Newman Zone - Weblog

Wednesday, October 30, 2002

Powermarks: Bookmark Manager 10:15 AM
Found this great program called Powermarks. If you have a lot of bookmarks, this tool helps you keep track of them using keywords. The first time you run it, Powermarks imports all of your Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer and Opera bookmarks. The program parses the bookmark descriptions and URLs and compiles a list of keywords. Then, whenever you need to find a Dreamweaver tutorial, you simply type "Dreamweaver tutorial" in the search bar and voila! You can even make Powermarks visit the bookmark's URL and add keywords using META tags.

What's clever about Powermarks is that it doesn't use a folder hierarchy to organize your favorites. This may seem unintuitive at first - I wasn't sure I could handle it myself - but after a while, you get used to it. The result is much faster searching than using the Favorites bar, or even NetCaptor. Turns out, I had just over 2,000 bookmarks. No wonder I couldn't find anything.

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Thumbs Up ASP.NET Extension 12:50 PM
I'm pleased to announce the release of a new ASP.NET/VB upload extension for Dreamweaver MX called "Thumbs Up." This server behavior truly makes uploads simple. Here's a quick rundown of its features:

* restrict file uploads by size
* restrict image uploads by size, width and height
* generate thumbnail images in GIF or JPG format
* specify maximum dimensions for thumbnail images
* choose the percentage of compression (JPG only)
* customizable thumbnail suffix (e.g., photo1_sm.jpg)
* automatically maintains aspect ratio of original image
* automatically inserts required Namespaces and form attributes
* automatically inserts <asp:label> tag to display status message
* supports multiple file fields for batch uploads/thumbnails
* optional pop-up progress window

Here's a sneak peek at the interface:

It'll be a few weeks before I can implement a payment system for the extension, so in the meantime, if anyone's interested, please contact me. As soon as I finish writing the help files, I'll make another announcement, explaining how you can purchase "Thumbs Up." I'll also create a demo page so you can see it in action.

I'm very excited about this, and I hope those of you using Dreamweaver MX for ASP.NET development will want to check it out.

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

The Wrong Way to Use CSS 5:44 PM
Found a good article by Adrian Roselli: The Wrong Way to Use CSS in Page Layouts. Although the article bashes Dreamweaver a bit, the writer effectively explains why pages that use CSS positioning (CSS-P) don't always look the same on all browsers and platforms.

What led me to this article was the sudden, baffling realization that ASP.NET is not XHTML-compliant. After spending many hours redesigning newmanzone.com in ASP.NET/VB, I was extremely disappointed to learn that, except for the most basic pages, ASP.NET does not validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

WHAT WAS MICROSOFT THINKING??!!!

As members of the W3C XHTML Working Group, they should be ashamed of themselves. The culprit, in this case, is a missing type="text/javascript" attribute in the SCRIPT tag. (The second error doesn't even make sense to me: who places a language attribute in a SELECT tag?) The only solution seems to be avoiding ASP.NET web controls altogether and using HTML server controls or custom controls.

I don't know what I'll do, but I'm glad I didn't shell out a thousand bucks for Visual Studio .NET.

Sheesh.

Friday, October 18, 2002

New George Petrov Extension 11:21 AM
George Petrov, technical editor of The Joy of Dreamweaver MX, is hard at work on his latest extension, Resize Uploaded Files, an add-on for Pure ASP File Upload. I'll let the extension's description speak for itself:

Automatically resize images to fit specific width and height
* Generate thumbnails for all uploaded images
* Easy display of the generated thumbnails
* Aspect ratio is always preserved during the resize
* Fully integrated with Pure ASP Upload 2.x
* Full support for a lot of file input formats: GIF, JPG, PGM, PNG, TGA, TIFF, PCX, BMP
* Resized files are always saved as JPEG
* Full control of the destination JPEG Quality
* A high performance, fully licensed COM Object for image resize is included (needs to be registered on the server first)

This is a great solution for ASP developers who need the ability to resize uploaded images and generate thumbnails, all in one step. I'm so impressed with this extension, I've offered to write an extensive Pure ASP File Upload tutorial for UDzone.

Stay tuned...

Monday, October 14, 2002

Web Matrix Guided Tour 3:30 PM
I think I may have misjudged Web Matrix, Microsoft's free ASP.NET editor. I just took the Web Matrix Guided Tour and discovered the program is much more full-featured than it first appears. It has templates for DataGrids and DataLists, XML Web Services, User Authentication, and lots more. It also features a Query Builder to simplify writing SQL SELECT, INSERT, DELETE, and UPDATE statements. It doesn't include Code Hints, like Dreamweaver MX, or IntelliSense, like Visual Studio .NET, but considering the price, it's hard to beat. In addition, Web Matrix is extensible, so the software can only improve as the Web Matrix community writes more Add-ins and Custom Controls. It's worth a look, if only as a learning tool for VB and C#.

Sunday, October 13, 2002

Broadband or bust 12:15 PM
This one's a bit of a rant, I'm afraid.

Recently, I moved back to New York. To a part of Upstate New York that, believe it or not, still doesn't have broadband access. After three years on a cable modem, I'm back to 33.6 — on a good day. I'm not alone: only 31% of Americans have broadband access.

And yet, web sites keep swelling in size. For years, I've been warning clients that not everybody has cable or DSL, much less T1 or T3. But clients keep asking for more widgets and gizmos, and we keep obliging them. Before long, that quick-loading Flash movie has ballooned to half a megabyte.

I'm not advocating designing web sites for the lowest common denominator. In fact, I recently decided to drop support for Netscape 4 on newmanzone.com and redesign it to be XHTML-compliant (the new site will appear in a month or so). But I think we have to recognize that the majority of our audience is still viewing web pages on dial-up. It's one thing to pander to your audience; it's another to completely alienate them because your homepage takes five minutes to load.

Technology should be making our lifes easier, simpler, more efficient. Instead, it's making everything more complicated. And expensive. Right now, the only way I can obtain broadband in my area is to pay $99/month for a satellite connection. And that's after paying $600 for the hardware. That's so Twentieth Century.

I suppose this is what futurists call growing pains. With each new advance in technology, we take two steps back. Microwave ovens make great popcorn, but they can't make toast. Progress has eliminated the busy signal, but is pressing a series of buttons in response to automated prompts really progress?

Take ASP.NET. I'm happy the language is more powerful, but did it have to be so complicated? Last night, I was working on a new .NET tutorial, and I decided to add a JavaScript confirm message before a record could be deleted. Witness progress in action:

The Good Ol' Days:

onClick="return confirm('Are you sure you want to delete this item?')"

ASP.NET:

Sub dlListingRooms_ItemCreated(Sender As Object, E As DataListItemEventArgs)

Select Case E.Item.ItemType
   Case ListItemType.Item, ListItemType.AlternatingItem
      Dim btnDelete As Button
      btnDelete = E.Item.FindControl("btnDelete")
      btnDelete.Attributes.Add("onClick","return confirm('Are you sure you want to delete this item?');")
End Select

End Sub

This only took me three hours to figure out. Now that's progress! Don't get me wrong, I like progress as much as the next ["Press 1 for guy, 2 for gal, 3 for other"], but there are times when I just want a piece of toast.

Friday, October 04, 2002

Tableless Layouts with Dreamweaver MX 7:01 PM
A terrific tutorial on creating Tableless Layouts with Dreamweaver MX, by Drew McLellan, has just been added to DesDev.

Question: How you do know you're really a geek?

Answer: When you start reading The American Heritage Book of English Usage - for fun!

If you're a wordsmith, you'll love Bartleby.com. It features dozens of reference books, poetry, fiction, essays, quotations - you name it. The reference section includes Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, William Strunk's The Elements of Style, and H.L. Menken's The American Language. Best of all, it's free. You don't even have to log in to enjoy it.