So as you may or may not know, I am definitely an Mac enthusiast. That said, at work I am unfortunately using a Windows machine, much to my dismay. It has been quite the challenge  hunting down any sort of freeware that compares with the options for Mac machines, but I’ve finally managed to found one that I find pretty awesome.

I had been going through various different freeware programs for different uses, ftp clients and code editors were the main ones that I was having a great deal of trouble finding solutions that I’d be happy with. Last week I stumbled on Scriptly by Webocton and was beyond pleased with what I found.

Scriptly is a code editor that is filled with all sorts of useful features. From the seven different preset syntax highlighting methods, as well as any custom configuration you may want to the incredibly useful sidebar containing search functions, code snippets, a color picker / hex value converter, and various other useful tidbits. Scriptly is definitely a program worth the download. I’m actually finding myself wishing for the first time that a Windows program was available as a Mac one as well. This is by far the best piece of freeware I’ve ever come across on this Windows machine.

I’m so tired of writing and implementing hacks and workarounds to get my CSS to display properly in Internet Explorer. It seems as thought that’s all that I’ve been doing with this redesign. At least in doing so I feel better about the site’s layout and the structural soundness of it.

Recently I’ve actually moved onto trying to stritcly use conditional comments, albeit the shortest stylesheets within them as I can, but conditional comments none the less. They really help in taking care of all of Internet Explorer’s inconsistancies and what-not all in one big hoorah!

If for whatever reason you’re not familiar with conditional comments, which is probably only if you’re relatively new to CSS, or if you’ve simply been using standard hacks and workarounds for all of the problems associated with trying to write cross-browser compatible stylesheets, you should definitely check out the page on MSDN regarding such. They have definitely been making stylesheet organization much easier with all of the shenanigans that come along with writing CSS for IE.

One practice that isn’t seen put into action enough in web development today is making the user experience as effortless as possible. A lot of today’s websites will have the typical links to add their site to your del.icio.us bookmarks, or StumbleUpon, furl, whatever social bookmarking site is the current trend, however, what about the typical web user? The everyday person who doesn’t have an account on del.icio.us, and uses the browser bookmarks for all their bookmarking needs? Easy methods of adding browser kept bookmarks are far from available on the websites of today, the end user is getting repeatedly overlooked to give way to one’s peers.

Adding a link to add the website as a browser bookmark is something that is very simple, and needs to be more often practiced. Below I will go into detail explaining the exact methods to use to make as cross-browser compatible of a solution as possible (Safari and Opera in part II). Standard JavaScript practices have been more or less getting ignored now that AJAX and it’s flashy, and very practical ways have been becoming the main use for any JavaScripted based coding, it almost seems like developers are slowly starting to completely overlook the basic uses of good ‘ole JS.

[Read more]