A Path Less Taken

Big (and little) changes are brewing for my blog. These are slated to include a new custom built theme, a possible name change, better Search Engine Optimization (SOE) and better analytical tools to track visitors (or lack there of). To get the ball rolling I’ve installed the Piwik Web Analytics tool to track visitors to the site. Here is a little more detail about this interesting tool.

I thought that I should give a shout out to the text editor that I use on all my open source coding projects. The program is SciTE and is a Scintilla based text editor. There are probably tools out there with more features, but this one just fits my way of working. It is Win 32 and Linux compatible and has context sensitive highlighting for all the scripting languages that I work with on my personal projects. If you are in the market for a text editor then I absolutely recommend that you give SciTE a try.

Yes, I know it’s a silly title, but when you are blogging on a Friday night you have to take a little creative license. I’ve been fooling around with using divs for page layout and I figured I’d capture my thoughts for you and me before I wiped the page and moved on with something else. Here are a few thoughts on divs and how they can be used

Below are some interesting web user interface effects that captured my attention. They may not always be practical, but small elements of style can add punch and polish to your site or application.

• Sliding Panels – here is a list of 7 sliding panel effects at http://www.balkhis.com/. Of particular note is the one found here which has the most polished appearance of the group.

As a programmer I’m about making things easier. I create a main page, set it up to go and then start coding away in other files. That’s why EVERY TIME I start a new project of any size I spend a minute scratching my head and going “how do I include that CSS file again?” I figured if you are as bad as I am I would provide you with a brief tutorial so that BOTH of us won’t forget.