Web Standards, Accessibility & More » Web Development

Best Free Code/Text Editors

Dennis — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:31:21 +0000

Looking for a good, free code/text editor? I’ve gone through this quandary several times (due to new job, second home computer, suggestion for a friend, etc.), so I figured I’d list my favorites here. Hope you find this, and it serves you well!

Windows

Notepad++ (highly recommended for the PC)
TextPad
Edit+

Mac

TextMate
Text Wranger
Xcode (Apple)
BBEdit (awesome, but just a free trial)

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TimeTracker now available for purchase

Dennis — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 22:13:23 +0000

My personal project this year, TimeTracker, is now complete and available for purchase. It’s a a web application to track one’s time with clients. I developed it for a friend’s employer, Music to Grow On, in order for music therapists to track hours with their clients. Of course, other professionals such as psychologists, teachers, and consultants, could make good use of the application.

Manage session time with clients with the TimeTracker. Manage session time with clients; track and report hours.

In TimeTracker, the professional may enter session information, run reports on his sessions, and view his client information. An administrator may edit user and client information, assign clients, modify all session data, and run detailed reports. In addition to tracking session dates and times, the scope of the project expanded to record driving miles, and to mark sessions as an assessment or a quarterly evaluation. You can read the list of features here.

Addendum, March 2009

TimeTracker has been rebranded as My Client Time.

http://myclienttime.com/

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Firebug plug-in available late for Firefox 3

Dennis — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 04:20:59 +0000

With so many developers using Firebug add-on with the Firefox web browser, I was really surprised that it didn’t work when I upgraded to Firefox 3. Firefox 3 was June 17, 2008, and you’ll notice that theÂ Firebug update wasn’t until June 28. That means that for eleven days, we web developers were left bewildered, without the now essential web developing tool. Of course, I’m guessing most of us had another computer with Firefox 2 and Firebug still running as I did.

So now, if you’re still wondering, you can get Firebug 1.2 that works beautifully with Firefox 3.

Firefox 2 users should install the older 1.05 version of Firebug. You can get the previous Firebug versions here.

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Questions Asked During Web Developer Interviews

Dennis — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:12:03 +0000

So I’ve become familiar with questions that tech companies ask when interviewing candidates for web developer positions in “Silicon Valley” in California. So if you’re interviewing, you should prep yourself for the following interview questions that always seem to come up:

What JavaScript libraries have you used? (And for YUI, which seems to be popular, which components have you used?)
What’s the difference between “if (a==x)” and “if (a===x)”?
Have you developed CSS for different browsers and versions? What are some examples of issues you’ve had? (i.e. box model)
How do you keep up on web technology? (books, blogs, etc.)
Use this text editor to properly properly markup this form from memory (with XHTML, CSS, JavaScript).
Use this text editor to properly properly markup this table from memory (with XHTML).
What’s the difference between “visibility:hidden” and “display:none”?
What’s the difference between using var inside and outside of a JavaScript function? (or an exercise involving this)
How would you write the HTML and CSS for a standard three-column layout with header and footer?

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Dreamweaver CS4 Beta

Dennis — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:52:40 +0000

Guess what? Adobe’s Dreamweaver CS4 Beta is available! And I’m just getting used to CS3! New features include:

Live View
Code Navigator
CSS best practices
Code hinting for Ajax and JavaScript frameworks
HTML data sets
Photoshop Smart Objects
Subversion integration
AIR support
New user interface

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Email Spambot Buster

Dennis — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 03:06:26 +0000

Did you ever have an email address that you posted on a web site “stolen” from a damn spamming company, then have tons of spam sent to that address? Doesn’t that suck?!

If you have, then you’ve probably either removed the email link or tried protecting it with some method of tricking these “spambots”.

I just posted an article called Email Spambot Buster.Â It describes a great way of safely displaying an email address on a web site. It is accessible, uses progressive enhancement, and adds a couple neat bonuses.

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An Event Apart, San Francisco (2007)

Dennis — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 01:54:14 +0000

I was fortunate enough to recently attend the An Event Apart, San Francisco (you can view a collection of ALA SF photos on Flickr). The first thing to mention is, to my pleasant surprise, how funny Jared Spool and Jeffrey Zeldman were! In addition to the sessions, the atmosphere was electric, a made a few good professional contacts, and the food was excellent I also had the opportunity to personally speak (even though briefly) with Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Joe Clark.

It would be great if every web designer and developer in the world could attend this conference as it promotes the right way to do web development–namely web standards and accessibility. There were also a couple excellent sessions on web design.

Eric Meyer, the infamous CSS guru, presented twice. He showcased his data table-to-bar chart CSS, which was really impressive. The second session focused on CSS and IE7, mostly about CSS selector techniques. Jeffrey Zeldman also presented twice–on Writing the User Interface and Selling Design. Other notable presenters include Jason Santa Maria of Happy Cog, Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering, and Kimberly Blessing of PayPal.

A few good quotes used in the presentations were:

I’d have written it shorter if I had more time.
Design helps people read less.
An interface is worth a thousand pictures.

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