Web Development

Some links and commentary related to the imminent release of IE 7 and related ripple effects.

In the past, the target audience has always been decided on for me so the decision to comply or ignore DDA has always been made for me. Since mine will be built up mostly of bikers, I don't think there will be a huge concern to address the needs of the disabled. Or am I being short sighted?

My thoughts on Web 2.0. Let me know what you think...

I had recently been using Alex Robinson's 3-column CSS technique called "ordered columns, float-margin/float-margin" for some website designs. But he has superceded that with the One True Layout.

Editor's note: after a friendly reader (see comment below) pointed out that this article was a pretty much word-for-word copy of another article, we have removed the text of the original article posted here and instead direct you to the article that was copied, "CSS Crib sheet #3 - Centering a Div," by Andy Budd.

I've had this idea for a while, and I think it's a good one. I hope someone else will run with it, because I would love to have a tool that does what I'll describe. If the consensus is that it's a dumb idea, then so be it. Web developers who either don't use CSS (!) or are abstracted away from CSS by a WYSIWIG tool or development framework might not be too excited by this idea, but I suspect it will resonate with people who hand-code their CSS. My idea is for a "precompiler" (if that's the best label) for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

...The upshot was, about 2 hours later, I still had to destroy most of the rainforests of Laos and Ecuador to print the damn thing out. And as far as portability goes, have you tried carrying around half a ream of loose sheets of paper lately? Fun with binder clips.

Ahh, the glory of a good Flash Gordon reference; it never fails to brighten one's day. But today I am not following the orders of General Kala, or doing the bidding of Ming the Merciless. Today, I am playing The Curmudgeon on the subject of Web 2.0 and the mysteries of Asynchronous JavaScript And XML--better known to the digerati these days as AJAX.

Some brief recommendations for people interested in SEO and web development topics, including a link to an excellent survey of factors that affect page rank across a variety of search engines.

You may be able to deal with this situation when buying a book online, but it's just unacceptable when you have 30+ paperwork packets per day to process. So even though you have your new web app, you're not using it, and the machine with the vulture on top is still humming away.

This is the home page for a little script called "CityDesk Replacer." The purpose of this tool is to augment the functionality of Fog Creek Software's CityDesk, specifically the 2.0 version. In short, this script allows for generic string replacement functionality at a specific point in the CityDesk publishing process: after a CityDesk "Location" has been processed using the "Publish" feature, but before the files for that Location have been copied.

The consulting shop I work for is small and, by necessity, general purpose. We like to be compliant to our clients' needs instead of shoving our technical ideas down their throats. One result of this approach to development is that I'm called upon to learn new tools (good and bad) all the time.

Sometimes this is all good stuff. For example, last year, as part of a new project, we started using Hibernate and I got to learn some valuable stuff about using a new, cutting-edge, OR mapping tool.

But sometimes this is not so much fun. Right now, I'm teaching myself to use an Apple technology called WebObjects, which is what the WO in my title refers to. (In full disclosure, I've copied the title of this entry from an old article I found here.)

In theory, WebObjects is neat stuff.

Please note that I have removed the original content from this page, which contained information about Drupal hosted by Lunarpages. I am no longer recommending Lunarpages.

Since my developer.* contact email address is listed all over the developer.* web site, email harvesters have been grabbing it for some time now. These harvesters add the address to their spam lists and also use it to "spoof" the From and Reply To addresses on spam so that it looks like spam and viruses and crap are coming from my address.

The quick solution to this problem is to just stop using that address and then replace all of the email addresses on developer.* to a Contact form. If I had a time machine, I would do just that and would never have placed an email address directly in any pages on the site. However, changing this address now would be a major pain. I can't just stop using it.