gBrowser? No, Chrome

Looks like the rumors from several years ago were pretty accurate; Google just released a new browser named Chrome that they have apparently been working on for several years. This thing has been in the rumor mill for ages but it was kept so closely guarded that no one but a select (very) few even knew the project existed. There’s been several dozen reviews/ criticisms written on the browser and it’s features, namely Incognito (a.k.a. porno) Mode where no history or cookies will be recorded for that window, the new super-duper awesome V8 Javascript Engine that multiplies the JavaScript performance of websites through this browser, and it’s speed both in page and javascript rendering. So many articles that I felt it worthless to write anything like that myself so I decided to link to what I found to be the most interesting ones here so you can check those out.

Fanning the Flames

The main reason for this article was just for me to be able to say that although I was initially against YET ANOTHER browser crowding the marketplace I’ve actually become quite smitten with the little browser that could (and probably will, in many respects). Not to use, oh dear no for my heart is still with another, but as I mentioned in that past ‘Google Browser’ article I love how things like this light the fire under everyone else. This is ultimately going to spur on so many new developments in browser technology faster than it would have happened otherwise. The fact that many things like the aptly named V8 Javascript Engine is open sourced is going to make progress all the faster and, according to their comic, they’re hoping that’s the case as well.

Another big reason that I’m now willing to welcome Google Chrome with open arms is because it’s using the open source WebKit Rendering Engine (also utilized by Apple’s Safari) so your sites should render pages the same as Safari. You are testing your sites in Safari right? Right?

Sorry, this post ended up having way more links than I originally anticipated. I think they’re all good reads/resources though so when you get a chance check them out! And as always i’d like to hear what you thought about this article, Google Chrome, and the state of web browsers in general either through comments or via the contact form!

After a long internal debate and a lot of work I’ve recoded this site from scratch to replace the WordPress engine I’ve been using since this blog started. There were three main reasons why I decided to do this, none of which were in any way related with dissatisfaction with WordPress. In fact, I’ve been thoroughly impressed at the quality of the WordPress system and it ends up being the first thing I recommend to people looking for a blog or an easy way to publish news on their site. "So what were the reasons?" you may ask, well allow me to explain!

Would you like some SPAM with that?

The first big reason was the spam, oh dear God the spam! The comments table for this blog racked up over 32,000 comments and a grand total of 31 of those were actually legitimate. All I have to say is thank goodness Akismet is preinstalled, but even with that I still kept getting slammed with dozens of bogus comments a day. So I thought I’d add the reCAPTCHA captcha system to see if that’d help some. It did, but it was only successful at curbing the spam by half. Not great by any standards. So a custom solution was the best option, if no one knows what you’re running under the hood chances are they’re not going to (easily) know how to get around that system that’s in place.

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can

I’m no stranger to large development projects, i’ve built a custom (albeit fairly simplified) CMS and even an eCommerce engine designed specifically for artwork prints, but I’ve never created a full blog system. So naturally I thought it’d be a cool side project to work on during my free time. I gotta say that as I was coding along I realized countless little things that I didn’t consider when I started but that’s how it usually goes isn’t it? All in all I think it turned out pretty well. Still a few things I need to work on but the majority of it is functional and (hopefully) rock solid.

One cog in the gear

Perhaps the biggest reason I custom coded this is because I envision it eventually being a part of a bigger system of sites I have brewin in the ol’ noggin. Customization and reusability is a crucial aspect of my plans and what better way to go than to create the foundation myself from scratch. This way I know every digital inch of my site and will be able to integrate it infinitely better than I would a packaged solution.What sites you may ask? Well i’m not going to tell just yet, but rest assured it’s BIG!

So that’s it in a nutshell, just me tinkering away on my little corner of the web. Hopefully i’ll be able to get more and more added as time goes on, that’s the plan anyway.

This might be something very obvious to some people but I for one never took the time to look into it until I started working with Joomla 1.5. Their new system uses several .ini files for the language packs which is pretty cool if you ask me. It was because of this that I finally looked into editing different file types in Dreamweaver. It’s rather easy, go to Edit » Preferences (CTRL + U) and in the menu that pops up go to the ‘File Types / Editors‘ and add any file extensions to the end of the textbox ‘Open in code view:‘. So for example mine was…

.js .asa .css .cs .config .inc .txt .as .asc .asr .vb

and now it’s…

.js .asa .css .cs .config .inc .txt .as .asc .asr .vb .ini .htaccess

That’s it! You can add any other file types you want Dreamweaver to open from here too. No more notepad for htaccess edits!

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.

Here’s a Firefox extension that I can see as being another vital tool to web developers trying to get those pixel-perfect web 2.0 applications done faster and with less hassle. It’s called FireBug and does a lot of things that the popular Web Developer extension does such as highlighting and code views but this also give additional support for Javascript debugging, CSS and JS tweaking on the fly and Exploring a treeview of the DOM. One of the coolest features, however, is the ability to monitor network activity so you can see exactly what is taking your pages so long to load. With the increasing complexity of even the most basic websites, tools like this are going to be a vital resource to keep production time down.

On their website they sell it as the “Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library” but the skeptic in me chose to determine that on my own. So I gave it a shot, tried animating some dropdowns using one of the tutorials on their site and I couldn’t believe it. In 3 lines I had finished what would have taken me a whole separate file to accomplish. Even more amazing was that it was set up in less than fifteen minutes, that alone makes this script gold to me. But there’s so much more it can do, i’ve hardly scratched the surface myself but had to write about this amazing time-saving library. I think things like this is the true direction of the “Web 2.0″ phenomenon, coding smarter and not harder. Write it once and use it forever, spend that extra time developing something even better, more usable and more accessible than we ever dreamed possible a short year ago. I’m keeping my eyes open for libraries such as this for other applications, I can see such libraries becoming as crucial to my arsenal of tricks as my stack of code snippets I pull from regularly.

Site Pro just released a new design for their site - http://www.sitepronews.com/ A cool resource for web scripts - http://protolize.org/ A free audio editor, anything this cool that’s free is pretty sweet - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Check out www.dhtmlgoodies.com/ for souped up menus and other “goodies”. This is a great resource for miscellaneous scripts that have been browser tested and developed for a good amount of time. They also have calendar, gallery and form scripts free to use.
 

I’ve recently discovered the single best PHP mail script ever. Some of you may have heard of PHPMailer but for those of you that haven’t, you must go over to http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/ and get it. It wasn’t the fact that it’s all wrapped up in one neat and tidy folder that intrigued me, it wasn’t even the ease of use and multitude of options. The thing that impressed me is its ability to not only deliver html and plaintext emails but somehow deliver them reliably. Whenever i try to create a web email form it always seems to deliver to the Junk Email folder in my tests. I don’t know how they did it, maybe there’s some additional headers in there or something. But maybe that’s another reason I like it, I don’t have to know how they did it, just that it really works.

A free online ‘zine worth checking out, http://www.websitemagazine.com/

Absolutely loving all the links over at http://www.kayodeok.btinternet.co.uk/favorites/webdesign.htm. It seems that some were broken when I tried but all in all another great bookmark resource!

By W. David Gardner, TechWeb News The good times for highly skilled IT professionals continue to roll, as the Yoh Index of Technology Wages reported Monday that wages continue to rise faster than non-farm hourly wages nationwide. Compared with the same quarter in the previous year, IT wages rose 4.62 percent. “There’s been an unabated growth in the last three quarters,” said Jim Lanzalotto, Yoh’s vice president of strategy and marketing, in an interview “And I don’t see anything that can slow it down.” Yoh noted that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that there were 211,000 job additions to non-farm payrolls in March and the unemployment rate dropped to 4.7 percent representing a four and one-half year low. The tight labor supply and the increase in the economy are also working to propel IT wages. Topping pay in IT job titles is the ERP Functional Consultant, which Yoh found is paying a whopping $81.58 an hour. Jobs in this category include expertise in SAP, SAS, Oracle, and PeopleSoft. “Companies are being realistic now,” said Lanzalotto. “They know they have to lock up great talent. It’s very difficult to find the right people at the right price.” While IT pay is surging now, it still isn’t reaching the nosebleed pay levels of the late 1990s when companies were desperate to hire anyone with Web design experience. Lanazlotto observed that IT pay has been increasing gradually over the past few quarters. Yoh is also finding that employers are increasingly particular in their hiring demands, asking, for instance, to hire analysts with specific expertise in specific industries. “They say, ‘Get me a CRM (customer relations management) expert with a background in Siebel and the pharmaceutical industry,’” he said. Other IT positions commanding top hourly dollar are: hardware engineer, $69.01; project manager, $61.46; java developer, $59.06; embedded engineer, $55.72; and database administrator, $55.42. Lanzalotto indicated the boom in IT salaries will have a ripple effect and influence other segments of the economy positively. “With the demand for technology talent growing,” he said, “the industry will become an even more significant driver of progress in the overall employment market, presenting new opportunities for experienced professionals as well as workers in struggling industries looking to re-enter the labor force along a more promising path.”

A few sites to draw inspiration from… http://www.okaydave.com/ http://www.mylkhead.com http://www.starvingeyes.com