Mind Swatches (BLOG)

In my first blog post on this site, I posted a review of GoLive 9 and my intentions for moving future development to Dreamweaver because of, primarily:

1. The auto-generated CSS rules that GoLive 9 adds automatically
2. Adobe’s implication that GoLive was now a tool for “beginners”

If you’re one of the GoLive users who unwittingly “upgraded” from CS2 to 9, a new extension named DeforceCSS has recently been released by Oliver Michalak with some help from Rob Keniger that at least helps to work around my problem #1 above.

After installing the extension, it will run as a maintenance script to strip the CSS styles that GoLive 9 writes by default. From what I can tell, it runs when saving the file or switching view modes, for instance from Layout to Source.

If you are NOT someone who would like to retain control of your source code and you WANT GoLive to help you generate markup, then this extension is not for you - you’re better off with GoLive’s default behavior, but if you’re a developer or experienced coder who would like to continue working in GoLive 9 without worrying about automatically generated styles, then it’s definitely worth a download. At this point, it seems to be a FREE download.

Thanks Oliver (and Rob)!

SitePoint has just made public their CSS Reference website. I’ve really only skimmed the site thus far, but it seems well worthy of at least a bookmark in the browser.

As with most of the books I’ve purchased from SitePoint (and I have quite a few), the site seems true to its name in that it’s best used as a reference than as a tutorial source for beginners to CSS. Not to say there’s nothing there for beginners, but the verbiage can be a little difficult to follow if you’re not already at least vaguely familiar with the technology being discussed. Perhaps some illustrations would help for things like the box model - not unlike their fine CSS Quick Reference Poster. But I’m a visual person…

Overall, I’d say they did a fine job, and I look forward to checking out the upcoming HTML and JavaScript reference sites.

We have recently updated our support and discussion forum to phpBB3. Because of all the forum spam I was getting with the previous version of phpBB, my original intention was to move to a different, less widely know/exploited forum package, like the Simple Machines Forum, which I’ve heard good things about.

After reviewing phpBB3, I was impressed with the CSS-based, XHTML strict validating layout so thought I’d give it a try before moving on. So far, spam has dropped off considerably. It’s not entirely gone, but it’s now easily maintainable. I don’t know how much of that is due to improved security features or just the fact that it’s not yet as widely known and aggressively attacked, but I suppose that should become clear soon enough.

it took me a while to get to customizing the appearance, but did the bulk of that today and am getting used to the new styling system.

I wish there was a more direct method for integrating Askimet, but so far it hasn’t proven necessary. If you’re already running phpBB2, then it’s probably worth the effort to upgrade.

I’ve always been a book person when it comes to learning new software or scripting languages, but for the last month or so I’ve been trying out the online training library from Lynda.com. I started out using it to brush up on the new CS3 versions of Adobe software (and it was great for that), and have since moved on to try to use the site to learn something that I’m not already very familiar with.
(more…)