Development Notes
I have the memory of a goldfish, which I'm told has a 3-4 second memory, explaining how Sparky's able to keep up such enthusiasm for those treasure chest bubbles and why it doesn't bug him to poop in his drinking water; you'll get there, too, someday, just ask my grandparents. Then you'll see. Oh, the point is all of these links are merely notes I'm leaving for me. If they help you, cool. See also the geek links for useful tools etc.
Get productive fast!
List of Essential Firefox Plug-ins (Add-ons)
Get Firefox!
A question I frequently get is which Firefox plug-ins do I recommend (OK, sometimes it's just "Hey, what's that?" as someone points to my screen). The world of Firefox add-ons is incredibly rich, but whenever I install Firefox on a development machine here's the extensions I always immediately add.
Web Sites 101: a primer to your first site
If you're considering hiring a consultant to build your web site for you don't go in blind. Yes, you do need to be "an informed consumer". Get your feet a little wet; trust me, it's not so bad. Here's the ten minute primer I rattled off recently to someone needing a site.
If you're thinking of doing it yourself, more power to you, read the danged thing twice then.
(I'm posting this because I'm lazy and don't want to retype it later. In Yogi Bera's words: "I wish I had an answer to that question because I'm tired of answering that question")
Plugin: PBTS_XTRA, add Multiple Content Areas to phpList
I've adapted my customized editor that allows me to define more than one content area within a phpList Template into a plugin you can fairly easily install and run in about 20 minutes.
Apache's Mod Rewrite
A quick explanation of how I've been using Apache's mod rewrite to handle moved page redirections instead of the meta refresh tags.
A Few Quick, Important Apache Settings
I'm always forgetting these httpd.conf settings so here's my check list after i've installed Apache.
Editing Windows Hosts
Run your own private DNS -- a must if you're a running Apache locally with multiple development sites.
Installing AWStats & the Multi-Month Patch
The first few hosting providers I dealt with had this installed nicely, thus I never knew how much work was involved. But having gone through it a few times... well, it's still a lot of work. But the results AWStats provide are worth it.
IE Fails the PNG Test, Compensates with Conditional Comments
Internet Explorer Tricks
OK, I'm a Firefox user, won over by the Fox's elegant implementation of Find and tabs, but I'll allow that IE has itself a really nifty feature in its conditional comments. Using this trick it's now easier than ever to correct IE's other failings, such as an abysmally embarassing failure to properly handle PNG transparencies. What? You didn't know IE still doesn't render PNGs correctly? Yeah, inept, eh? So, here's examples of the PNG fix, the conditional comment, and a CSS hack.
Pizza Style Samplers
Stylesheet Sampler for Pizza. I'll never finish, I fear, this never-ending tweaking with H1, LI, you name it, there's always an exception or new need. These pages are for debugging CSS edits: basic page | wide page.
Added a Search to Your Site?
Don't Forget to Schedule Indexing
I looked around a bit, found most of the stuff out there to be crap, until I stumbled upon isearch. Fast setup, tons of features, customizaable appearance takes minutes. So what more? Well, don't forget to schedule the indexing:
/usr/bin/php -q /home/pizzaby/public_html/isearch2/admin/reindex.php cmd
More Crucial Tools
HTML & CSS Validators
Before handing over the keys to that shiny new website (one word, dammit!) take a moment to run your site through this: jigsaw.w3.org css validator and validator.w3.org.
php Info
The "Hello, World" of php: server info, etc. view php info for this server.
