Linux and website design

So you want to develop your website using Linux and you?re not sure if you’ll find the right tools you might need. Don’t worry, this article will get you rolling in no time.
There’s not such a large array of tools available for Linux website development, but the ones already here are doing a good job so far. Take Aptana Studio for example. It includes capabilities to build web applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript and is totally free. Kompozer would be a second option if you wish for someting WYSIWYG.
If however you’d like something old-school, code-ready, try Quanta Plus. It also works great for editing files directly over FTP. VIM, Bluefish, SciTE and gedit they all have CSS and HTML/PHP syntax highliting.
There’s a tool for all your needs when it comes to webdesign in Linux. Create your images with GIMP or Inkscape, create image maps with KImageMapEditor and check for broken links with KLinkStatus.
As for content management systems, you can use a large variety of CMS’s, from WordPress to Drupal to Joomla – all open-source, all with a decent background of usage behind them.
While GIMP and Inkscape can be very useful in creating your images, one of the best tools in batch-manipulating them is ImageMagick. The commands available in ImageMagick can convert, resize, watermark, edit images without the need of an X server. So if you have a lot of images to process and they’re already uploaded on the server, just use SSH and convert them using ImageMagick. Most servers offer ImageMagick capabilities.
Let’s say for example you have three folders on your servers: london website design
To edit the width of the images in the third folder, to a

cd design

then

mogrify -resize 800 *

This will set the width of all the image files in that folder to 800px, while keeping aspect ratio. When you have to deal with 4GB of images that need downloading, converting and re-uploading, SSH and ImageMagick cand be both a real time-saver.
If you have a HTML-only website, you can craft a script to monitor a certain folder for new images, then convert them all to a specific size. This way, you can bluk upload them to that folder and not worry about pre-processing. Let the server do the work for you.