I thought it was worth noting down the tools I've discovered along the way that make my life as a web developer more bearable - it might be useful to you, possibly, if you've found this page, since I've gradually accumulated these tools over a couple of years.

1) WinSCP

I've used a few FTP programs over the years, but for reliability, flexibility and power WinSCP is the best. It just works, it's free, and doesn't get in my face about the fact that it works, which is a quality I appreciate in a program.

2) Paint.NET

For me this was something like a holy grail. It's a simple but powerful graphics program, it can open PSD files, and it's free! It took me a long time to find this. I spent a long time using Corel Paint Shop Pro which is good but limited (and not free), and I was experimenting with the trial version of Photoshop CS4 recently. Photoshop kept crashing my primitive replacement desktop machine, which was frustrating because I don't even want to do anything complicated most of the time, I just need to be able to read PSD files that designers send me, and to create and edit (very) simple graphics myself. I found it too hard to work out how to use the GIMP, which again is a much more powerful tool than I actually need. Paint.NET, I love you, thank you for existing.

3) Notepad

I know it's ridiculous, but I do more work in notepad than any other program. See above about the not-getting-in-my-face. I've tried more rich-featured editors and they just don't work for me. I don't want curly braces inserted for me, thanks, I'll just end up deleting them and putting them in again myself. I don't want formatting preserved when I copy and paste text. I don't want reminders that I'm saving a rich-text file as plain text (thanks, Wordpad) and I want to be able to go to directly to a line number when I'm debugging an error (thanks again, Wordpad). I can see the benefits of working in an IDE but I would need a different one for every language. I've tried a lot of code editors and I keep coming back to notepad, so if anyone has a great editor that they work in please let me know, I'll probably try it out, and probably go back to notepad again.

4) Firebug (Mozilla Firefox Plugin)

Another life-saver. Before I discovered this I used to give myself such headaches trying to identify page elements and styles and going "View Source" a hundred times an hour. I had tried Firefox's Developer Toolbar which has a lot of really annoying quirks and too much information. Firebug is the best. You can even debug JavaScript. How useful is that?

5) Drupal

I wasn't even going to mention Drupal because it was so obvious. 90% of the sites I build are based on Drupal. It's not so much an out-of-the-box CMS (like, say, Joomla or Wordpress or many others) as a basic framework and a giant, ever-evolving hodgepodge of tools for web developers. It's very flexible and easy to develop for, and it has an extremely lively and helpful community. The only downside for me is the pace at which it evolves.

6) SugarSync

I suppose there are many equivalent online data backup and synchronization services, such as Dropbox (which I also use), but SugarSync is the one that saved my life recently when I decided to pour most of my mug of coffee into my laptop. It's really easy to use and you get 2GB of free storage space (and 250MB extra per referral) which is more than enough for my purposes. I don't need to backup all my music and personal stuff but I really, really need to back up all my sites and work-related files, and 2GB is plenty. If you ever need more, well, Dropbox give you 2GB free too...and there are others.

However, I suspect it won't be long before Google drop the bomb on SugarSync and the rest of them by offering practically unlimited free online backup. They already give me 7 or 8 GB just for gmail, enabling me never to delete any mail, ever. When they offer this service there will be no reason for SugarSync to exist so I hope they manage to get themselves bought out before that happens.

7) OpenOffice

A no-brainer. A full-featured, free, open source office software suite compatible with all Microsoft Office documents. Not much more to say about it, really.

8) 7-Zip

I waahed and booed when WinZip wasn't "free" any more. Then I laughed when I realized it didn't matter.

9) Evernote

This one is a bit of a crossover between work and personal life. It's an online synchronization service like SugarSync, except that instead of focusing on file storage, Evernote is all about note-taking and cross-referencing and being an integrated repository for whatever random thoughts, photographs, notes and suchlike [ass through your head on a normal day and are usually, without such software, lost forever. So now, when I find a useful scrap of code online, or I think of a story idea, or see a cool piece of graffiti, instead of bookmarking it or making a "mental note" or other equally futile attempts at memorization, I enter it into Evernote, tag it, and it synchronizes with any devices I have.

This is another service, however, that will be rendered obsolete if and when Google get into online backup & synchronization, because Google's search capabilities automatically make everything indexed and searchable anyway. But for now, with Evernote on my iPhone, I can let my gooey grey physical memory linger on important things like the colours of leaves and the plots of science fiction films while everything else is externalized digitally.

10) My iPhone

Seriously. How did I ever get by without it? I'll probably want the legendary Googlephone when and if it appears, but for now, this little piece of technology has turned me into a walking office wherever I am. It makes me instantly professional. The only problem is that I neve rhave to unplug. I have any spare time, anywhere, and I'm usually fiddling with the iPhone instead of gazing into the distance thinking deep thoughts. But it's worth it. I can be in Sainsbury's, 30 miles from my computer, with my family, trying to stop Joshua from stealing other shoppers' trolleys, and I can take a client's phone call, log in to their website, debug an error, edit and FTP new files to the web server, then email or Skype them to let them know it's all OK again. They never have to know the true amateurishness of my operation.

That's all for now, but I do intend to blog again about useful tools for web developers as and when I come across them, and I'm sure there are loads out there that could make my life a lot easier. If any developers are reading this: I code at the moment mostly in PHP, MySQL, HTML, Javascript, CSS, but I'm also an experienced .NET developer and MSSQL semi-guru, so if you've any (free) productivity tools you want to share, I'd love to know.

EDIT: I missed the most obvious one of all.

11) GOOGLE

It's like saying "You know what's really great? Air." Without Google I literally would not have a job. Not only do I constantly use their FREE tools like Gmail and Calendar, but without Google's revolutionization of search I would never have had access to the information I needed to do my work. I don't own ANY computer books, I didn't do a computer science degree and I have never done a computer course of any kind. When I don't know something, I search for it, and I can only imagine what kind of hell that would be if Google didn't exist and I had to rely on Yahoo or Ask Jeeves or whatever. Google even searches my own hard drive better and faster than Windows search, even AFTER Microsoft have put loads of effort into improving Windows search.

I think I've made a pretty good case for switching to Linux. I don't even play PC games any more. But that's another topic and shall be told another time.