Back last year I posted about Fixed vs. Fluid Layouts and Screen Resolutions. I made reference to a friend of mine that I went to and saw how my site looks on his LCD Monitor. That was just a couple few hours, one experience. Everywhere else I go I encounter only 17″ monitors, CRT or LCD. So that 800 pixel limit for sites seems to work out just fine.

Now I finally got the parts for my new computer last week. One of the new things I’ve gotten is a 19″ wide screen LCD monitor. Now, one thing learned about LCDs is that LCD monitors don’t look good in any other resolution except the one they are designed for. Mine is 1440 x 900. Now I’m not complaining. I love this monitor. Everything is so beautiful and crisp. The only thing that could make this better is if I had two of them side by side.

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Courtesies of TechJunction I bring to you:

The Top Five Technologies You Need to Know About in ‘07

1. Ruby on Rails - Faster, easier Web development
2. NAND drives -Bye-bye, HDD?
3. Ultra-Wideband -200x personal-area networking
4. Hosted hardware -Supercomputing for the masses
5. Advanced CPU architectures -Penryn, Fusion and more

Ruby on Rails

has been getting real rave reviews lately. Honestly, I haven’t delved into it that deeply yet, but from my initial experience I don’t see what all the fuss is about, but I promise to investigate more. What I have seen is that a lot of web hosts out there either don’t support it or do so at a hefty price to the end consumer. As such, PHP still reins in the world of cheap web developement in my opinion.

NAND Drives

These will make more of an impact with notebook computers as they are smaller and lighter than regular hard drives. And being based on flash memory makes these extremely fast. However, as with all new technology, it just costs too damn much right now. 2007 for the rich folks, maybe more like 2008 for mainstream use.

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Introduction

Here we go again, the age old story. Do we use plain old HTML Tables or do we invest the time and energy into learning and using CSS properly? Duh, it’s not even worth saying anymore. Tables suck, tables have always sucked. The only thing that keeps tables going for so long is their ease of design.

More Evidence

Tables Bad, CSS Good… tells us, again, why we should us CSS whenever possible:

• Search Engines: I have redesigned many websites eliminating tables and placing all links in unordered lists and have seen there search engine rankings improve drastically.
• Compatibility: Remember that in today’s day and age websites are being viewed on everything from 60 inch plasma TV’s to 3 inch cell phone screens. If you assign a table a width of 780 it becomes near impossible for visitor using a handheld device to view your website.
• Accessibility: People with disabilities have the right to enjoy the web! If your website uses tables a visitor using an audio browser is going to have trouble accessing your website. Go ahead and try to use your website with and audio browser…

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Introduction

Ever wanted to clock your website’s speed? Of course you have. If you’re any sort of Web Developer you’ve used Web Page Analyzer in the past and you’ve probably gotten by with it. There’s a new AJAX tool called WebWait, which does a similar job except much, much cooler. I mean, after all it’s AJAX right?

WebWait is unique is many ways.

• One of the nicest features is that you can set it to perform multiple runs at specified intervals and take an average of all of them.
• It is, of course, browser independent since it doesn’t exactly run on your system.
• It handles cookies and authentication from within your browser. If you log into a page and copy a URL from an authenticated session, then you can track these load times. This is one option that I’ve never seen before.

Why I Still Use Web Page Analyzer

Although there are these cool features of WebWait I still rely on Web Page Analyzer for a lot of things. My first problem is that WebWait does not give an estimated speed.

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For most of my real quick image editing I usually use Paint.NET. That’s for when Photoshop is overkill and I’m not really a Gimp man, sorry. And of course MS Paint, or whatever it’s called now, it’s going to cut it, ever. But what do you do when you’re not home and away from your normal tools? Well I just use Paint.NET on my flash disk, but that’s another story.

Here is what normal people do: Snipshot. Here are some of the greatest features:

• Import from any website or upload your own pictures
• No need to download anything. Runs totally in a browser
• Save files as GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG, or TIF
• Crop, rotate, resize
• Contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness and hue
• Files up to 10 MB

One feature which deserves a little more explanation is the Bookmarklet they provide. Save this bookmark to your browser’s favorites and anytime you’re browsing on a website and see a picture you’d like to edit, click the Bookmarklet. It brings up the Snipshot website with a list of all images on the page. Just click one and edit away.

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First off, let me apologize for the many weeks of no posts. I’ll give you some more information later, but basically I got a new job (yaaaaay) and I had to move about 150 miles to search for apartments and all the stuff that goes with it. That, coupled with no internet connection and being dead broke didn’t leave much time to get on the internet.

Popularity: 3%

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For those of you just wiping the remnants of 2006 out of your eyes welcome to 2007. If it’s January 1st and it’s before daylight I hope you’re just reading this before you go to bed or something, because if you aren’t out with friends partying, I truly feel your pain. lol.

To the rest of you stumbling upon this post at a reasonable hour I have a great way to start out 2007 with some AJAX. The Register - RegDeveloper.co.uk has a nice step by step tutorial on Developing Web Applications with AJAX - Part 1. The topics include:

1. Overview of XMLHttpRequest
2. Installing Software
3. Configuring JBoss with MySQL Database
4. Creating an Eclipse Project

They use JBoss here as a Java backend. You can try this to begin with however as soon as you understand the tutorial, it should be clear how we can replace the Java backend with something normal like ASP or PHP. Or if you really like Java then go right ahead.

Enjoy the tutorial and once again: Welcome to 2007. Jah Guidance.

Popularity: 3%

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Introduction

I must say, JavaScript and I have had our love-hate relationship. Sometimes the reason I love it are the same reasons that I hate it:

• Variable Declarations are not necessary
• It does not compile

But officially, does JavaScript suck?

Why JavaScript Sucks

Fabien at Chase The Devil uses The Google Web Toolkit as his basis for claiming that it does suck:

Why would GWT be so well acclaimed if JavaScript was a good language. When you talk about GWT to someone (a developer preferably), the first reaction is often

Why JavaScript Doesn’t Suck

Now the guys over at Think Out Loud has a different idea about JavaScript. They claim that it doesn’t suck:

1. Just because some vendors are building tools to generate javascript code doesn’t mean the language sucks. If the language really sucked these tools wouldn’t even exist. …
2. If JavaScript was so horrible then you wouldn’t find libraries like the Yahoo UI kit, Mochi, Dojo, Scriptaculous, Prototype, and the many others out there. …

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