TechNest

NerdBird's Nest was founded in January 1998, though the domain was registered a month earlier (I got it as Christmas present!). I usually refer to the version now as version 4.x, as the one released in January was 4.0. Older versions - of which some didn't even have the NerdBird name - were found on other domains.

Microsoft FrontPage 2000

I had been working in Claris Homepage 1.0 for a couple of months with my first homepage, when I encountered FrontPage 1.1 on my NT Server 4.0 CD-ROM. Being a Microsoftophiliac by nature (or whatever it's called), I swiftly changed to FrontPage, except for the frames handling, which HomePage at that time was better at. Then came FrontPage 98 and now FrontPage 2000m and I do 95% of my homepage editing in FrontPage 2000, as this is simply a great editor, with the well-known Office touch, which makes me feel so much at home... It's not still a fully-fledged Office program (for instance, the F4 key doesn't work in FP as it does in Word, and in the Open dialog, open one document can be selected at a time...). It also likes to create lots of FrontPage/IE specific code, so you have to be careful and now the details of FrontPage. Personally, I don't think anybody without a basic knoweledge of HTML should be allowed to try FrontPage or another WYSIWYG HTML-editor and even less to publish a webpage... but maybe I'm just old-fashioned here.
Price: Commercial Product in the Office 2000 suite.

Microsoft Notepad

sometimes a plain text editor is simply the best for that quick'n'dirty update - and writing HTML code by hand gives a better understanding of how the Web works.
Price: Free with Windows NT.

Microsoft Word 2000

is my favourite editor, but not the one I use for HTML-editing in general. But most of the larger portions of text at this site started their life as a .doc file. My biggest complaints about Word 2000 is that copy'n'paste from Word 2000 to FrontPage 2000 generates a lot of unnecessary Office/IE specific HTML-code, which I must either remove by hand or copy from Word to notepad and then to FrontPage :-(
Price: Commercial Product in the Office 2000 suite.

Microsoft ActiveX Control Pad

is a strange but useful little program for writing ActiveX pages... and it's free! It works a bit like Webmania - you point and click to tell the program what you want, and then it creates the HTML- and VBScript code for you. Pretty soon, I discovered that it was often easier to manually insert the VBScript thingies - but when you just don't exactly remember the Object-ID for a Control Button, the Control Pad is great to have.
Price: Free.

Micrografx Picture Publisher 8

I got a demo-CD with Micrografx' Graphics Suite 2. A 30-day trial, that is. After 15 days, I bought the package... Picture Publisher 7 was an excellent graphics manipulating program, and the version 8 is really improved. I neither can nor will pay for PhotoShop, and in most cases, I don't think it's necessary. Picture Publisher 8 does all what you need and then a whole lot more. A new version has just come out under another name, but I haven't tried it out yet.
Price: about 400 dkr. Came free with a computer magazine some months ago, when the new version was released.

Micrografx Simply 3D 3

Version 2 is another member of the Graphics Suite 2 family. Fun to play with and makes impressive 3D-scenes. Unfortunately, it makes my Pentium 100 a bit exhausted now and then. I've used both version 2 & 3, and both are great - though version 3 of course is better (but requires a fast PC).
Price: about 400 dkr. 

Alchemy Mindworks' GIF Construction Set 32

A cheap little GIF animator. Shareware and cheap to register. Very effective and user friendly, and in addition it has some funny - not always useful - extra features, such as scrolling LED signs and such. Fun stuff. The link points to a newer version.
Price: US $20.

Virtus VRML

I used the Virtus VRML editor to create the 3-D worlds you can find on my site. It's a bit old and saves in VRML 1.0 format, but it's fast and doesn't demand much machine power!
Price: Came free with a book I bought.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 beta 1

I like trying out new stuff, so when Microsoft released the first beta of IE 5.5, I had to try. It seems promising, but it's definitely a beta!

Lynx, Netscape & Mozilla

are two browsers I usually don't use - but Jens uses those a lot and makes sure to tell me if my page doesn't work with these.

Perl & vi

was used by my fiancée Jens Fallesen to do the counter, the guestbook script and the statistics page. I don't know Perl myself and frankly have no intention of learning it, so when Jens offered to do these scripts, I happily let him do it, as they improve my site. Then, I suppose, I must live with the fact that parts of my site has been created with vi on a UNIX-machine...


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