International Blogday 2005 has arrived and as instructed here’s my 5 blogs that I try never to miss in no particular order… LironBot Jarkolicious A List Apart Creative Bits Asterisk

The Opera browser turns ten today and to celebrate they’re giving away FREE Registrations! Go to http://my.opera.com/community/party/reg.dml for yours! But hurry, it only lasts today!

A recent article posted on RedHerring.com revealed the development of a 8-hour laptop battery. If successful, this battery would last two hours longer than any battery currently on the market. Matsushita Electric Industrial, a company that manufactures Panasonic products, is teaming up with Intel for the research and development. The partnership will combine Matsushita’s battery knowledge with Intel’s power-saving circuit technology, according to Reuters. Catch the full article at RedHerring

This article, Architecting CSS, opened my eyes to the possibilities of better organizing my CSS. Up until recently i’ve had no problem using one CSS file for a site but i’ve noticed more and more that they get longer, especially when the layouts are CSS based. Definitely an eye opening read, check it out for some good ideas of how to better organize your code.

Blogday is August 31st! Here’s the jist of what it is and why we need it…

What will happen on BlogDay? In one long moment In August 31st 2005,every blogger from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs (in the same time). In this day all Blog web surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown blogs and celebration the discovery of new people new bloggers. Why do we need a BlogDay? I am suggesting this kind of activity because in the last months I felt that the more blogs there are, the less time I’m spending on new web logs. Because of the overload of information, I’m just visiting my favorite Blog and therefore, I’m sure that I miss a lot of good blogs.

I’ve noticed that there are some eccentricities in getting tables online, from copying from Excel to trying to duplicate a table already online elsewhere. I’m going to venture to quell some myths and hopefully provide a few tips that will prove useful to you in your tabular endeavors. I’m using Dreamweaver for most of these examples but I’m fairly confident that the same results will occur on your favorite WYSIWYG editor. MYTH #1 “Copying a formatted table from a website is impossible without a ton of edits, you’re better off doing it yourself!” This is only partly true, if you copy source code from one site and cram it into yours there’s bound to be a lot of modifications like styles, links and images that would have to be edited out. If you’re just looking for the tabular data without all these edits you could use Notepad (or similar program) as a ‘filter’ of sorts. Copying the table from the site and pasting it into Notepad will automatically remove images and links as well as all the formatting because it, by nature, doesn’t support it. What you end up with is the plain text version of the table. You can now paste this into Excel for further editing or straight into Dreamweaver’s design view. Voila, the table data without all the crap. MYTH #2 “Copying data from one table into another usually yields unwanted results!” I’m sure we’ve all been there, we’re trying to copy a few rows from somewhere into a preexisting table and it either gives you a warning that it won’t fit, overwrite what’s already there or add a new table into the cell you selected! Generally, it’s easy enough to just go in the code and add it manually but what of there were a hundred rows to add? There’s definitely an easier way! I’ve come to realize that any tabular data that you paste into Dreamweaver is treated as a new table. So what I do is start a new document in Dreamweaver and paste the table data in there via Design view. Then I select the table cells to copy rather than the whole table, this way when you paste elsewhere it will create new table cells. MYTH #3 “But I can just save my Excel table as a webpage, EASY!” For some applications it’s fine to just save as an html page, but any self respecting web designer knows that the page excel (and Word for that matter) creates is twice as big as it needs to be. That may not be a concern to the less web savvy but for those of us in the know that’s precious bandwidth wasted, exponentially so if you have 5 tables, or 10, or 100. Now the good news, if you copy and paste your table into Dreamweaver as explained above, you’ll notice in the code that each table cell has a set class that usually looks something like “xl24″. Each code relates to a specific style, so all cells that have a yellow background will have a unique code. The same goes for all the styles you’ve used within Excel. This way, you are free to develop your own CSS styles and therefore cutting the code substantially while also making future revisions easier. This is by far the most I’ve ever delved into html tables, I hope some of it was helpful to you!