Christian Ziebarth

Posts Tagged ‘web development’

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CSS Libraries

In Uncategorized on March 7, 2009 at 6:29 pm

I think at least 20% of the job of a web developer is keeping up with all the new developments out there in our realm. It seems like every day there is new CSS this, or new jQuery that. One of the CSS libraries is Blueprint and a few months ago I began to use it for a project but realized it was like my own unnamed (as yet) CSS/JavaScript framework that I’d been using so I scrapped that idea.

Blueprint CSS

A couple months later I found a job listing for a Blueprint developer and wrote to them and said, “I have my own thing that’s like Blueprint that works even a little better. Would that work for you?” The guy was nice but said, “Well, we would give preference to a Blueprint developer.” And that was the last I’ve heard from him.

When I started my next project (United States Mexican Restaurants; yes, I have three Mexican food-related websites, but only three) I decided I would put it in Blueprint so I could say I had Blueprint experience. So what is my opinion on Blueprint? It’s okay, but maybe not really better than the framework I had created on my own (but was not visionary enough to market). I think I will probably at least keep this one project in Blueprint. People have discussed drawbacks to Blueprint, the main complaint being, “What I find with a lot of these frameworks is that they try to be ‘all things to all people,’ which leads to using more code than is necessary.” But I can live with it on one of my sites. Read the rest of this entry »

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Good Old-fashioned Books

In Uncategorized on February 11, 2009 at 7:22 pm

With the unfortunate brushfires that have occurred in Victoria, Australia, the big Aussie-based web development website SitePoint (see blogroll here for direct link) is raising funds for victims of the disaster by selling five of their books for $29.95 USD and donating ALL of the proceeds. If you’re any kind of web developer and you have any kind of heart and human compassion in you it’s hard to not help out with this effort. I have just placed my own order for five of these books.

The main reason I’m mentioning this here is in the hopes that other people that could use web dev books might also want to take advantage of this offer and increase the amount of help that is offered to those who were affected by these historically bad wildfires.

This made me think that even in this Internet age I actually do purchase AND read web development books. Of course I’m looking at a darn computer screen much of the day but I don’t like to read big blocks of text off of a computer monitor and sometimes I learn things from books that I wouldn’t learn from online tutorials

And here are many of the web development books I own myself:

DSCF6158 Read the rest of this entry »

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Indentation Sensation

In Uncategorized on January 13, 2009 at 8:36 pm

When I first began learning HTML in 1998 my messy code very easily qualified for the epithet “tag soup.” Quite often I had very little clue what I was doing and very often was copying somebody else’s code and simply changing the content without touching the tags so I wouldn’t “screw anything up.”

As I started to learn more about HTML from online tutorials and books (yes, I learned quite a bit from HTML for Dummies in 1998) I would see it advised that an HTML coder should “indent their code.” But I never saw anywhere an explanation as to what should be indented, what it should be indented in relation to, how much it should be indented, if indentation meant anything more to the logic of the code than just “some lines don’t start at the far left edge,” etc. Still, back then I wasn’t sure if these were even valid or important questions. So I would go through my code and randomly indent some lines then think, “There, my code’s indented. I hope those online tutorials are happy now.” Read the rest of this entry »