Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a huge Flash advocate. I don’t like it for a lot of reasons: It’s heavy It’s not standard A lot of older browsers don’t support it. But guys, I think I fell in love: SWFUpload is one of the nicer Flash applications out there and it’s good because it has a few features that ordinary HTML uploads can’t give you.

I've stumbled upon a disturbing poll at About.com. How much is too much to pay for Web hosting? If it’s not free, don’t do it $2.01 per month $5.01 per month $10.01 per month $25.01 per month $50.01 per month $100.01 per month $200.01 per month $500.01 per month $1000.01 per month The results of this poll were somewhat alarming to me. 33% of voters said that a business should pick a free host.

I read this title and I was a bit confused. How, was my first question. Well, they did it. They did it a number of ways. Basically, they use a full background color and use CSS and a little bit of JavaScript to "eat" away at the corners. Very interesting idea. Alessandro Fulciniti writes: This is the original article. The technique has been improved with better browser support and a lot of new features.

What is a Content Management System? Here’s a little background. Lots of websites have dynamic content. Meaning, the content is located in a database, usually MySQL, and they are simply dumped into a web template when the page is viewed. That way, if you decide to change the structure or template of your website, the content need not be changed. You wouldn’t really have to mess with anything. Since you have one main template, a change in the template is propagated throughout all the pages because all the pages are created dynamically and use the same template.

It is now 12:56 AM and I'm putting the finishing touches on my Take Home Exam for Numerical Analysis. When is it due you may ask. No, you're wrong, it's not due tomorrow at 8:00 AM. It's due at 11:00 AM, so there :). Yes, it’s due in a couple of hours. Did I just start it? Come on now, no I didn’t. I’ve just been procrastinating in finishing the last question.

Brand new. InstaCalc. Just like the name says, it’s an instant making use of AJAX. No need to hit “enter”. Your results are written as you type, just like any other AJAX application. You can set a number of rows and even set variables and use them similar to Excel. One neat feature is that it understands words like “thousand”, “million”, etc. You can even define a calculator and then embed it into an HTML page.

Personally, beyond a simple Flash banner, I don't see much use for it in the web development world. Yes, it does have that coolness factor if you do it right. But the fact is that too many people do it wrong right now. My number one reason for not using flash is that it kills SEO. Well let's say that's my number two reason, number one: I can't really use it :).

In the world of web design you often come across people who don’t exactly know what they want. And that is usually a good thing for you because you can then charge them for the minimum and increase based on “added features”, which they should have seen up front, but they don’t always. This has the slight problem of having a contract with an indefinite time period.

A time period is usually scheduled for delivery of the product in the contract. This ensures the buyer that the product will be delivered in a reasonable time frame so that you don't keep extending the job for not real reason. One thing I've learnt, however, is that you need to also specify a time frame that the user has to review the work and ensure that everything is to his liking. You absolutely need this if you're not charging by the hour.

This is the problem I ran into a couple weeks ago and I’m still trying to get out of. I did a website for this guy a couple months ago. We agreed on a fixed price because it was supposed to be an easy enough job: a nice static layout, not much PHP, a Gallery, etc. A prototype was done in about three days. He was amazed by the quality of the website and had nothing but praise. Everything is good right? Wrong. He now had to burden of supplying content for the website. To make a long story slightly less long, this took a couple of months, and he only supplied pictures for the gallery and content for one of the six pages (not the home page). Now you may be thinking what does that have to do with me if the guy’s website

is empty, he paid for a design and that’s what he got right? Well I would agree with you there, but the problem was he had not yet paid the balance on his bill.

Does your domain have skeletons in the closet? We know that there is a lot of domain parking going on out there. People simply buy up a ton of domain names, sit on them for a while and see whether or not they can make a quick buck off of them. When domains expire they then go back into the market and are up for sale again. What you need to make sure of is that the domain that you buy has not been involved in any shady business.

First off, this is for those of us with our own servers. Not those of us on shared hosts, because we’re going to need access to the command prompt and MySQL commands, etc. Some shared hosts may allow some of these things, but most don’t. Matt Wade Writes: Just a quick note to recommend AutoMySQLBackup for your MySQL backup needs. This little gem does daily, weekly, and monthly backups. It handles all the backup rotations for you.