Become a better web developer in 5 minutes
Written on August 8, 2010 at 8:41 pm, by Al
Firebug
If you’re not using Firefox for web design, you really – really – should be. Besides being standards-compliant and supporting thousands of useful plugins, it also supports Firebug. Firebug lets you dig into your coed in real time and try out edits and changes as well as giving you a whole range of debugging tools. What’s more, Firebug also supports Yslow a Firebug plugin from Yahoo! thyat’s pure gold. It gives you accurate readouts of your page download time and has built in tools for getting more code and minifying images by using All Smush It to reduce image size without degrading quality.
Filezilla
FileZilla is an open-source FTP client which supports sFTP. FileZilla is stable, easy to use and fast. Don’t pay for an FTP client when FileZilla is available.
Snippets
Every time you write a clever line of code, discover a unique new tool or find an elegant way to write something you should save it. In the future this will save you more and more time as you go on. You should try and keep your snippets up to date and replace them as you find better alternatives. At the very least, consult a site like CSS Tricks which has a massive, ever-growing collection of freely available web design snippets.
Frameworks
Consider looking at using a framework. In CSS BluePrint is a fairly well-known standard for preventing yourself from writing repetitive code. Perhaps you’d rather use something simper? There’s plenty out there. I use a modified version of WhiteBoard CSS for WordPress, a framework which I add to with snippets I collect.
What does the client need?
The most important thing in my experience is to balance a client’s needs with your desires and their intentions. What I mean by this is that if a client needs a website selling microwaves they need it to sell, you’ll naturally want it to look fantastic and so will they, but you will be doing a better job by making a website that works rather than one that lives up the imaginary ideals of what a ‘good website’ is in your head. A good-looking, well-coded website that sells nothing is a bad website.
Alternatives to Microsoft Office
Written on August 8, 2010 at 2:15 pm, by Al
You won’t hear any disagreement from me if you say Microsoft Office is good. It’s great, it has a vast amount of features and once upon-a-time most people seemed to have a copy of it. Not often legal ones, but you either had it or you didn’t.
Today Microsoft office is expensive. Amazon.co.uk has the Standard edition at £283.27 at time of writing. That’s a lot of money, especially if you don’t use it every day.
Here I have some credible alternatives to Microsoft office that are hassle-free and cost-free:
Open office org
Open Office.org (the ‘.org’ is included for legal reasons) is my personal favourite. Developed with help from Sun Microsystems, but still open source and completely free, Open Office.org offers you a seamless switch over from Microsoft Office. With alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access, you’ll still be able to open regular Office documents, work on them save them and read and edit them again in Microsoft Office. Open Office hasn’t always been the quickest application, but it is becoming faster and more streamlined with each release.
IBM Lotus Symphony
Lotus is based on an earlier version of Open Office, but branched off in a slightly different direction. It’s not as intuitive as Open Office but it’s free and again works with Word documents.
Google Docs
Google is becoming a contender in many fields, but the one benefit to using Google Docs is the ability to keep your work in the cloud. Just sign up for a free account and you can write and edit documents and spreadsheets from any computer in the world.
The interface is more spartan, the options fewer – to get more, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid version – but it’s utterly usable.
You can also work live with other users on documents, making real-time revisions and updates by selecting which documents to share with which users.
In today’s varied internet ecology, paying for expensive products when you can get free, legal equivalents is just unnecessary.
Best iPhone apps for work
Written on April 17, 2010 at 8:38 pm, by Al
The iPhone is undoubtedly a polarising device. It probably has more fans than detractors (or at least I like to think so), but it is primarily seen as an entertainment oriented phone, pretty much the polar opposite to the Blackberry.
So I thought I’d highlight some of the most useful tools it can provide for business.
Scheduling with Calendar and Google Calendar
I use Google Calendar not because it’s incredibly good-looking, but because it has great methods for subscribing to other applications and systems. The iPhone can subscribe to Google Calendar and sync dates and events back and forth. The magic part is being able to sync Google calendar to other apps, meaning that you can make a date on your iPhone and see it appear across your workflow (mine appear in Lighting in Thunderbird). You can add as many calendars as you like.
http://www.google.com/calendar/
Syncing files with Dropbox
Dropbox is a file-sharing program that uses peer-to-peer technology to synchronise the contents of folders across different systems. You can use Dropbox to sync files between your own PCs (or Macs) as well as choosing to share folders within your Dropbox folder with other people. The iPhone part comes into play when you download the Dropbox app and are able to view copies of your files on your iPhone. Handy, no? You can also view, download and restore files from the Dropbox website.
Dropbox is free for a starter account and gives you a whopping 2gb. If you invite friends to Dropbox you’ll get an additional 250Mb per person.
The Google App offers a quick portal into it’s services. It’s by means revolutionary and there are more complete apps for accessing Google services, but it has killer speech recognition (ie. It actually works) and a pretty icon.
The Google App links in to many of its services and can prevent a tiresome login each time you need to access a service.
2do
My favourite todo list app, mainly because you can link it without having to subscribe to an expensive system. Version 2 is on it’s way soon, with even more features. Add tasks, lists (collections of tasks), multiple sections for different types of task and sync free with Toodledo.
The interface is not only extremely good-looking, but allows for drag-and-drop, sorting, sharing and different views.
Tabs are used to great effect to separate sections and the application icon can display the number of tasks falling into a category you select.
The official website lists far more features than I can here: http://www.2doapp.com/en/2Do/tips.html
What email program do I use?
Written on April 15, 2010 at 3:18 pm, by Al
Web browsers come in different shapes and sizes, (‘What’s a browser?’) but fewer people are aware that they have a range of choices with email as well.
There are just as many email programs as there are internet browsers.
Microsoft Outlook
Most Windows users will be familiar with some form of Outlook. As part of the office suite, outlook offers reliability and a full suite of editing tools to control your emails. Outlook also has calendars and tasks functionality.
Microsoft Outlook isn’t free though. If you run Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you’ll have a copy of Windows Mail which is essentially a very cut down version of Outlook. If you have XP or previous you’ll have Outlook Express. If you do want to buy Microsoft Outlook you can buy it standalone or as part of the Office Suite, either way you’ll be looking to part with more than £70.
Thunderbird
Thunderbird is my email client of choice. From the same teams that runs Firefox, the world’s most popular internet browser, comes Mozilla Thunderbird. Just like Firefox, Thunderbird is free, and simple to set up.
Version 3 was released earlier this year and whilst not as fully featured as Microsoft Outlook, it is gaining features, including tabbed browsing through emails and a very fast indexed search that lets you specify dates and other conditions to filter through results. Thunderbird will also run on pretty much any platform, including Windows, Linux and OSX. An official Mozilla plug-in Lightning provides calendar functionality to rival Outlook’s.
GoogleMail / GMail
Google Mail is a slightly different approach to email. Rather than encouraging users to set up email programs and download mail to their desktops (though of course you can) Google tries to entice you to use it online so you can access it anywhere in the world.
Rather than using folders, Google has tags for your email to help organise things as well as a range of other features, including filters to process mail automatically when it arrives, beer goggles to stop accidental emailing immediately after a gentlemen’s snifter of sauce and many more experimental features besides.
Personas for Firefox
Written on January 11, 2010 at 12:53 pm, by Al
If you’re up to date enough to be running the new Firefox 3.6 release candidate, then you’ll be able to take advantage of a groovy new feature, Personas for Firefox.
Personas are basically skins, but with a better system for installing and previewing them it’s become a breeze to switch what clothes your version of Firefox is wearing.
Please note: The new release candidate may not yet be entirely stable or compatible with your plugins. if that’s the case, just wait a few weeks until Firefox 3.6 is released officially. If you’re impatient like me though (I’ve had no problems with this Firefox release), get downloading, the links are below.
Get the new Firefox release candidate here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6/whatsnew/
Get Firefox Personas and the personas plugin for faster switching here: http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/
Grooveshark – free, legal online music
Written on January 9, 2010 at 6:10 pm, by Al
I sometimes get a little tired of having to have my iTunes library on each computer, when I just want to chuck on some music and get on with work I go to Grooveshark.com and choose some music from their library.
Even better, is Grooveshark radio – simple select a song or songs you like and then hit the radio button, Grooveshark will then create a playlist based on the songs you have selected and you can either ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ songs as you go along, refining your playlist predictions.
Try Grooveshark out at: http://listen.grooveshark.com/
Get Quickbooks free
Written on January 9, 2010 at 8:52 am, by Al
Nope, it’s not a con – refreshing isn’t it? I’ve been using this for the past 6 months and it’s been fantastic, due to my being more organised, I’ve actually made more money!
Quickbooks from Intuit is a remarkably useful accounting program and if you’re a small business with 20 customers or less, you can run Quickbooks for absolutely nothing. You will need to upgrade if you gain more than 20 customers or suppliers, but it’s a great way to start off and personally, I’ve not reached that many yet.
Download the UK version at http://quickbooks.intuit.co.uk/accounting-software/quickbooks-freestarter.jsp
Digsby
Written on January 9, 2010 at 8:46 am, by Al
If you’re anything like me, you have a wide array of ways to network and chat with your friends and contacts. From email, web-mail and private messages, to Facebook wall posts and Twitter to real-time chatting on Windows Live Messenger and online messaging systems like Facebook and Google’s chat.
Digsby collates all of your networks into one easy way to log in and communicate from one interface.
You need to create a Digsby account which then stores all your login information. They claim their servers are secure, and I’ve not had any problems over the past few months I’ve been using Digsby.
Another very nifty feature is to generate a widget to place on your website or blog that lets you chat in real-time with visitors to your site.
It’s still a relatively new program and seems a little bandwidth-intensive when checking POP email, but the development continues to progress rapidly and new fixes are being applied all the time.
Check out digsby at: http://www.digsby.com/
What to look for in web hosting
Written on January 7, 2010 at 9:48 am, by Al
Building a website
First things first, you don’t need to be technically minded to build a website, the most important quality you can have is to be a good communicator. As long as you can get your message across to your audience, a good hosting package will take care of everything else.
What should a good hosting package offer?
A good hosting package should offer several of the following things, a great hosting package will offer all of them.
- A range of server-side software
Server side software is what transforms a good hosting package from a place to store files to a powerful system that lets you build websites and applications in an intelligent way. Many hosts will let you install Content Management Systems for websites and blogs. One of the most popular of these systems is WordPress, a blogging system that can be set up in minutes. WordPress can also be used to quickly build regular websites with an easy way to manage them. Other programs include forum software, virus scanning programs, webmail and backup systems. - Plenty of emails, databases and server space
You should check how much space and how many (if any at all) email accounts you have been allocated. You should make sure you have several email accounts included in your package. A database is a bonus, and will let you run complex systems on your website such as Content Management Systems, Shopping Carts and other interactive facilities. - Good customer service
With the best will in the world, you will at some point have questions or need advice on your site. If, even more urgently, your site is hacked or damaged in some way you’ll want to get things fixed as soon as humanly possible. - A host that doesn’t dramatically oversell
It may sound like a technicality, however some hosts oversell dramatically. This means that if they have 100Gb on a server, they might sell 500Gb worth of space on it, knowing that most customers will never reach their full allocation. Unfortunately, this happens more often than some hosts like to admit, meaning disruption for everybody hosted on that server and even more so if your account needs to be moved. A good hosting company will know their limits as well as offering you a generous amount of space. - Good backups
A backup system is included with most hosting packages, letting you create backups of your files and sometimes databases as well. This is useful as long as: 1) You have remembered to create a recent backup & 2)You are able to restore the files yourself.
Some hosting companies offer automated backups, meaning you can always be sure that there will be a recent copy of your files safely stored somewhere. Even better, some packages allow you to restore the files yourself, rather than having to contact customer service to do so. Better yet, some of these companies offer this feature for no extra cost. - A degree of flexibility
There will always be times when you’ll need to do something you never anticipated, expand, change or add something to your package. You need to ensure your hosts are happy to add and modify things on the server for your benefit.
Do I have a recommendation though? Yep.
The entire point of this article is not as a puff piece, but lists the features I have found useful – essential in fact, to have in place to be able to effectively build and maintain a website. Having said that, one company stands out in my experiences, offering all the features listed above as standard even on their most economical of packages.
VidaHost are based in Bath, with a data centre in London as well as international hosting options. Their cheapest packages start at £17 + VAT a year and this includes a free domain. Check out VidaHost, they’re happy to answer questions and their tech-support is stunningly fast as well as stunningly free!