Raible Designs

Comments by Lance

Lance did some nice work on Roller this weekend and implemented the much-desired Comments feature. Nice job Lance!

It also seems that Eclipse 2.0.2 was quietly released on Friday (it says Thursday on the downloads page, Friday on the dev mailing list). This update does not appear to be available from Help > Software > Update Manager. Hopefully it will be soon. Does IDEA have an upgrade within the IDE feature?

Good Stuff @ Rebelutionary

Mike seems to have reduced his blogging frequency as of late, but when he does write, it's good stuff.

OpenSymphony has a new Wiki online, powered by SnipSnap. It should be useful for on-the-fly documentation writing and tip sharing. Already the WebWork Cookbook has moved there and got some extra contributions!

... and ...

For those of you not using IDEA, can your IDE do all this?

IDEA has always looked good to me and I agree that it's a great IDE. But I can't argue with Eclipse's price! And Eclipse seems to be getting a lot more users of late - I'll bet it ends up with more users simply on price. I tried talking with the IDEA folks a while back about discounted pricing for a one-man show. They said it sounded good, but no thanks. At least they responded. And I found myself only starting IDEA when I really needed it. I find myself starting Eclipse every time I edit a .java file. I also found this review of IDEA 3.0 on JDJ's site, and learned that IDEA 3.0 will be available for download tomorrow.

Add a Google Search to your Site

I got the idea from Dave and now I've implemented it on this site. To add one to your site, copy and paste the following code and adjust the site URL accordingly. NOTE: This is the XHTML Strict version, if you want a Transitional version, view source on Dave's site.

<form id="searchForm" method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search"
 style="margin: 0; padding: 0" onsubmit="search()">  
   <input type="text" name="q" size="20" maxlength="255" 
       value="search this site" style="font-size: 11px"
       onfocus="this.value=''"  /> 
   <input type="submit" name="sa" value="go" 
       style="font-size: 11px; padding: 2px; line-height: 1" />
</form>

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function search() {
    form = document.getElementById('searchForm');
    form.q.value = form.q.value + " site:www.raibledesigns.com";
    form.submit();
}
//-->
</script>

Make your Flash HTML Standards Compliant

I initially found that the latest issue of A List Apart was published via web-graphics.com and then got this tidbit from Zeldman:

In Issue 154 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: “Flash Satay” by Drew McLellan. "This site uses Flash. This site validates as XHTML. They said it couldn’t be done. Now it can be. Have your Flash and standards, too." Please note, the ALA server may be slower than normal due to heavy traffic.

The technique involves using the following code:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="c.swf?path=movie.swf" 
	width="400" height="300">
	<param name="movie" value="c.swf?path=movie.swf" />
	<img src="noflash.gif" width="200" height="100" alt="" />
</object>

Where c.swf is a container movie to workaround the fact that IE/Windows doesn’t stream the movie with this code.

Drew McLellan is the author of Dreamweaver MX Web Development and a member of The Web Standards Project’s Dreamweaver Task Force. You can follow the progress of this technique on his site.

WebGraphics also has an interesting post with a list of reasons why ease of use doesn't happen on engineering projects - uiweb.com