Editors for Web Programming

When doing web development (or any development without an IDE) you need a good text editor. Many people might think of MS Word when I say text editor, but that is a word processor. While it can serve as an adequate WYSIWYG editor for creating websites it isn't intended to be used to do real programming (most html tags are "misspelled"). With more interest in web development in my family lately I have gone though my Gnome applications list and have some editors to suggest...

For WYSIWYG editors, Word actually does an ok job, as does OpenOffice but something specifically intended for web development might be better. If you have some money to spend there are plenty of great alternatives, but if not you might want to look at NVU. Unfortunately NVU's development has been slower lately, but has all the features you need to do basic (or even more complex) web development. Something it doesn't do is close tags in the source editor, but you can't have everything. There is an unofficial bugfix/fork of NVU called KompoZer available too, but I haven't tried it yet. Another choice, is the integrated editor in the Mozilla suite (now called SeaMonkey). It is very similar to NVU but with some features missing. You can open the Mozilla composer by clicking this button:












While any of these also offer a source editing mode, a dedicated source editing package might be better for those that know some of the web development languages and html. The best (free) editor of this type that I have found in my short quest is Bluefish. Bluefish supports a variety of languages for syntax highlighting and will automatically complete html tags (as well as a few other types). For some reason these features aren't on by default and need to be enabled on a per document basis from the Document menu. The big disadvantage of Bluefish is it's sketchy Windows support. There is a Windows port available here, but I'm not sure if its any good.

If you want a more generic text editor you can't go wrong with vim (VI Improved for anyone familiar with vi). Unfortunately it does have a fairly steep learning curve (hint press i to insert/append text, escape + :w + enter to save, escape + :hardcopy to print, escape + d + arrowkey to delete a character, etc). vim will do color syntax highlighting on just about any language (including the web ones). You can get a copy here, along with a nice GUI. Windows users may prefer a copy of Programmer's notepad, which is a bit easier to learn and has some of the same features.

Of course, this is no where near a complete list, though it should get you started. Anyone have a favorite editor not listed? Unix people may also like things such as nano, pico, joe, etc but this is for a more general audience. Once you get an editor you like, check out webmonkey and start learning to build websites.


Well back to my homework, believe it or not this was a quick post (if not short) so feel free to complain if something doesn't make sense ;-)

Bad Year for Sony

As noted by Y! and Slashdot, it might be a good idea to keep track of your Sony digital camera since they are having trouble with some model's LCDs. No news on which models are affected though. If you do have problems, I guess your best bet would be to contact Sony Support. Also be sure to make sure any laptop batteries you may have are ok (check with your laptop manufacturer) .

Read All About it.

If you ask me most Sony cameras don't have much going for them anyway, with their proprietary and expensive memory cards. They do make some cool DSLRs though, their self cleaning sensors are nice.

Happy Turkey Day!

More posts after the pie, hopefully

Timezone Change

For some reason earlier this year the powers at be decided to change how daylight savings time is done here in the US. This of course causes problems for any computer that tries to deal with daylight savings by its self. According to Microsoft patches for Windows XP and 2003 should be out for the December round of patches, anyone using something older is out of luck ;-(. I expect Linux users will also get patches as you normally do (depends on your distro, I think Gentoo has had a patch for quite awhile, not sure about the others).

If you run a Windows CE or Pocket PC (Windows Mobile) device things are a little more exciting. You need to patch the registry. Microsoft has an inf which you can compress into a .cab and install or you can use this one (WARNING: Only works with Windows Mobile, look here for CE) that someone was kind enough to post (thanks PocketPCThoughts).

It will be awhile before this is a problem, but I thought I'd mention it while I was thinking about it from the PPCThoughts article. Vista will ship with the new settings.

Geography Quiz in Google Earth

As seen on the Google blog, Google and National Geographic have an African geography quiz for Google Earth, as well as some other interesting information about Africa. So, if you looking for something to do, install Google Earth 4 beta and try out the quiz. They also added some neat old maps under "feature content" the other day. Note that these require the very latest version of Google Earth.























Edit: I thought maybe a screenshot would be good here.

Combat SPAM in Gmail

Here is an interesting tip brought to my attention by my latest Maximum PC magazine. It is well documented that Gmail ignores any extra "." s added to the username portion of an email address (example: me@gmail.com is the same as m.e@gmail.com). These extra dots are, however kept when the mail is delivered and can be used as criteria for a filter. In this way if you give a company your email address with some pattern of extra .'s you can find out if they are the ones putting you on a SPAM list or simply filter for their email.

Handy!

Black Friday

Black Friday (the busiest shopping day of the year, the Friday after thanksgiving) is approaching, and ad scans are already being posted. If you plan to try to get a deal on Black Friday you may want to check out this year's Black Friday site as well as shopping forums like fatwallet.com

Some of the scans are pretty bad, so you may want to download them and open them in a real image editor. A good unsharp mask in Photoshop or GIMP can help a lot.

Just be prepared to get up early. Sometimes you can order online and have your purchase reserved in store, getting the discount without having to be the first one to the store.

Old Movies

Quick post tonight (haven't been many lately, sorry),
Anyway,

If you have a lot more time than I do you and a fast Internet connection you might want to look into watching some old movies. Very old movies have run out of copyright, and are now freely available on the net (like the Project Gutenberg books). One way is to get them from the Public Domain Movie torrents site. This site has a number of old movies available using bittorrent (to save the server bandwidth). You can also find a huge amount of old video on Archive.org (Check out their whole moving pictures section or skip right to the Prelinger Archives for the old stuff).

Perfect for long trips if you have a Pocket PC or recent Palm.

Comment SPAM ;-(

Well, It looks like this blog has been getting hit with comment spam lately (mostly on older posts for some reason). I turned on comment moderation, so your comments may not show up as quickly, sorry. That said, feel free to comment away, just no more ads for skincare products please ;-)

I'll try for a real post later today, I have been busy lately (as usual)