On My Way to Boston
Tomorrow morning, I'm catching a plane to Boston to watch Saturday's game against the Yankees. It's going to be incredible. Wakefield vs Johnson. I don't know if I'll even sleep tonight
PunBB
PunBB seems be be a nice, newer, no-frills php-based bulletin board.
Why software sucks (and what to do about it)
Here’s a good article from scottberkun.com about software design and why people call it sucky. What are they really thinking? What does this make the developer think? How can developers spend time more efficiently to create software that is user-friendly?
Page Structure
Today I’m nailing down the page structure for a new set of sites that I’m working on and a key part of that is asking “what gets denoted h1, h2, etc.”? I perused several HTML and design forums looking for discussion on the subject, but did not find answers that seemed practical. A model that kept coming up was that your h1 or h2 should mimic your title tag. If your title tag follows the convention of “site name - page name” this is problematic as these are two distinct elements that should be marked separately.
Podcasting on the Macintosh
I’ve done a few personal podcast episodes on this site and more recently, produce the Board of Education podcast on the Lincoln Public Schools website. Through these efforts I have tried just about everything available on the macintosh right now and am yet to find a tool that does a great job of making the entire process easy. I’ll use the Board podcast as an example. I publish two podcasts for the board.
Studio First Thoughts
I downloaded the new Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash last night and have had some pretty good opportunities today to use DW and Fireworks. Regarding the previous post about folks bashing Fireworks, I’m not in agreement. They were obviously doing some things with Flex that I’m not doing, but Fireworks suits me very well and I do not feel like the product seems neglected, although there is not much new there.
Fireworks 8 Lacking?
Studio 8 has yet to be released for non devnet subscribers, but news is starting to hit the web and one of the first interesting critiques focuses on Fireworks' improvements, or lack of.
Studio 8 Today?
Subscribers to Macromedia’s DevNet service are reporting that they have been provided links today to download the parts of the new studio 8. Perhaps the rest of us will get it today also… (fingers crossed)
Back at it - New blog
Another school year has started and things are humming. I’ve just switched my blog from being based on Movable Type to WordPress and things are probably going to be a little funky here for a week while I learn this new environment and make this what I want it to be.
Studio 8 Announced
I'm three days late on this, but Macromedia announced Studio 8 (Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, Contribute and FlashPaper) on August 8. 8 on 8/8. Great huh? Anyway, I'm quite a bit saddened that Freehand is not in the package as this almost certainly means that it's death is eminent. They have not said as much, but I'm not sure what else a person could think with the coming Adobe merger. So what's new?
XML and XSL explained
As part of a new series of articles from Macromedia centered around the Studio 8 announcement, Marius Zaharia has written one titled "XML Overview" that does a very nice job of explaining XML, it's connection to HTML and XHTML, and XSL. If you are interested in these topics, this article is worth reading.
MII "Next Web" Presentation
Again, for any interested, here are the presentation slides and handout from my "Next Web" presentation on Tuesday at the Midwest Internet Institute in Lincoln. View Presentation | Download Handout
Midwest Internet Institute CSS Session Followup
For anybody that might be interested. Here are the files that I used during my session on cascading style sheets Monday afternoon at the Midwest Internet Institute in Lincoln. They are included here as a zip file that you can expand and proceed to play around with if you wish. The presentation itself is also here. Please be patient with these while they download as my server uplink is not very fast.
iTunes 4.9 brings Podcasting
iTunes 4.9 was release sometime either last night or this morning and now features podcast subscriptions. It is so super easy, you can browse the store for podcasts in the same way that you browse for music. When you find something you like you simply hit "subscribe". You can customize how many shows you would like and best of all, you can tell iTunes how to clean up after itself so that old shows are removed as new shows are downloaded.
Fat Heads
Whining Dave Winer posted a honest reason for his deciding to cancel his Audible service, which Audible CEO Don Katz blasted him for (I bet he doesn't blast people for posting about subscribing), and in typical form Winer opened both barrels back on him in his blog. Stupid stuff.
CFChart Blog
Here's a blog specifically to help folks with the cfchart part of coldfusion
CFMX7 Shirts
You know you want one
Geek humor in the Bible
Link
Google Maps: How do they do that?
The "Giant-Ass Image Viewer" is a very similar project that is demonstrated and explained.
How Blogs Work
Here's 7 simple steps that describe the blogging process (publisher to reader).