http://www.breakingbad.com/ - Awesome advertising website for the new AMC show Breaking Bad.
http://www.txeff.com/ - The best automated flash text effects I’ve ever seen.
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ - A great site to test the speed of your webpages, gives graphs on what loads and how long it takes.

I wasn’t sure what to think about Sun acquiring MySQL but after reading this post by Kaj Arnö i’m feeling pretty good about the prospects. I didn’t know that Sun had a proven track record as the largest contributor to Open Source, that was a big part of what helped ease my mind. Java has been released under the GPL. So has the OpenSolaris operating system, Open Office / Star Office, the GlassFish application server and the NetBeans IDE tool. That’s a long impressive list of applications. Finally, MySQL will still being managed by the same people, and their charter is still the same so there should be no anxiety about them changing directions with MySQL.  I say good for them, it must feel great to get your hard work recognized like that.  I’ve been using MySQL for years and it’s the only database system I use in daily development and I couldn’t be happier. I’m excited to see where this goes in the future, only time will tell. A press release on the Sun website “Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire MySQL” explains the acquisition in more detail.

It’s not too often that I find a good reason to make a site scroll exclusively horizontally rather than the easier and generally more accepted vertically but I’ve found myself in that situation recently and finding support on the subject was minimal at best so i felt it prudent to share what I’ve found to help those of you that need a horizontally scrolling site. Any searches I tried in Google were referencing how to get rid of the horizontal scroll, how to avoid the horizontal scrollbar and just how bad the horizontal scroller is in general. That is until I found a website dedicated to it called The Horizontal Way. Not only is it a showcase of sites that have used the horizontal way of display, it’s also a fine example of a horizontal display in itself. Definitely worth a bookmark for that rare occasion when you want to go against the grain of web standards.

Linotype Font Management - A free font manager that works like magic! Good Things Should Never End - I totally agree, fun site too. McCain Potato Parade - I never had this much fun with potatoes before. Opt Out PreScreen - Save a few trees and get less crap in the mail.

As of Adobe Creative Suite 2, thumbnail previews in Windows Explorer no longer are supported by default. I don’t know about any of you but for me these thumbnail previews are vital to everyday production. I can understand why it’s no longer supported, the included Bridge application covers previews, organization and so much more for the whole creative suite. That said, sometimes I just want a preview of the files in a folder and don’t want to have a whole separate program open to do so. Lucky for us there’s a solution to this mild annoyance. Follow the instructions below to get those previews showing up for you again. This was apparently developed for Windows XP but I can also verify that it works for Vista. Obviously, I cannot be held liable for anything you do to your machine so be careful and get help if you don’t know what you’re doing.

1. Download this AI and PSD Windows Preview Files zip.
2. Shut down all Adobe programs.
3. Set a “System Restore Point” just in case something goes wrong, it’s an option located in your control panel.
4. Unzip the file to C:/Program Files/Common Files/Adobe/Shell. You’ll see four files and a readme, you can delete the readme if you want.
5. Double click on ‘aiicon.dll.reg’ and ‘psicon.dll.reg’ to run them. These files will automatically update your registry settings so you don’t have to go about trying it yourself.
6. Restart your computer to let these changes take effect.

There you go! Preview to your hearts content!

Last month Google announced the development of a new free tool called ‘Knol’ [stands for a unit of knowledge]. The goal of Knol is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. Using it is by invitation only currently but based on their screenshot example it looks to be a lot like Wikipedia with a few rather significant differences. In their announcement on their blog, Google noted that this tool would highlight the author, which in my opinion is a feature that is sorely needed. It gives the information found on these pages at least some basis of credibility. Also introduced in the beta of knol is common social networking tools such as an area for comments, questions, edits, additional content and even ratings, giving the content even more credibility if you ask me. Check out the knol screenshot and the Google blog post about knol for even more information. I think this is just the latest in a long and successful string of Google taking a basic idea and adding a little Google magic to it to make their version a major competitor in that market.

I never even heard of a coding ‘framework’ until I found out about the multitude of lightweight and powerful frameworks for javascript such as jQuery and Prototype. So it goes without saying that when I found out there were some for PHP too my mind was sufficiently blown. After looking through a few different types I settled on trying one called Code Igniter because it looked to have the smallest footprint and was among the easiest to learn. There are several different reasons i’ve used CodeIgniter ever since I found out about it a few months ago. Following is a few examples of why this framework is priceless to me and my productivity. One is the structure it forces upon you (in a good way) namely the Model-View-Controller dev pattern. Right out of the box I found myself writing code more segmented and documented, which is excellent for those functions that are reusable in future projects like image processing and user logging. Also I love the way the URLs are designed to be search-engine and human friendly right out of the box. For example instead of a URL like artwork.php?piece=23&order=ASC it could end up more like /artwork/23/asc/. One thing I’ve noticed regarding this URL rewriting is that it makes it a little bit more challenging to integrate it into other script packages like WordPress that have their own rewriting method. Finally, there’s a ton of common functions, classes and helpers that range from form validation to email to sessions. It’s all been battle tested and works as you would expect them to every time. I apologize for how broad this is but it’s just too huge of a reason to explain in detail, if you’re interested in reading more about these there’s a detailed user manual online here and it’s all in HTML so it’s also included in the zip when you download the framework. I’ve created about 6 sites with this framework and can’t count the number of times I was able to go back to a previous site and reuse a function that not only saved me time in development but also in testing because it was all done already. All in all I think the fact that I feel I’m more productive, efficient and create all around cleaner and more documented code is the reason I love using this framework the most.