I am running Ubuntu 10.04. What is the best software for authoring websites in this nix? BTW, I am fairly new to linux so any info on exactly how to get it, set it up, etc. would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Your basic text editor like vim, emacs, gedit, kate, nano, etc.

However, if you must use something graphical, I believe quanta and bluefish are the two main tools cited.

WordMaster,

It really depends on what it is you want to achieve.

If you're up for an all-singing, all-dancing website, and you're Ok with coding and SQL, then a plain ol' text editor is your friend. Maybe one with syntax highlighting (which pretty much all GUI text editors do these days).

If you're looking to build a simple site and you haven't got much/any experience of any languages, HTML or programming, then something graphical like Kompozer might be a good option for you.

Give a few a shot and see what suits your way of working most.

--thymox.

Thank you to both of you. I generally use a text editor to write web sites, but in windoze I had a graphical editor I could use for fancy looking quickies. It could pretty much handle css, tables, etc. very quickly just by placing stuff on the wysiwyg screen. This is handy on sites I do for free that need to work well and look good, but where I can't spend the time to do them freehand. I am looking for something like that in linux.

I have tried a couple of windoze programs under wine, but with very little success.

Kompozer may do what you need

Kompozer ,flash for linux , Dreamweaver works with wine sometimes i make .gifs and headers with programs like gimp or lives

It is not quite clear whether you are, and should be, asking directly about software to edit html, in which case bluefish, kompozer, quanta, kate (and possibly Tea) are the kind of thing that you are asking about. It is easy enough to grab them from repositories and try them out, although in the case of the programs written for the kde environment running them will entail running some kde libraries (not an issue, unless your development box is heavily memory constrained).

On the other hand, it could be that your needs are best served by something like a CMS (content management system). There would clearly be a learning curve in using a CMS, but ongoing maintenance and updates could become so much easier that it would be worthwhile.

Again, it is unclear whether you are asking for advice on how to set up your development system or advice on how to set up a webserver. Probably the latter - if so, you should have a look for tutorials on 'linux webserver' or 'Lamp stack' and come back with specific questions. (Note; many tutorials don't seem to even mention security, and if you have read a tutorial or two and not even thought about security, you should try something like 'webserver security' as a search term, or ask specific questions. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.)

I use the SeaMonkey suite (using the Composer application). I use Filezilla to upload the files to the server.
By the way, the SeaMonkey suite/Filezilla is the same for windows as is in Linux so whether I use either OS I can easily edit my webpages using the same authoring tools.

that all depends on the age of the person answering
i learned using win NOTEPAD.EXE

so some will say "visualize your code "
just "see it " as you type in a very basic text editor

others will say use a wysiwyg editor
like the eclipse IDE

me i am in between gedit or Emacs

For HTML, Quanta is my favorite GUI editor for Linux, because of the built-in preview function, but it is kind of clunky. In fact, every GUI HTML editor I've tried for Linux has been kind of clunky.

One thing I miss from my Windows days is HTMLKit (the only other thing I miss is The Semware Editor, the best text editor ev-vuh). HTMLKit is a darned good program--small, fast, and versatile. I wish they'd port it to Linux.