WS_FTP

One of the benefits to winning the .net Readers Site of the Month award (check it out) for List Books last month (you notice how casually I dropped that in), was a free copy of WS_FTP Pro 2006. Now, I've never bought a copy of FTP software, prefering to use free clients instead, which is a bit daft as it ranks inside the top 10 most used bits of software on my PC. After trying a few different bits of software over the years, I landed on the free version of Core FTP. Sure, it's ugly, but it works very well and has more features than any other free client I've found (like allowing you to connect to IP addresses rather than just URLs).

One thing I liked about Core was that you could specify not only the start location of the remote server, but also the location on your computer too. So, for someone like me who has several sites to keep updated, I could set which local directory it opened when I connected, making it much easier to begin updating. WS_FTP let me set the remote directory, but I couldn't figure out how to set the local one, so I checked out their user guides section and that's when I found out about workspaces. The not only allow you to set the local directory, but open multiple connections, local and remote, all with one click. Very useful indeed.