Have you ever looked in a real DIYers toolbox? Or maybe even the toolbox of someone who's pretty handy, but who has a messy streak? So all the hammers might be together, or all the screwdrivers will be together, maybe even with some sort of arrangement as to Phillips or Torx heads... but there is almost inevitably, in some corner compartment of the toolbox, or some drawer (and maybe several of them, even) an area set aside for what amounts to a whole lot of miscellaneous "everything" bits. These pieces might logically be found with hammers, or dry wall tools, or about a million other things... But they aren't quite the same, and they aren't always used in the same manner. So they end up in a big pile, that you hope stays manageable enough you can find them again.

This week's Linux switch, the last of the web development stuff for a bit, is like that compartment. These are all nifty little tools, and great when you need them. But they are mostly small, and have a strange distinction of not always being associated with any one particular type of task.

Some, like FTP programs and plugins, are associated with other programs. But what if you love your editor and hate the uploading functions it has? Image maps can be a nuisance to set up, and we think that's probably part of the reason why you don't see a lot of them. But sometimes, they just fit the project at hand.

And you know how we said we'd go easy on the editors? Seriously, we meant it. However, there's one more editing tool we want to mention that's probably beyond most casual users, but will make Linux users who want to develop SWF9 applications pretty happy. We are not covering it in any great depth, because we are not any sort of whizzes with Flash development -- but we have to point it out. It's been a long time coming!

So welcome to our odds and ends compartment of web tools!

It's been 3 years in the making, but FileZilla 3.0 has finally been released. There aren't a lot of new features in this excellent free FTP client. But the code base has been rewritten from the ground up. And here's the best thing. It's now cross-platform. FileZilla 3.0 runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Because this is a total redesign, FileZilla 3 installs to a new default directory. That means you can install FileZilla 3 without uninstalling FileZilla 2. It also means that your settings will not automatically be imported, but there's an easy solution:

• Select "Edit" from the menu
• Click "Import"
• Browse to your Filezilla 2 folder (probably in your Program Files directory).
• Select the file titled FileZilla.xml. This is probably the only file you'll see anyway.

Now your site manager data including FTP sites and passwords should be imported. If you're a Windows user and haven't had a problem with FileZilla 2, there's probably not much reason to upgrade. The file transfer window has new tabs to display queued files, failed transfers, and successful transfers. And that's about it. But future development on FileZilla will likely focus on this version, so it might eventually be a good idea to upgrade.

Over at sourceforge.net, my favorite FTP client, Filezilla (portable) 2.2.27 has been released for download. I love the desktop based FTP client that does a great job on a quick and dirty basis. The portable edition is even better than the desktop installed version for a mobile pro on the go. It is small enough to fit on any USB flash drive (Filezilla portable edition takes up a whopping 3MB), and is full featured enough to manage all your websites from one portable app, anywhere you feel like FTPing your server. Oh, did I mention Filezilla is free and available. So go FTP yourself the Filezilla portable FTP client which can be used on Windows or on Linux (with Wine).

The fine folks at PortableApps.com have put together an excellent Portable Apps Suite that bundles eight essential Windows apps that you can take with you on a USB drive. The included apps are Firefox (web browser), Thunderbird (e-mail client), OpenOffice.org (office suite), AbiWord (word processor), NVU (web site editor), Sunbird (calendar and tasks manager), FileZilla (FTP client), and Gaim (IM).  The suite comes in two flavors: Standard, which includes all of the above and fits on a 256MB drive, and Light, which omits OpenOffice.org and fits in 128MB. Brilliant.