lissmo . dot . com

The problem with RSS feeds is that you usually don’t subscribe to your own feeds, so you don’t know that they’re broken until someone tells you. So…yes, I know my feeds are broken. Hopefully I’ll find time this weekend to fix them, but if not…well, obviously you’re not missing much!

There is only one thing I can think of that’s more frustrating than finding a bug in my FTP program that means that my entire website gets deleted when I only mean to delete one file.

Finding the bug at 1am. Three times in a row. Because apparently I am S-L-O-O-O-W.

Thank God for backups, and good night.

BaseCamp is a slick project management/client extranet tool build by the team at 37signals. They’re providing an object lesson in how to identify an internal need and turn it into a business venture with the responsiveness and attention to detail that they’ve been known for in their other work.

I’ve gotten tired of messing around with it, so I’ve launched the new design for this site even though I don’t consider it really done yet. There are still some niggling differences in the page templates that I’m working out on the back end. I also want to finish implementing the URL rewriting so that the URLs are friendlier.

The thing that’s bugging me the most right now is the color scheme - I’m thinking that this color scheme is still a little bit too dark. I think that the text is a touch too hard to read, unless I use the lighter color for all of the text and not just the headings. That’s not the look I’m going for, though.

I’ll have to play with this a little more, so you’ll have to suffer until I get it straighted away.

Working on the last half-dozen or sites I’ve built, I’ve rediscovered how much modularizing the code helps me in the long term. Updating the site and building out each new section as the site grows is so much easier when I can copy an existing file and just change the names of the includes to the new section.

Why did I stop using include files again??

Drop-down menus for navigation are a huge problem for many developers, especially those who want to create pages that are clean, easy to maintain and consist of valid XHTML markup using CSS for design elements rather than a mess of nested tables and invalid, inaccessible Javascript code.

Unfortunately, designers (and clients) adore them. They are, admittedly, an easy way to get lots of options in front of the user quickly (let’s not discuss whether or not that’s a good thing right now), so developers are often forced to find a way to work with them whether they like it or not.

For a site I did recently, I collaborated with the other developers at work and came up with what I think is a pretty elegant solution to the problem. Originally based on menus done by another firm for the Cingular web site, the main navigational elements are unordered lists. The drop-down functionality is still Javascript-driven, but the sub-menus are also unordered lists. The menus themselves are easy to maintain and move around as needed, and the functionality (aside from the calls to the JS functions) is completely separate, and those were my two main goals.

It looks like Glasshaus is folding, along with Wrox and Friends of ED. The Glasshaus team have produced some of the most useful books I own on web technology subjects. Great authors, great production values, and good people. This makes me incredibly sad, especially having heard the rumors of how things have been handled on the business end - there are some really talented people who are getting shafted hard.

Dreamweaver UltraDev: next great time-saving tool, or time-wasting PITA? Opinions? I’m not entirely sure yet. It seems to have promise, especially for some people on our team who aren’t ready for hand-coding ASP and for times when faster the most important factor, but I’m not exactly thrilled with the code it generates. I’ll need to spend some time looking at how much I can customise the generated VBScript; don’t even talk to me about the server-side JavaScript it generated on the test pass of that code. Nightmare city, just like the “behaviors” I hate so much.

I’d love to see some real competition - not to mention really robust products - in the automated scripting arena. Visual InterDev is a beast (consider the source) with too much crap I don’t need (surprise!). Adobe took GoLive and didn’t make it any better, though now they’ve added “Dynamic Link”, which I’ve yet to see actually work. At this point, Macromedia is the winner through mindshare alone. Not that Dreamweaver is a bad product - far from it - but I really wish there were some decent competition. Free market economy and all that.