Web Explorations

JumpCut is a free app for the Mac that allows you access the contents of your last 25 copy operations.

On most systems you only have access to the current clipboard. So, if you copy an item (CTRL c) it overwrites the previous copy. With JumpCut you have access to a list of items you’ve copied giving you the ability to copy multiple items and paste them into a document or form when you need them.

I especially find this useful when I want to copy multiple URL addresses to send in an email or when writing code and want multiple snippets of code available.

I use JumpCut on a regular basis whenever I’m editing or writing. It has become a natural extension to my copy/paste activities.

Although I haven’t used it, there is a similar program for people using Windows. copy/paste clipboard extender that is available for free here. Or, you can pay $10 for a more sophisticated version out at BriefSoft.

Adobe has released a new Flex application called Browser Lab. It allows you to see what your web pages will look like in a variety of browser versions including FireFox, Safari, and Internet Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8).

You can set up a side by side view, magnify part of the page, and select different browsers.
There’s an onion-skin feature that lays two pages on top of each other so you can quickly check alignment issues.

This tool is very helpful because it is so hard having access to multiple versions of Internet Explorer.

Here is a screen shot showing my home page in FireFox 3.0 and IE 7.0.

You do need to register with Adobe to use this tool. However, if you are already registered for BuzzWord (a collaborative document site) or Kuler (a color scheme tool) than you have the userID/password you need. Here’s an article I wrote on Kuler.

Over the years students have asked/suggested/cajoled that I write a book with the information I present in my classes. For starters I decided to pull together all of the tutorials I have written for my Web Development course.

The Secrets of a Web Developer is now available for $39.00. You can view some excerpts from the book as well as the complete table of contents out on the site.

There are over 300 pages covering all the major aspects of web page development with lots of screen shots and graphics and step-by-step instructions.

• The
  Web and the Internet
• XHTML markup
• Page styling with CSS
• Page layout
  using CSS
• SEO – Search Engine Optimization
• Design Principles and the Design Process
• Web Marketing
• An introduction to JavaScript

These tutorials were written for anyone interested in learning
how to build web sites with no prior knowledge of programming or HTML.

This is an entry-level book and all you need is an understanding file
management and basic typing skills.

The tools are all free. You will need a color-coded text editor (such as NotePad++)
and a browser. FireFox is recommended because of the many add-on tools that are available.

If you are interested in taking the complete Web Developer course online there is more information at http://southcentral.edu/cc/course/webDev.html.

BrowserShots.org allows you to specify the URL of a target website and then proceeds to take “pictures” of how the page will look in each of the browsers you selected. This is a great way to do the final testing on how well your pages work without having multiple browsers loaded on your machine.

Here’s what the home page looks like:

There is also a link that will validate your CSS code as well as your XHTML code.

The top graphic a look at my home page which is a valid (strict) XTHML page. Notice how text and images don’t show up on all the browsers including the new IE 8.0

Special thank to Tim for telling me about this valuable web site.

I just received this email question from one of my students:

Peter,
I am currently working on a website for one of my clients. She said that she took your web design class and mentioned that you use QualityHostOnline.com for your hosting and domain needs instead of GoDaddy. My question is why? Why meaning is there a reason or just a preference that you choose Quality Hosting. Please let me know.

Here is my response:
Tim,
Originally GoDaddy limited what you could install on the server. When I first hosted with them I quickly found out I couldn’t install Drupal. I still remember how arrogant the help person was telling me that the agreement did not allow a refund but that he was going to refund some of my money anyway…

The Drupal limitation has since been fixed although recently there was a snafu with a GoDaddy client using Drupal and being charged over $6,000 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-fendelman/why-i-dont-owe-godaddy-65_b_129276.html) The only thing that helped resolve the problem was his article on Huntington and the furor it caused. All the bad press caught GoDaddy’s president’s attention and he stepped in to resolve the things and stop the bad press.

Their advertising is extremely sexist. Something I might enjoy looking at but not something I can recommend to students in class. Especially when one of my students started doing a web site for his church…

And, just recently, I tried to transfer my domain being held by GoDaddy to QualityHostOnline. It took me over two months to accomplish due to an unknown userid/password that was automatically setup without my input when I purchased a privacy option. Because my email on GoDaddy was no longer valid I had to fax, mail, and send scanned copies of my driver’s license and a specific numbered form to a branch of GoDaddy. They would also have accepted copies of my passport which makes me even more nervous. They made it EXTREMELY difficult to do the transfer. I had to send the request three different times and made numerous phone calls all to the answer of “I’m sorry, that is out of our control.”

Meanwhile, I’ve been with QualityHostOnline for almost five years now and have had excellent support, low cost, and overall good results on a consistent basis. They were very helpful and responsive during my domain name transfer. I’ve also recommended this hosting service to other instructors and many many clients and everyone is having the same positive experience.

So, there you have it.

Guess I’ll make this into a blog entry.

Peter

PS – You might want to do a web search for “GoDaddy ethics” It makes for some interesting reading.

Addendum: 09-15-09 I’ve been having a lot of downtime with QualityHostOnline.com and am migrating my servers over to BlueHost.com based on recommendations from several of my students. I can no longer recommend QualityHost as I have in the past.

Sumo Paint a really fun paint application written in Flex. Its really snappy. This is what web applications should all be like!
When you click on one of the shape tools, look in the upper right corner for the “Shape Trails” checkbox and then start noodling around. Too much fun…

Thanks to Matt Potocnik for the link!

Color schemes are an important building block to good web design Here is a great tool from Adobe that allows you to build a color scheme from a logo or photo or by simply choosing the colors yourself.

You have to register with Adobe to use the tool, but registration is free.

Look for the “Create” button on the left to open up the palette selector and you can either upload an image or pull one from your Flickr account. I’ve seen similar pages do this, but they took color samples at random from the image. With Kuler you can move the hotspots around to select the key colors that you want to incorporate in your theme. The resulting color swatch shows the hex color values and is great to print out and keep with your client files.

Here is a screen shot showing our Computer Careers logo and part of the resulting color swatches:

By using colors on a consistent basis you improve the professional look and feel of the site and increase the believability of the site.

Special thanks to Michael in my Web Programming classes for showing me this great web development tool.

Data is money, and probably the most important data you can maintain is your customer list.

In an earlier posting I had mentioned Kurlo which I have been using for several months now. But, I hit a few bugs and it just didn’t have the power that I needed.

Earlier I had looked at Sugar CRM but it was too much and very cumbersome to work with. I also couldn’t figure out how to set up categories for each contact and suspect that that is a feature that is only available in the commercial version.

This weekend I finished an install of XRMS, an Open Source CRM (Customer Relationship Management) program located out on SourceForge.  Installation only took about 30 minutes, but I’ve been fiddling around for several weeks converting my Kurlo data into the XRMS tables. (XRMS has import templates for most popular software such as Outlook, Act2000, Goldmine, and SalesForce if you already have a customer list in one of those).

I now have the ability to keep track of meetings with all of my students as well as my business network, and clients. Like most CRM packages there are tables to keep track of companies as well as individuals. I can also track Activities, Opportunities, Cases, and Campaigns.

Activities are used to maintain contact with a client and to increase business. For most businesses this would be a follow up sales call. For me it is usually my student advising or the  committee work I have set up for the high school Career Expo each May.

Opportunities are sales opportunities. For example, a business may find out that one of their customers will be changing their name in the next few months and will want their entire web site rebuilt. The follow up on this opportunity for that company or individual could be easily tracked using XRMS.

Cases are used to support client issues, like help desk activities and bug reports. A case is set up for an individual contact or a company.

Campaigns are primarily marketing-related. They take the form of direct mailings and similar efforts and are directed towards companies and contacts. Campaigns have a fixed budget and take place over a fixed duration. I might do an email campaign in a few weeks to all the people that have inquired about our program, telling them about the Registration Dates and our new online Orientation.

Right now I am running the program on my laptop but it would be an easy transfer to move it out to one of my web servers so the other faculty members in Computer Careers can access the data. XRMS is PHP/MySQL based so it will run on either a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server or Microsoft’s IIS.  I’m using MAMP on my Mac. Or, you could use EasyPHP to set up a local LAMP environment on your Windows machine.

For my convenience, I also added a link on my FireFox favorites bar so the program is just a click away whenever my browser is open.

As part of the open source movement I will be writing a tutorial on how to transfer data from other programs into XRMS.

Follow up (June 8th, 2008)

I have quite using XRMS due to its limitations. I found the table setup to be very bulky and the input very cumbersome. Also, the online community support has virtually died out and it seems that no new development is being put into this application.

I’ve since migrated to address book on my Macintosh. It easily syncs with my iPod Touch. It also keeps track of the groups I need, and is very fast and easy to access. I found that I can also click and drag information from Entourage (the Mac version of Outlook) into Address book. If I need to follow-up on a call I just drag it over to my Mac calendar.

Everyone likes free books. Here is an excellent resource being organized by Globaltext.org .

Here’s a summary from their web site:

Through what he’s dubbed, “The Global Text Project,” Rick Watson and an international team of professors aim to create a free library of 1,000 electronic textbooks covering subjects typically encountered during the first two years of college. A prototype text is already complete, and work is underway on the first book in the series.

The prototype book was created in 2004 because Watson couldn’t find a comprehensive textbook for a graduate level XML programming class he was teaching. Each student was assigned to write chapter, and Watson served as editor-in-chief. The book, “XML: Managing Data Exchange” (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XML), turned out so well that it is still used in classes at UGA today. Each class that uses the text makes improvements on it, leaving it in better condition than they found it.

I looked through the XML text as well as the Java text and they both are an excellent resource for my class.

It’s interesting. Last semester I had my Web III (XML) class start a Wiki as part of the learning process. The idea was to do exactly what wikibooks is doing, although I didn’t know about wikibooks back then. I was disappointed when the students simply posted information that they copied from other sources on the Web in order to complete the assignment each week. I deleted the whole thing over the summer and decided not to pursue it.

Now I’m thinking of resurrecting this project. We could focus on a specific topic and all work together using a private wiki (a wiki is a web page where a group of people can all edit the pages – wikipedia is the most famous of these.) At the end of the semester we could submit the chapter to wikibooks.

Meanwhile, you don’t have to be in a third-world country to take advantage of these textbooks. Go out and find your favorite topics and bookmark them for reference.

Thanks to Tom Edwards for sending me the link about this.

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For just a minute imagine you are an employer deciding who to hire. Both candidates seem to be excellent programmers. They both interviewed well, making good eye contact and each had a nice strong handshake. The first candidate types 30 word per minute and the other types 90 words per minute. Let’s say the position pays $30/hour… One employee has the potential to produce over 3 times more than the other. Which would you hire?
So, how do you become that 90 wpm person?

I strongly recommend using TuxType, an open-source typing tutor, that is available on SourceForge. You’ll not only improve your typing speed but you’ll have a grand time doing it.

Here’s some tips on increasing your typing speed in 10 minutes.

Cognitive scientists have found out that not all our memory is in our brains. Virtually every cell in our body “remembers” things. Athletes have demonstrated this for years.

You can use this to your advantage by practicing twice each day. First, practice intensely for 10 minutes every night before you go to sleep. 10 minutes. No more. No less. Your brain and muscles will continue processing the information as you sleep. Then when you wake up do the same practice for another 10 minutes. Intensely, with no distractions. This will reinforce what you learned the night before, telling your brain (and each muscle cell) that, “Hey, This is important!”.

Keep doing that seven days a week without fail and you’ll be typing a steady 90 wpm in no time.

Want to customize the practice words?

TuxType uses simple text files for its word list. Look in the folders to find these lists and then make up your own. I made a list of all the HTML tags and several special characters in order to help me increase my speed with the less than, >, and & keys.