One of those programs that makes life easier if you have a website or blog is an FTP program. Sure, you can use the command line client, or, worse yet, internet explorer’s built-in FTP functionality, but neither of these solutions is ideal. If you do a lot of FTP transfers, you need a full-featured program dedicated to this purpose. Filezilla is a quick and easy to use FTP program for Windows that you should check out.

The install is simple and takes less than a minute after downloading the installation file. After installing, start the program and you’ll find an interface with several window frames as well as some boxes at the top to input the address of the ftp server and your username and password. Connecting is as simple as filling in these boxes and hitting Enter.

It’s easy to drag and drop files from the Remote Site frame at the right into the frame at the bottom to download files. One thing you’ll have to remember is that you have to click the ‘Q’ (Queue) button on the toolbar at the top of the window, though. This is actually a great feature because it allows you to correct your mistakes before you make them. No transfers are completed until you are ready.

Another cool feature is that when you navigate through the menus, a brief help message appears on the status bar at the bottom of the screen to explain the command option. This also works with the toolbar at the top of the screen. I expected to see tooltips pop up when hovering over the buttons, but this works just as well and it appears instantly instead of after the pause that you have to wait through with tooltips.

Filezilla is freeware and actively maintained, so you can expect to see it updated regularly with lots of useful features.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Freeware, Main, Open Source, Utilities, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.