Using MAMP & WordPress to develop locally on my Mac

Well this has been a learning experience. I had been wanting to play with WordPress locally cause I have realized its potential for allowing faster development of sites for clients. Right now Im developing an update for a Realtor’s website that was originally built with Microsoft Tools in the late 90s. Its been great using WordPress to add new pages quickly and drop in code. One of the pages had a Mortgage Calculator which obviously I had to replace the MS spagetti code so I found a great free code snippet and dropped it into the Mortgage page along with another snippet that displays the rates for the past two weeks.

Probably the most difficult thing has been trying to understand how to make changes to the .php pages and .CSS that  came with the theme I selected. I have it kind of figured out now and its getting easier. Its just a bit frustrating to be so easily overwhelmed by the shear amount of information one must wade through to learn how to do a seemingly simple task.

(More to come as the project progresses)

Pendule – Google Chrome extension gallery

Pendule – Google Chrome extension gallery.

CSS3 + Progressive Enhancement = Smart Design • Perishable Press

CSS3 + Progressive Enhancement = Smart Design • Perishable Press.

Web Designer Notebook » Remembering: The CSS3 Multi-Column Layout Module

Because I will not shut up about CSS3, this time I’ve decided to show you a little bit of the multi-column layout module. This module allows you to layout the content of an element in multiple columns, like flowing text on a newspaper-type layout.

via Web Designer Notebook » Remembering: The CSS3 Multi-Column Layout Module.

Custom CSS, Keep it or Lose it? « SexyBookmarks

Custom CSS, Keep it or Lose it? « SexyBookmarks.

This plugin for WordPress is very cool, it has all the links the major social bookmarking and sites so that a user doesnt have to have a bookmarklet in their menu bar, all kinds of animated goodness.

Very cool plugin/extension for Firefox

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Latest_Ubiquity_User_Tutorial

“Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension that gives you a powerful new way to interact with the Web. Ubiquity commands can do nearly anything. Ubiquity comes with a set of commands that make common Web tasks faster and easier. In this tutorial we’ll teach you how to use some of them. By the end of this tutorial you’ll be able to perform quick Wikipedia, Google, definition, and Yelp searches; add maps to your email; and translate a snippet of a web page, highlight a word, and then email it to a friend.”

Zen Coding: A Speedy Way To Write HTML/CSS Code – Smashing Magazine

In this post we present a new speedy way of writing HTML code using CSS-like selector syntax — a handy set of tools for high-speed HTML and CSS coding. It was developed by our author Sergey Chikuyonok and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers.How much time do you spend writing HTML code: all of those tags, attributes, quotes, braces, etc. You have it easier if your editor of choice has code-completion capabilities, but you still do a lot of typing.We had the same problem in JavaScript world when we wanted to access a specific element on a Web page. We had to write a lot of code, which became really hard to support and reuse. And then JavaScript frameworks came along, which introduced CSS selector engines. Now, you can use simple CSS expressions to access DOM elements, which is pretty cool.

via Zen Coding: A Speedy Way To Write HTML/CSS Code – Smashing Magazine.

iPhone/Mobile Distribution

iPhone Distribution Build Cheatsheet just a simple PDF cheatsheet

http://johncmurphy.com/ This site has free programming howto videos, walk throughs on basic application to advanced Dashcode tips

http://www.iphonemicrosites.com/tutorials/ This site has some great tutorials for scripts that redirect an iPhone browser to a mobile version of a website, as well as some methods for making a mobile site version look very professional. There is even a template you can download to get a head start on your own mobile site.

 

I think it is interesting how micro-sites have become a necessity and a convenience for mobile browsers based on Webkit (safari). I would imagine that soon there will be a way to automate the creation of a micro-site from the data on a regular website. The trafficking of data as a service instead of the service of trafficking data is the big difference I see for web 1.0 versus 2.0. People expect to see independent data that can be collated to their whims instead of just being given a little snippet of data that some person deemed was enough. I truly appreciate micro-sites when Im on my iphone and need some information, it saves me a lot of time and reinforces my loyalty to a site as a source which I will happily pass on to my social circle.

Google Experimental Search

http://www.google.com/experimental/

I might recommend anyone who is a serious Google Search Addict try out these experiments which add to the functionality of your searches.

Fun article about Web Design dos and donts

http://webdesignledger.com/tips/20-dos-and-donts-of-effective-web-design

custom twitter backgrounds

http://www.twitterbackgrounds.com/