up and running on Backdrop, which is why you are reading this right now! I didn't lose any of my data/ images/ pages, though there was a bit of manipulation to get things in the correct place and working "my way". And don't even ask about how many hundreds of broken links after not keeping up for almost 10 years. But it was totally free except for my labor and labor of all those kind experts who assisted me. If any of my relatives want to set up a simple website that can grow as needed, I encourage you to check out the Backdrop CMS site, and join us in Office Hours on a Wednesday (it's similar to Zoom), where people show up to ask questions, and others show up to help. You'll need a paid hosting site to store your data (I could probably provide a bit of space on my server for a small sum), and a domain name, but Backdrop and the modules are free. I could even help set you up with a new site and show you how to use it. I can't even begin to describe how excited I am about Backdrop CMS and the community of helpful people I have found there!
Webtrees - this is a free web based program that is geared towards keeping up with genealogy information. Some people use it as their primary genealogy program. It can be used by extended families to let users around the world access the site and make updates, or can be populated with GEDCOM downloads from any genealogy program. Like Drupal and Backdrop, you'll need a paid hosting site to house the program and your data. With the old DescendantsOf site, I was using an applet to display the pedigree charts from my GEDCOM files, but alas, the applet is now out of date and no longer maintained. Webtrees is set up a bit differently, and not integrated into my main site, but it presents my genealogy data very well, so I have linked from the main blog section to the research/ data records section.
