Mass Geocoding
I just wrote a cool tutorial on how to mass geocode addresses using Google's API and JavaScript. Take a look - it was a lot of work for me.
CSS Developers need this (Firebug)
I've talked a good amount about CSS and how much of a pain it can be. With different web browsers displaying content differently it can be a major pain trying to get something to work with all of them. Thankfully there are some great tools out there to help make your life easier. The most important tool you probably already have, Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver makes it very easy to manage all the different CSS options you have. However when developing you have to make a chance, save the file(s) then upload and then see the finished product. If there is a problem (and it seems there always is) now you have to go back and repeat the process. Dreamweaver does a pretty good job at the what-you-see-is-what-you-get but it isn't perfect. Thankfully there is a great Firefox Plugin, Firebug.
Firebug
Firebug will show you a lot information, real time right in your web browser. Once installed you have a little icon in the lower right hand of your browser. Click on 'Inspect' then move your mouse around the web page. You can see different sections are high lighted. Here you can see all the different tags in your site. This can be useful when trying to track down a weird display bug. That's all fine and good but the amazing feature comes when you click on Edit. You can actually change CSS, HTML pretty much anything on the fly. Its truely amazing. Now you can quickly edit CSS and immediately see the results. I hope everyone gives this amazing utility a try, so far its been a huge time saver and has helped me track down countless errors.
Upgrade from Internet Explorer 6 ... Please?
Are you still using Internet Explorer 6? If so, do me a favor and upgrade, I don't care if you go to Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox but please just upgrade. My job is basically two fold - fix computers and design web sites. Both of them are harder when my clients use Internet Explorer 6.
Lets take a look a few things that you are missing out on if you still use Internet Explorer 6.
Security
Simply put, you are at a higher risk of getting a spy ware infection if you are using Internet Explorer 6. Its also harder to remove an infection from Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 7 has a nice 'Manage Add Ons' option that allows you to easily remove 'bad' add ons.
CSS
This is probably the biggest reason. CSS works differently in every web browser but its just even worse in IE6. Everytime I design a site I always must make exceptions and different variations due to different web browsers.
PNG
Yes I love PNG's, they are so great compared to our old outdated friend the GIF. Basically for those of you that don't know, PNG files allow transparency that is major better looking than a GIF file. They are easier to work with and just plain look fantastic. Only probably is IE6 doesn't recongnize the transparency so it puts a white background making it look very ugly.
Hopefully this will convince someone out there to upgrade, than I can say I tried to make a difference. My personal recommendation is to download Firefox but if you absolutely must Internet Explorer 7 is somewhat acceptable too (just my personal opinion).
Different code for different browsers
Every web developer has had this situation at one time or another. You come up with a great design, everything looks perfect ... until you test it in another browser. Without fail there is some difference, its always something small but its so extremely annoying. Now what? You make a change in your CSS to fix that, but then you go back to your first browser of course its now wrong in that browser!! Talk about frustration.
Thankfully there is an easy way around this nightmare, something called..
Condtional Comments
Conditional comments only work with Windows so there is limitations, however it is very functional and a huge time saver. So lets see how this works in a real world example.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/firefox.css" type="text/css" />In the above example you can see we load our firefox.css style sheets and if the user has Internet Explorer 7 it will then load the ie.css style sheet. The idea is that the Internet Explorer style sheet would over write anything that is needed. This is a very handy fast way for when something looks correct in Firefox but looks terrible in Internet Explorer.
<!--[if IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/ie7.css" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->
Web Site Developer Resources
We are proud to announce that Certified Computer Experts has expanded their Web Site Developer Resources. Right now this resource section is kept up to date pretty much by yours truely. Over time hopefully more people will consider sending in tutorials and other interesting tidbits for viewers that want to learn more about web site developement.
Resources include:
- Adobe Flash
- JavaScript
- PHP
- Coldfusion
Soon I plan to add CSS Tricks and whatever else I think might be interesting to see. If anyone has any suggestions or would like to contribute please email me personally using tom@ccexperts.com.
