Pheap uber beta announced!

Pheap has been a project of mine for the past week or so. It is a free, simple, and easy to use content management system written in PHP with a little AJAX functionality. Today I'm releasing the uber beta version available for download at the official Pheap site. Check it out, download it, give me some feedback (bugs alerts too!).

Cool site of the day

I was recently contacted by cool site of the day who had nominated one of my sites, DossilFuels.com to be cool site of the day for Sunday, July 16. I'm going to make some updates to that site over the next few days to make it ready. I'm expecting huge amounts of new traffic. Thanks cool site of the day!

Streamline your code! Part 2: JavaScript

This is part two in the streamline your code series. I'll talk about reducing the size of your javascript files. I'll give you two ways to slash code and improve load time.

1) Optimize your code! Assuming you wrote your JavaScript the proper way the first time (e.g. using semicolons at the end of every line!), you can use one of the many JavaScript compressors to remove comments and white space. This will dramatically decrease the loadtime of your javascript.

Accessibility and AJAX

I am going to address the issue of accessibility, usability and AJAX, using this blog as an example.

For years, web standardites have been critisizing Flash for its problems with usability and accesibility. While Flash is making improvements in those districts, we are now seeing old Flash problems reoccur as AJAX implementation becomes more widespread.

Streamline your code! Part 1: CSS

How many lines of code do you think you could eliminate from your web site while preserving the same functionality? I think you'd be surprised! Today I'll talk about lightening the load for your stylesheets, but I'll blog on JavaScript soon. Here are three ways to strip those stylesheets down:

1) CSS is continually evolving; CSS3, now supported in a few major browsers, allows you to do more with less. For instance, I'm particularily excited about a new feature in CSS3 that draws rounded borders with just one line of code! What was previously a somewhat arduous ordeal, with background images and floats turns into this:

Separationists

These days, everyone and their mother are talking about the separation of content and design, or separating CSS from the HTML. This means no using "style" attributes on HTML tags, only id and class.

While, that's all well and good, that's a great idea, and there is no reason why everyone and their mother shouldn't be doing it, when you begin to create web sites with ease of maintenance in mind, there needs to be a third distinction: Design, Content, and, um... everything else.

Welcome to my Blog

On a whim, I decided to code this blog in AJAX, though it should degrade nicely for older browsers. After clicking a link, you should see a little loading graphic. Please, don't hesitate to contact me with any questions, comments or concerns. Enjoy!