Just a quick update.  I had upgraded to firefox 3 because its god damn amazing and everything was fine for about a day, then suddenly i lost my bookmarks.  I lost all bookmaring functionality. Needless to say i was bummed and completely helpless.  I tried a bunch of different techniques to get them back with no success.  Then at the last minute I found the appropriate fix.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Lost_bookmarks_after_Firefox_3_upgrade

I followed the instructions for the manual deletion method and next thing you know i had my old book marks back.  Glorious.  If anyone else is still having trouble with this just leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help out.

Blue is an amazingly versatile color.  It can have various meanings and interpretations ranging from cool and calming to the sad and somber blues.  I’ve decided to compile a few CSS web sites that make use of blue in a few different ways.

http://www.auramist.net/

http://winter.tnvacation.com/

http://www.calmamedispa.com/

http://www.pacificequitygroup.com/

http://flavert.com/

http://www.iconiza.com/

Now when I think of a religious web site, I think of a site made by some parish member in a real primitive web 1.0 style, but there are a few diamonds in the rough out there.  Here are three well crafted CSS sites that all happen to be for religious groups.

Edgepoint Church

Island ECC

Stonebriar Community Church

John Hicks of HicksDesign gave an excellent speech at the most recent Future of Web Design Conference. He titles the presentation “Design to Deployment” and it covers exactly that.  He build a site dedicated to cheese, and in the process explains his code from planning to execution.  This is definitely guide that should be paid attention to.

I don’t 100% agree with everything he demos, however. For example, I am not much of a CSS grid framework advocate.  I believe that grid frameworks complicate sites with extra code and blur the lines between markup and style.  But other topics he covers are oh so useful, such as importing styles, and using Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset.  Check it out.  Also, below the video are links to the relevant slide show as well as some of John’s thoughts on the presentation.

Jon Hicks - FOWD London 2008 from Future of Web Design on Vimeo.

The slides for this presentation here.

Some of Johns personal thoughts here as well.

I am changing a few things around.  Ive decided I could better serve the community by posting exclusively about my passion, web development.  I’ve stripped out all of my posts relating to my life and happens. I figure there are better outlets for that kind of information such as facebook, twitter, etc.

So what now?

Well I am going to begin posting web development tutorials, misc tips and tricks, site reviews, and beautiful inspiring web sites.  Also, If you want to get involved I am working on a contribution format in which you can subit your own tutorial, tips, tricks, reviews, or inspirational sites.  I’ll post more info on this once I have things a little more figured out.

This should be an exciting new venture and I am looking forward to taking it on.

-Furley

Every web developer/design relies on a great set of tools to get their work done, and I mean more than just Adobe products. The Internet is choc’ full of excellent tools. Here are some of the tools I use on a daily basis. If I miss anything amazing please add it in the comments.

Firefox Plugins

First off, Firefox is a must for any developer. The plugins can be beat.

firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

web developer

Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Awesome tools. I love the CSS tools as well as the form tools and the view port resizer. Really helpful.

colorzilla

Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.

MeasureIt

Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a web page.

ietab

Allows you to embed Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox or switch your current window back and forth between usinging the firefox rendering engine and the ie rendering engine. It may not replace testing in ie but is a great tool for quick on the spot testing.

yslow [for firebug]

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance web sites.

Internet Resources

Here are some web sitesi keep on hand and ready for action.

sxc.hu

Whether you just want to browse our huge image gallery or want to share your personal photos with others, this is the site for you!

ColorSchemer

Browse color schemes, find inspiration.

w3schools

At W3Schools you will find all the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP.

Blogs

Some helpful and interesting blogs that cover web development from design & code to entrepreneurial tips.

A List Apart

A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.

Think Vitamin

Vitamin is a resource for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs.

This is just a start. There are tons of other resources out there. These are just a few of my favorites. If you have any others or suggestions please add them in the comments.

When learning php and mysql, everywhere I turned I would find that you need to open your connection to the db using

mysql_select_db("my_db", $con);

then run your query, followed by your mysql_close() function

mysql_close($con);

I followed this protocol for ages, after all this is similar to how I have dealt with different databases in different languages in the past. Naturally, in db heavy sites I adapted this to open the db connection in the header and close the db connection in the footer as to allow me to throw many queries in each page.

The other day I was working on an app when I got an error message that this practice was causing a conflict. Apparently, the page I was working on wound up opening and closing the same database multiple times and well it just didn’t like that. I got the “connection to the same database” error.

After a little research I find that, despite this being the common connection method, it is not necessary to close your connection.

mysql_close() closes the non-persistent connection to the MySQL server that’s associated with the specified link identifier.

- php manual

Once I removed the close function I was good to go.

Just thought I’d post some explanations on why when and where to use the mysql_close function for posterity.

It is not necassary to explicitly disconnect from your MySql server or to free the space allocated to you SQL results. However, if you have a popular script that takes more than 5 seconds to execute, you should do all you can to conserve resources. Therefore, it is smart to explicitly free up your MySql resources rather than wait to let php do it on your behalf.

- PHP in a Nutshell (O’Reilly)

If this interests yo you might also want to read up on the mysql_free_result() function. This is similar to the mysql_close function but is more applicable to a situation where you would have multiple users (100+) connecting to your db all at once. It will enable you to better handle the mysql connections.

MediaTemple (mt) is just simply the best hosting company ever.

I have been through my share of hosting troubles. I think the worst was in the earlier part of the decade, I had hosting through some small company [i hosted with them on a recommendation from a friend]. Everything was fine for about 6 months. Then they closed up shop and moved, aka disappeared into the night. and of course I had paid for two years. I never did track them down. Damn elusive hosting companies.

After that I rolled the dice with godaddy. I figured i need to be with a company that wasnt gonna cut and run with my money this time, and for the most part I was satisfied with godaddy. I love using godaddy for domains. [sidebar: always go to retailmenot and get coupon codes before buying anything] My problem with their hosting was well… it was kind of a pain in the ass. The interface was terrible. UI is not their strong suit. It takes too many clicks to accomplish a task. I will say however that once I figured out how to accomplish each task everything worked fine. Also, I couldn’t easily manage multiple sites. Which as you can see from my work page, is a problem.

So this fall I went to the future of web design conference in NYC and media temple sponsored the after party. Now I’d heard of media temple before but i thought that like so many other web 2-ish companies they were just regurgitating the same services with a cool logo on the front. But after the amazing party they threw at the conference [and it was quite amazing] when my hosting was up for renewal I thought I’d give it a go. I’m so glad I did.

I purchased their grid-service which costs $20/mo. If you pay for the year its $200 [$40 off] so i did that. Well actually i used another coupon code from retailmenot so i wound up getting 15% off which brought it down to like $170.

Anyway people, the point is they are an excellent hosting company. They have a proprietary control panel that is sleek, sexy, and functional. There are no guessing games. There is no learning curve. The system just makes sense. They also have a great knowledge base and a multitude of support options. Their customer service is quick and responsive. and best of all their technology is amazing. the grid service system is perfect for someone like me and will handle traffic spikes with ease. you can host up to 100 sites on one acount with ease. bottom line they’re amazing.

I’ve also been using their dv server system, which is much more complicated [rightfully so] but it lets you do amazing things as well. Most notably, resell hosting with full control, set up personal control panels for clients, and re-brand the entire system [as well as a ridiculous list of other things]

Bottom of the line. I love MediaTemple (mt).