How to

My friend Derek shared a link about Zen Coding a month ago which I finally made time to look at this morning. Zen Coding is a plugin designed to supercharge your HTML markup and CSS coding and it's available for several IDEs and text editors. I watched the available screencasts and gave it a try this morning. It's remarkable what you can do with it.

It's common practice these days to skip the use of <label> elements in simple forms. The most common example of this is a site's search form.

Every now and then, a single CMS post may vanish or a forum user's posts are accidentally deleted. No worries, right? That's why we make backups. If you have an active site with lots of users posting content, loading a backup is probably not practical. So, load up the latest incremental backup and select the records you need, and do it easily with MySQL's SELECT INTO OUTFILE and LOAD DATA INFILE.

Although I haven't had need to do so for freelance jobs, I do administer several Windows-based Sybase and MS SQL Servers at my day job.

I'm beginning to build a Drupal-powered web site for a customer. A goal for this project is to provide translation of pages, events, and announcements for Spanish-speaking site visitors. Although Google's Translation service is great, automated translation tools remain less than perfect. Fortunately, the customer has several dedicated bilingual volunteers who will translate as much of the site's content as possible.