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Blogs » Archive for March 11th, 2008
And The Winner of the Nintendo Wii is…
I’m excited (and more than a little bit jealous) to announce that the winner of our SitePoint Reader Survey competition is…
Ivan Soria
Ivan is a designer, student and entrepreneur from Mexico, and his interests include motion media and video games. He’s the lucky winner of a Nintendo Wii and TWO copies of Guitar Hero III.
Ivan’s suggestion for improving sitepoint.com was selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 entries. Here’s what he wrote:
I would totally love to see a SitePoint desktop or web application where one could find some tools aimed at web design, coding and business. For example, it would be cool to have a CSS coder with quick access/interaction to the reference section.
But Ivan didn’t stop at just one idea — he had quite a few. For example, he had some ideas on the type of content that would make him visit sitepoint.com more often.
I think it would be useful to have a weekly featured digital/web artist, and to see his or her portfolio. I’d like to see SitePoint develop a finer aesthetic sense, rather than having so many tutorials. (I write this because I think of SitePoint as more a “thinking” or “philosophy” site, rather than practical …
Save the Planet and Save Cash
Now there are lots of good reasons to be more “green”, saving the planet, moral obligation, yadda, yadda, yadda. But, let’s get a bit selfish here — what’s in it for me and my business? I mean, of course there is the feel good factor about doing the “right” thing, but what about saving some cold hard cash?
As it turns out (not too surprisingly), being a bit “green savvy” with your hardware purchases can save you a fair amount of power and money. So, before you buy your next computer here are a few handy resources to help make your decision:
- The Electronic Product Environmental Asset Tool can help you discover the most environmentally sound desktop, laptop and monitor.
- The energy star rating.
- Calculate the savings in terms of money, C02, trees and cars (Excel Spreadsheet).
- Investigate the efficiency of you power supplies at 80 Plus.
- Calculate your server efficiency using the SWaP (Space, Watts and Performance) metric.
You can also check how your current computer performs, using power management tool like LocalCooling for Windows or monitor your CO2 output on OSX using SusiClimate (both free).
Being energy smart with your next computing purchase will save you money. Go …
.NET on the NET March 2-9: MIX Hangover Edition
On the really off chance that you missed it, MIX08 has come and gone. I posted some reflections here and here. Definitely make sure to check out the webcasts [NB: install Silverlight 2 first] if you get a chance. Lots of great stuff was released to the web at the show—Matthew Podwyoski has a good list of the ASP.NET specific ones. Working around the release of IE8 Beta 1, the involved teams tell us about IE8 and IP licensing, Activities and Web Slices, IE8 and JScript, CSS 2.1 Testing, and the IE8 Developer Tools. A bit more mundane, but more important in my life is the torrent of releases from the IIS team. Highlights include IIS7 admin tools for XP, 2003 and Vista, configuration extensibility x2 and a very strong article on IIS7 diagnostic tools for developers.
Given that a rather significant hunk of the ASP.NET world was busy schmoozing and boozing in Vegas, there was not a lot of activity in the dotnetosphere. LINQ and other fancy, schmacy stuff …
WaSP Gives SitePoint Books The Thumbs Up
The Web Standards Project’s new Street Team are running a guerrilla marketing campaign to warn retail customers about books that are outdated or teach techniques that are not considered best practice.
This is the first of the “street team” initiatives that the group has undertaken, and they’ve done so with a passionate but witty call to arms:
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, will be to track down and identify dangerously outdated web resources and expose them as the misleading charlatans they truly are.
The bookmarks direct readers to a page on the WaSP site that contains a list of recommended, up-to-date books. We’re obviously very pleased to see over 20% of the books listed are SitePoint titles:
- Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS
- HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, 2nd Edition
- The CSS Anthology, 2nd Edition
- Simply JavaScript
- The JavaScript Anthology
- The Art & Science of JavaScript
The WaSP street team have a PDF of the bookmark available for download (PDF, 3.4MB), so you can print it out and discreetly place it in any outdated web design books that you …
PNG32 hacks and IE6. Is it worth it?
Last year you might remember me running through what I thought were the under-appreciated qualities of an image file format that seems to slip under the radar — the PNG8.
Namely:
- Small files sizes
- Graded alpha-transparency in all current browsers
- No requirement for potentially brittle hacks requiring JavaScript, ActiveX and/or other proprietary technologies.
Although, admittedly, you had to be prepared to slightly lower your expectations of the render in IE6, we considered the trade-off generally worthwhile — particularly as you begin to hone your skill for producing PNG8 images that degrade nicely in IE6. Personally I haven’t ruled out using PNG32 in certain situations, but PNG8 is certainly my weapon of choice.
Bearing this in mind, it was great to read a really interesting post on PNG32 hacks and IE6 by George Reilly on the new Cozi Tech Blog. For a little background, George spent seven years working on IIS at Microsoft, and as such has two things most of us can’t claim:
- an array of hard won Microsoft ninja debugging skills
- a black book of Microsoft contacts to quiz about nonsensical IE6 voodoo
Nevertheless after deploying the time-honored IE6 PNG32 hack in …
New Atlanta Does The Unthinkable!!
Wow! Vince I have to give you and the entire New Atlanta Team a big high five, raise my glass, slap on the butt, or whatever your favorite congratulatory “thing” may be. With this blog post you did something which Adobe couldn’t or didn’t know how to. You Open Sourced CF. Ok so you didn’t open source CF but you did Open Source a J2EE Enterprise Server which runs CF, and that in my book is awesome!
For years I’ve watched New Atlanta constantly innovate the CF market with new ideas and business practices. I’ve heard your entire team talk about “listening to the community” and then acting on it. I admit I’ve seen this a few times but never really got the feeling you were “really” listening to the entire community. Then you pull this out of your hat. You’ve done something we CFML developers have been asking Adobe / Macromedia to do for years.
It’s the opinion of this blogger that with this one announcement and “project” you have in essence single handedly ensured a LONG life for ColdFusion. Anyone who’s ever worried about Adobe selling CF off, or worse just shutting it down can rest easy. With …
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