Blogs

Are you ready to take a step beyond writing code in a text editor like UltraEdit, BBEdit, or TextMate? Would you like to see those PHP and JavaScript syntax errors in the editor, without transferring files to the server or opening a browser? If so, then you're ready to jump into the world of the IDE — Integrated Development Environment. I'll compare the free, open source Eclipse IDE to a few of its commercial competitors Then we'll go through the steps to install Eclipse PDT All-In-One, the Zend Debugger, JSEclipse, and Subclipse.

By now you're probably thinking that I'm a Yahoo! evangelist. But who wouldn't want to tell other web developers about all of the great web developer resources that Yahoo!'s released? I know it may sound sad, but I just about wet myself when I found the YUI Grid Builder.

UPDATE: AHS has been updated to v0.3.9.7 to eliminate the YUI Event.addListener(window, 'resize', function) issue!

Alex Iskold over at Read/Write Web posted a great article about JavaScript's performance impact on blog sites today. Like most blogs, this site relies on several single lines of JavaScript to power interface features, display widgets, and process data. This site, as well as all of the others that load things like Google Adsense, loads a little bit slower.

YUI 2.3 was released and sports several new components plus improvements to existing features. Most notable in my opinion is the addition of RTE or rich text editor. The RTE looks nice and is extensible, just like TinyMCE editor.

Also of note is the addition of YUI Base CSS which extends YUI Reset and Font. Base CSS brings back basic size and spacing styles for headings, paragraphs, lists, and other HTML elements that are stripped by YUI Reset. Base CSS provides a great set of styles that look great and are easy to apply.

Yogi Berra once said "it's deja vu all over again", and he was right. For each HTML/CSS template I build I find myself dealing with the same issues. How do I clear everything from that floated sidebar? How do I fix the margin and padding differences between IE and Firefox?

I recently tried the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Library's Reset, Fonts, and Grids CSS and I'm here to tell you that YUI makes many of those CSS deja vu tasks things of the past.