Eskimo North

I'm a long time and very frequent user of both MS Works database and Netscape Composer. These are older programs that eventually won't work on a new computer.

I'm happy to continue using them until that time, but are there any suggestions for newer, easy to use programs?

Yours,
Joe Spitz

I don't have any recommendations for a web WSIWIG editor since I do my web coding by hand, but with respect to a database, give MySQL a try. We use it here for quite a few things. Initially we had some stability problems, but they turned out to be stupid human tricks rather than real database problems. Once we understand what stupid human things to avoid, it's been real good for us.

My laptop (XP) came with MS Works, including Database, pre-installed, and apparently working (word processor and spreadsheet do, I haven't tried database other than simply running it for a quick test). As Bob mentioned, MySQL is also available (both on the server end and as a stand-alone install for the PC, etc.)

You might also like to check out OpenOffice(.org), which has a database feature as well as an HTML output from its "Writer" editor. Plus, it's free (GPL license).

Can it go from wmv to avi?

There is a word processor I use called Abiword, it's open sourced and runs under both Windows and Linux, and although not intended primarily as a web composer, it has the ability to write out HTML and does a reasonably good job of it. Many of the WSIWIG composers I've seen turn fifteen bytes of text into 150kbyte pages full of tags, Abiwords HTML output is reasonably lean yet still produces a page that looks like it did in the composer. So that's one thing you might like to look at.

With respect to databases, MySQL is free, complete, and reasonably reliable.