General

Register for Ajax Seminar

There is going to be an Ajax Seminar in New York in March 2006. Registration is now available at AjaxSeminar.com. Prices are as follows: Super Early Bird Holiday Special (Before December 31, 2005) - $695 Early Bird (Before January 31, 2006) - $995 Discounted Price (Before February 28, 2006) - $1,195 Seminar Price (After February 28, 2006 and if any seat available) - $1,295 Secure your seats now. Don’t miss out on this opportunity.

Firefox 1.5 Released

Ok, Firefox 1.5 was finally released today from Mozilla. Um, I must say that I’m not really impressed. Well, given the types of updates that were made, most people won’t notice a huge difference. There is added support for all sorts of things like SVG, CSS 2, CSS 2, and CSS 3, however most current sites don’t make heavy use of these so we won’t be noticing anything for a while.

Microsoft, Yahoo, and Zimbra Releaseing New Ajax Powered Webmail

The Break Down All three of these companies have decided to give webmail a “fresh spin”: Microsoft and Yahoo are poised to make Web-based e-mail more powerful than ever with updates that bring a desktop-style interface to their respective Web mail offerings. We tested betas (currently invitation-only) of Windows Live Mail and Yahoo Mail, and also looked at an open-source newcomer called Zimbra. All three apps use an increasingly popular programming technique called Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to improve on standard Web mail and even Google’s Gmail.

HTML, PHP, etc Code Editor

This is where many web developers tend to disagree. We can never seem to settle on a good code editor, ever. I’m going to leave you with a few of my favorites and some that I hate.

First off, I live and die by Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Win/Mac. As a matter of fact, I also use Macromedia Fireworks 8 heavily for my web site designs. I just think that they have done a good job and incorporating HTML and CSS together. Especially with version 8.0. But then again, you get what you pay for because it’s going to set you back quite a pretty penny ($399). But it was a good investment for me.

On the other hand we have the Frontpage junkies. I haven’t really looked at Frontpage much since early 2000. I’ve opened up the version that comes with Office XP, but I was not impressed. What I do remember is that back in the day it was horrible. Frontpage used to dump a bunch of Microsoft specific “tags” into the code that it just served to bulk up the final output. There is the small advance of using Frontpage Extensions, which enable things like site counters and other things (sorry, I really haven’t been looking into it), but the problem lies in the fact that Frontpage extensions on servers usually cost more and they are very limited, and simply I haven’t heard anything about Frontpage lately, so I’m staying away from it.

For PHP editing I use a simply text editor called emEditor. One nice feature is tabbed editing. It also has syntax highlighting. Since I don’t write or compose very large PHP scripts, this is more than adequate for me.

When I’m at work and on Linux (Fedora) I stick to KDevelop. Most likely, I would be doing some C programming anyways, so it is just convenient since it is already opened to just drag and drop scripts and HTML files in there. I don’t, however, do any heavy HTML design on Linux though. I haven’t found tools suitable for such yet. There is something called NVU, but it just doesn’t do enough for me to design a site from scratch using this.

HTML Tutorial

Since this blog does (claim to) encompass all sorts of Web Development. I’ve decided to insert a couple basic links. I’m not much for HTML my self. Honestly speaking, I don’t know much HTML and I refuse to learn it. Yes, I am a Web Developer and have designed 20+ websites in the past 4 years, but HTML is something I’m not too good at. If you ask me, it’s all in the tools you use.

WordPress Installed

I finally took it upon myself to install WordPress. I mean I’m just been hearing so much about the darn thing, I figure, why not give it a shot. I’ve been using Mambo (now renamed to Joomla) for a while. It’s a complete website CMS. I’ve been using it on a couple sites and realized sooner or later that most of my site simply boiled down to just a blog anyway.