The Web Development Blog has moved to http://www.heidicool.com/blog/. Please visit me there to read the latest entries and to update your bookmarks and RSS feeds.
June 28, 2006
Sharing the wisdom of Blake Ross, inventor of Firefox
Monday night—as I was driving home from work, making dinner, and puttering about the house—I listened to The City Club's podcast of their June 14th 2006 forum featuring Blake Ross, inventor of Firefox. While I've been subscribed to The City Club's podcast's for quite awhile, I thought Blake's talk might be of interest to you because many of the ideas he applies to program development also apply to Web development. Blake Ross, a 21-year old student and developer, realized some time ago that programmers can't work in a vacuum; instead of focusing inwardly on their code, they need to understand...
June 26, 2006
Uploading files with Dreamweaver (FTP)
Note to users of the main Case Web server (Aurora): As of May 19, 2008 you will upload your files via WebDAV instead of FTP. Learn more about the transition to WebDAV. Once you've planned your site and organized your files, it is time to start building and uploading your pages. If your site is hosted on Case's main Web server you will do this via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). There are a variety of good inexpensive FTP programs* available, but if you are using Dreamweaver—provided through the software center as part of Macromedia Studio—you can simply use its built-in...
June 20, 2006
Web File Organization and Naming Conventions
At home, entropy reigns supreme. My friends will attest that a visit to Heidiland—replete with obstacles ranging from art supplies to Pisa-like stacks of books—is an adventure that would be considered overly-taxing by the neat freaks of the world. My computers, however, are another story. Given that my active Web development folder has over 14,000 files within, and that this is but one of many folders on one of three computers, I've had to take a more logical approach.
June 09, 2006
I'm not going to teach you XHTML/HTML, but you should learn it anyway
If you are already comfortable editing in HTML or XHTML, then you may want to just skip to the bottom and bookmark some of the resources I've listed for future reference. But if you've just been given the responsibility of maintaining or building a new site for your department, you may be wondering where to begin. If you've done the requisite site planning, as described in my Planning Your Website Tutorial, then you are almost ready to begin building or editing your pages. To build a new site you will need to download the appropriate template files, and make sure...