My favorite text editor for as long as I can remember is Homesite. I still use it today to edit HTML, PHP, etc. Homesite began life as a product developed by Nick Bradbury. Nick sold the software to Allaire. Allaire was acquired by Macromedia and then most recently acquired by Adobe when Adobe acquired Macromedia.

Adobe has announced that it no longer will support Homesite and is pushing customers into Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. Adobe notes, “After careful consideration, Adobe discontinued development of Macromedia HomeSite software effective May 26, 2009. Field and channel sales of the product ended on May 26 and sales across all channels, including the online Adobe Store, ended June 18, 2009. Existing customers are encouraged to consider the development environment of Adobe® Dreamweaver CS4 software.”

A real shame as Adobe really has no product that is lightweight and works for raw coding. I will continue to use Homesite as it meets my needs for coding. You can read my last review of Homesite 5 from a few years ago.

A while ago, I heard rumors that the next incarnation of HTML would include support for easily replacing HTML elements (such as headers) with images by simply adding a “src” attribute to the HTML tag. For instance, you might be able to do something like:

<h1 src="myimage.png">This is my alt text</h1>

However, it seems that the advent of this type of thing, if it ever happens, is still quite a ways off. Therefore, if you’re looking for an easy way to replace a plain text header with a nice image, for instance, a banner, you need to find another way of doing so.

This article will briefly explain how to do so using purely CSS. Continue Reading »

I have had an iPhone for about two months, now. When I first got it, I was told that I should pick up the Otterbox Defender case to protect it. I ordered one and was immediately impressed. In fact, I was so impressed, that when we got iPod Touches for our kids’ birthday, the first (and only) accessory we ordered for them were Otterbox Defender cases. We also bought one for the 3rd generation iPod Nano that was handed down to my wife after the iPod Touches were received. Continue Reading »

Firefox 3.5 was released by Mozilla, today. If you haven’t grabbed it, yet, you should probably go ahead and do so. According to the promotional materials and the release notes, this version of Firefox has been clocked around twice the speed (it takes less than half the time to load items as opposed to FF 3), upgraded phishing and malware detection and protection, and has introduced “private browsing.”

On the Firefox Web site, Mozilla has also developed it’s own chart similar to the IE8 comparison chart we discussed last week.

The new version also natively supports OGG audio and video, along with the HTML5 audio and video tags.

Google has put together a list of myths regarding how site architecture affects (or doesn’t affect) rankings within the search engine. They also take a look at why traffic might drop from Google to a specific website.

The myths investigated include:

• duplicate content
• affiliate links

There is a discussion about site design including robots.txt, moving sites and the “rel=canonical” tag. Here’s part of the presentation:
Continue Reading »

Rackspace, one of the leading managed, dedicated Web server hosts in the world, experienced a rather major power outage at their Dallas-Fort Worth (TX, USA) data center.

Around 4:15 this afternoon, our Web site at work (which is hosted by Rackspace) stopped responding to requests (at first, I was a little freaked out, because I was running a back-up and thought maybe something had gone awry). I then tried visiting the MyRackspace customer portal to submit a support ticket, and found that it was not responding, either.

I called our point of contact and asked him to look into it. Around 4:40, our Web server was back up and running. Rackspace, however, was still down for a while longer.

Rackspace is keeping customers updated on their blog. At this point, they are saying that everything is back online.

For the last two weeks, Rackspace has been performing tests, upgrades and maintenance to their back-up power utilities because of “anomalies” they’ve encountered. I wonder if this power outage was a result of those anomalies, a result of the upgrades, maintenance and testing or if it was completely unrelated.

Who do you follow on Twitter, and why do you follow them? Following is a sample of the types of people and organizations I’m following on Twitter. I’m curious to know how you guys are using Twitter. Continue Reading »

Today, Zend released the latest beta version of their Zend Studio application. Zend Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for PHP developers. Although the software usually requires a commercial support license (which currently runs $399 for one year or $717 for three years), the beta version of Zend Studio 7.0 is available as a free trial download for the time being.

You can download the beta software from Zend’s Web site.

Having picked up a 30″ LCD monitor at work and having finally gotten my dual-head configuration working, I found myself in a situation where I wanted to split my screen into equal sections so that I could work on many various things at once. Browsing the Web with my browser maximized on the 30″ screen was rather silly (since most sites I visit are developed with a fixed-width design, they only fill up a tiny portion of my screen). Instead, it made much more sense to divide my screen into four equal regions and have at least four different programs open in the corners of the screen.

Getting tired of trying to manually resize my windows and move them around, I started searching for a program that might make it a little easier. Ideally, I was looking for a program that would split my screen into four equal sections, then “dock” the applications in those sections so that I could drag the corners and have them snap in place. Continue Reading »

Editor’s note: Austin from MuseGames put together this comparison of how 3D environments render in a variety of browsers. Muse Games is a destination site that finally brings fun 3D, multiplayer gaming in to the web browser.

Being peddlers of 3D content, we thought it appropriate to take a look at the current state of 3D in the browser. How do the different browsers stack up? Read on to find out, and if you’re using IE6, please, for the love of your developers, upgrade.

 Safari 3 (and 4)

Rating: BEST

Download:  Mac  PC

Both Safari 3 and 4 dominate all the other browsers in terms of speed, performance, and aesthetics, with 4 being the latest and greatest. We of course realize Safari is not all that popular, particularly with Windows users, but the sheer technical superiority of Safari warrants giving it a shot. In terms of specifics, Safari 4 executes javascript faster than any other browser (with the exception of Chrome, where it is about evenly matched), it supports the latest standards for website design, and it exhibits no threading or memory issues related to rendering 3D in the browser via an ActiveX plugin(see Firefox).
Continue Reading »