Essential Tools for Website Owners & Troubleshooters

Welcome to my WordCamp USA resource guide! As a website owner and troubleshooter, having the right utility belt makes all the difference when debugging code, optimizing content, and managing server infrastructure. Below is a curated collection of cross-platform open-source software, browser extensions, and workflow tools I rely on daily.

Text Editors & Knowledge Management

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is my primary IDE for WordPress plugin and theme development.

WordPress Schema Intelligence: Exceptional support for editing theme.json files, with auto-completion and validation for standard block theme definitions.
AI Integration: Serves as the standard environment for Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, and other AI coding tools.
Cross-Platform: Native support for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Kate Editor

Kate is a powerful multi-document editor by KDE. It’s ideal for rapid text manipulation, opening massive log files, and scratchpad editing without the weight of a full IDE.

Tabbed multi-file viewing with session saving.
Built-in terminal with instant navigation to the active file’s folder.
Extensive syntax highlighting across dozens of programming languages.

# Linux installation via Snap
snap install kate --classic

Obsidian & Markdown Tools

Obsidian: A local-first markdown note-taking app designed for personal knowledge management, site documentation, and quick reference linking. Free for personal and commercial use.
jrnl: A fast command-line journal application with options for AES encryption, ideal for keeping a dev/troubleshooting log.
MarkText: An open-source, real-time preview Markdown editor focused on speed and focus. Cross-Platform: Native support for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Color Pickers & Typography

A Most Excellent Color Picker

An open-source, modern color system tool (Live Demo | GitHub) that goes beyond traditional sRGB constraints to support the full spectrum of modern displays.

OKLCH Color Space: Perceptually uniform wide-gamut colors perfect for modern website design systems and accessible contrast calculations.
Real-Time Conversions: Simultaneously view and compare OKLCH, HWB, HSL, HSV, RGB, and HEX.

Gpick & Pastel

Gpick: Advanced desktop color picker with screen zoom, color scheme generation, and export features for CSS and GIMP palettes.
Pastel: A CLI tool for color generation, analysis, and conversion. Works great in Linux pipelines:

pastel random | pastel mix red | pastel lighten 0.2 | pastel format hex

Font & Icon Discovery

WhatFont Chrome Extension: Easily inspect web fonts and typography styling directly on hover.
Recommended Icon Libraries: For building plugins or sites, stick to permissive licenses (MIT / Apache / ISC):
Tabler Icons (MIT)
Heroicons (MIT)
Lucide (ISC)
Bootstrap Icons (MIT)

Development Environments & Automation

Lando Local Development

Lando is a powerful Docker-based local development tool designed to spin up containerized WordPress, LAMP, or custom tech stacks with minimal effort.

Includes built-in support for WP-CLI, Xdebug, and database management.
Standardizes development environments across team members and different OS environments.

Local (by Flywheel)

Simply install Local on your computer, and in minutes have WordPress running. Try new plugins, experiment with making layouts you like. No risk of damaging your live website on the Internet. The favorite for people learning WordPress. Linux, OS/X (Intel or Apple CPUs), Windows

OttoKit Automation

OttoKit provides streamlined automation tools for triggering custom form-based workflows, managing data processing, and connecting WordPress applications seamlessly.

File Management, Transfer & Backups

FileZilla & croc

FileZilla: The industry-standard tool for managing server files. Always opt for SFTP over plain FTP for encrypted credential transmission.
croc: A secure peer-to-peer CLI tool for transferring files and folders directly between any two computers using relay-based end-to-end encryption (PAKE).

Dual-Pane File Managers

Dual-pane file management drastically speeds up directory reorganization, local site staging, and batch file handling.

Linux: Dolphin or Double Commander.
macOS: ForkLift 4.

Secure Backups with Restic

Restic is a fast, deduplicated, and encrypted backup tool available on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It pushes backups to local drives, SFTP servers, or cloud storage seamlessly.

Database, Monitoring & Utility Tools

Database Management & Debugging

MyCLI: A terminal client for MySQL/MariaDB with auto-completion and syntax highlighting. Highly recommended for debugging databases in local setups like Lando.
MySQL Workbench: Visual schema designer and database inspection tool.
HTTPie: A modern, user-friendly command-line HTTP client for testing REST APIs compared to verbose curl.

UptimeRobot Site Monitoring

UptimeRobot offers real-time site monitoring, tracking uptime, HTTP responses, SSL certificates, and sending instant alert notifications when a site goes down.

CLI Enhancements

bat: A modern replacement for cat featuring syntax highlighting and automatic paging for log inspection and Git diffs. (On Linux, might install as batcat)
zoxide: A smarter navigation command (paired with fzf) that learns your most used directories.
dust: An intuitive tree-like visual breakdown of disk space consumption in terminal.
Insect: A high-precision scientific CLI and web calculator with full physical unit evaluation.

Productivity, Media & Office

Screen Capture: Ksnip (Cross-platform screen region, frozen frame capture, and screenshot annotation tool with OCR plugin support).
Clipboard Manager: CopyQ (Stores history, formats, and tabbed items for quick retrieval).
Task Tracking: Super Productivity (Privacy-focused task management with Pomodoro timing and GitHub/Jira/GitLab sync). In addition to what projects I am working on, I track glasses of water and have it remind me every 40 minutes to get up and move around.
Bookmark Management: Raindrop.io (Cross-device bookmark organization with full-text search). Save website URLs and my notes, with tags, instead of keeping all those tabs open. Same list in Chrome and Firefox and on my phone.
Audio Tools: Audacity for multi-track audio editing and Adobe Podcast AI for automated background noise cleanup.
Media Playback: VLC Media Player (Universal cross-platform media engine). Better controls than any player I’ve tried. Space bar pause/play. I configured left-arrow to “back 10 seconds” and right-arrow to “forward 10 seconds”. Save playlists.