del.icio.us bookmarks for December 6th through December 20th
These are my links for December 6th through December 20th:
- 24 ways: Diagnostic Styling – We?re all used to using CSS to make our designs live and breathe, but there?s another way to use CSS: to find out where our markup might be choking on missing accessibility features, targetless links, and just plain missing content.
- CSS Text Wrapper – The CSS Text Wrapper allows you to easily make HTML text wrap in shapes other than just a rectangle. You can make text wrap around curves, zig-zags, or whatever you want. All you have to do is draw the left and right edges below and then copy the generate
- Drawter.com – DrawAble Markup Language – Stop coding and start drawing.
- Maximum and Minimum Height and Width in Internet Explorer ? Perishable Press – by taking advantage of IE?s proprietary CSS attribute, expression, you too can whip IE widths and heights into desirable proportions.
- Vitamin Features » Creating Sexy Stylesheets – In this article Jina Bolton gives 10 CSS tips culled from surveys with 12 top designers.
Tools of the Trade: FilenameToFTP
Clients often send me PDFs and images whose file names aren’t set up correctly for the web. The files will have spaces, commas, apostrophes, or other special characters in their names which need to be changed before the files can be uploaded. To manually make these changes is a pain, so when I was using Windows full-time, I found FilenameToFTP, a tiny freeware app that makes file names web friendly. FilenameToFTP renames files and folders, using all lowercase letters and replacing invalid characters with an underscore. A nifty little time saver.
On the Mac, you can use Automator to do the same thing. The Automator action Make Names Web Friendly would probably do the trick.
Switched
Well, just over a month ago, I made the switch — I went from my three-year-old Toshiba laptop to a 24″ Aluminum iMac. My take: Awesome. I simply love this computer. At first, the 24″ monitor was overwhelming (especially after using a 15.4″ laptop for the past 3 years), but I’ve gotten used to it. ;)
But this entry isn’t about the iMac itself. Rather, here’s a list of the tools I’m now relying on everyday, since moving to the Mac full time.
skEdit 4.0 Released
skEdit, the “little Mac editor that could,” has just turned 4.0. There are a bunch of new features, including:
- Extensible Editing, which allows you to create and edit new language files for syntax highlighting, code folding, code completion, code navigation, and code indexing.
- Remote Editing, allowing you to edit files over (S)FTP or WebDav.
- Projects, which can be created from local or remote files.
- Code Completion “for built-in functions, classes, etc. skEdit will even index your own files, so custom functions, classes, etc. will show up too.
- Search one or many files and perform project-wide search and replace, all using regex.
- User Scripts, written in any language, to automate custom tasks.
skEdit also comes with a new price of $35 USD (up from $25), and the free lifetime upgrades now only apply to those who purchased skEdit pre-4.0.
Sitemap Diagrams Using OmniGraffle, Applescript, and a Google Sitemap
Typically, when a potential clients contacts me about redesigning their website, I like to examine their current site to check out the design and to see how large the site is — in order to get a sense of taste and potential project scope.
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