As I went through the CSS related books I ordered first, here’s another one: The Art and Science of CSS.

Since this is the first book I ever ordered published by the famous Australian web design/development community I must admit I didn’t expect it to be of the same “level” as an O’Reilly book for instance. But that didn’t turn out to be an issue at all. On the contrary: given the books structure I don’t think they could have done a better job explaining the different subjects they picked.

While the structure is in some way similar to Bulletproof Web Design, this book describes a few different common scenario’s you’ll come across. Although they are not similar to the former, I find them better explained. Where Bulletproof Web Design is suited for a broader audience, this one touches the limits of CSS support in the current browser versions (pre-IE 8).

One section that I found particularly useful was the one about Forms. It basically tells you how to fine-tune to the default Zend_Form set-up many people have been struggling with.

My opinion

I think people new to markup – layout separation, should read one of the other SitePoint books first. After that, The Art and Science of CSS is one you should keep on your desk when crafting XHTML & CSS pages.

I develop on Windows. Whether that’s good or bad, I am happy with it. Until now I’ve been a subscriber of the Microsoft Action Pack which basically is yearly MSDN-like subscription service with the latest versions of all their popular software (from their OS’s to the complete Office suite). It has been created for Small IT Businesses and enables them to recommend Microsoft products to their customers.

But earlier this year Microsoft announced they would require subscribers to take an exam to prove their knowledge of the products. I must admit I can understand this policy change.

However, I am not interested in taking an exam with them and since I cannot renew my subscription, I am evaluating my options. And I have to do this quickly as my subscribtion expires on November 15th. Since I only really use Windows XP, Office and Visio I’ve summed it up like this:

• Windows XP: I have an OEM license that came with my PC’s, so basically that’s fine. No new versions, but I currently don’t feel a need to upgrade. I’m not (yet) ready to use Ubuntu to run everything so I’ll stick with XP for now.
• Office (Outlook, Word, Excel): I can narrow this down to Outlook (which I use heavily). Basically I have two options: use Gmail or buy Office. If I don’t buy Office, other applications can be replaced by open-source variants.
• Visio: I don’t use it that often so I’ll probably find a way around it.

So basically it’s Gmail or Outlook. The battle:

I already mentioned a complete move to Ubuntu. The biggest issue is: it will require several hours to get everything set up and be productive. Time I don’t have at the moment. Although I don’t want to exclude it completely as I’ve really started to enjoy Inkscape lately (and used GIMP in the past) which overcomes some barriers. I haven’t found a replacement for Adobe Fireworks though.

I’ll post an update after November 15th. Any suggestions are highly appreciated!

Edit: I almost forgot! Jeroen reminded my about the sync with my cellphone. After some panic, Lifehacker to the rescue.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to stored procedures. On one side, they pull away a part of your applications logic which decreases maintainability. While on the other side they tend to perform better and are easily accessible (for instance, by a DBA).

Anyway, there are certainly situations were I use them and while doing so on MySQL I bumped into this bug report (and this related one). One stored procedure call did not produce any errors but when I added a second, PDO threw “General error: 2014 Cannot execute queries while other unbuffered queries are active.”.

Apparently using PDO to call multiple MySQL stored procedures on a Windows environment (e.g. your development WampServer) causes a few errors (different ones depending on the amount of calls if I’m correct). After 2 years it should have been fixed mid September ‘08 so hopefully the next PHP release will correct this.

In case you ever wondered: this seems to be a reason why the popular e-commerce solution Magento currently requires a linux server.

Because Andy insisted, a list of feeds that I do enjoy reading (or feel the need to read):

• Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
• Cornwallseo.com
• PHP::Impact ( [str Blog] )
• phly, boy, phly
• How to Change the World
• PalatnikFactor.com
• Zend Framework Wiki RSS Feed

In no particular order.
In fact, I am amazed how little I found worth sharing. Please send me anything that you recommend!

Many freelancers and small businesses don’t like to write quotes and proposals. Depending on the project, me neither. I especially dislike getting into it. Once you get going, it doesn’t seem so bad.

In my case one of the reasons is that I like working on actual projects better. Since I have more than enough work to do, quotes mostly just get pushed back to the last hours of the day.

Lyndoman from Cornwallseo doesn’t like them either.

But don’t despair! There is someone who does. Steven from Zion (Dutch) told us multiple times he likes it at least as much as coding. And according to him, if I remember correctly, he has an extremely high success rate of 80% (where mine is below 50%). Being pickier about the projects you accept and the time you put into your quote of course has an effect on this.

But why not start www.IWriteYourQuote.com? The one that writes the quote gets 20% (with a low border for small projects) if it gets accepted. You can end up with something like Elance, oDesk or crowdSPRING, but it doesn’t have to be that big.

I have become a fan of PDT, one of the 2 PHP Eclipse IDE’s (the other is PHPEclipse).

I believe it is supported by Zend and they have derived Zend Studio for Eclipse from it (thus it contains many of the features). Maybe the only feature I’m missing is the code formatter for PHP found in Zend Studio for Eclipse (which formats your code to match, for example, the Zend Framework coding standard).

Anyway, I’ve added these addons which make it even more useful:

• JSEclipse: JavaScript syntax highlighting and code completion.
  Add as remote site: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/jseclipse/autoinstall/site.xml
• Subclipse: Subversion (SVN) client.
  Add as remote site: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.4.x
• HTML Tidy: well known (x)HTML cleanup.
  Download and add as a local site: http://eclipsetidy.sourceforge.net/

Preferences (Window – Preferences) I have adjusted:

• Search for encoding and set everything to UTF-8.
• Search for delimiter and set everything to Unix.
• My favorite: go to PHP – Editor – Save Actions and select Remove trailing whitespace (it does not search for this).

The only downside: Eclipse is written in Java.

I followed about 40 blogs until today. It does not take much to realize that causes me to loose a lot of time, especially on a larger period of time.

Be more productive tip #2: press the delete button on some of the blogs you’re following.

Evaluate if they provide information (as in useful information) to you and clearly delete the ones that aren’t. Also, low volume is not a reason to keep them: they will just draw your attention one way or another.

Cut back to less than 20. That seems reasonable, no?

Some I deleted:

• Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen
  Although I like Scott’s writing style a lot, .NET is not my cup of tea anymore.
• Ibuildings Blog
  They post to little useful information (for me, as a developer).
• Small Business Trends
  This was a difficult one. While I really enjoyed reading their posts, it did not contain enough information for me.
• Xaprb
  I just don’t use MySQL in a way Baron blogs about it and realized I probably never will.
• Lifehacker
  You just need too much time to follow all of their posts! Very nice posts though.
• Signal vs. Noise
  This was another difficult one. I love their style but like they say themselves: focus!
• SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
  Very painful. I also love their style but for various reasons this blog isn’t useful enough for me.
• Redo The Web
  I will probably never use Symfony anyway.
• Eric Bergen
  Just had to cut some more. Sorry Eric!
• Chris Shiflett
  Sorry Chris!

Please note that this represents my opinion about these blogs and the effect on my work. They probably are appropriate to someone else.

I recently bought 7 books on Amazon and I will try to write a review of each as I read them. Note: this could take some time because of my workload.

The first one is Bulletproof Web Design by (the famous) Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits.

“The book contains several guidelines to help prepare compelling designs for worst-case scenarios, increasing user control and readability for varying text sizes and amounts of content.”

It explains clearly (as clear as a book can ever get) what best practices are for some common web design scenario’s. It is not a bible nor a reference: it roughly takes 10 common problems you may have experienced (or will someday) and tells you how do to this in a bulletproof way. Personally, I could also see benefits in taking one “project” (website) and applying all best practices to that one subject (for continuity), but the author chose to do this with separate examples. I guess the book benefits from that by the very low prerequisite knowledge you need to read it.

My main intention when buying this book was to verify if my xHTML & CSS knowledge was up to date by comparing it to Dan’s preachings. You can argue that this book isn’t the most appropriate since it was published in 2005 (although this is the second version, published in 2007) with techniques that could be outdated. I hardly believe this is an issue though. For example: a layout made with web standards for IE7, FireFox 2 and Safari 2 should not break on IE8, FireFox 3 or Chrome (note the “should” of course).

My opinion

A must read for anyone writing (x)HTML & CSS. I guarantee you will learn at least 5 important best practices or improve your knowledge of them which makes it worth every penny.
Most certainly if you ever wondered how to get those floating containers to do exactly what you want on every browser!

Implementing the PayPal “Website Payments Standard” (advanced “Buy Now button”) has proven to be an extremely painful process for me. In my opinion, they have a terribly bad system when compared to competitors and current web standards.

I’ve been implementing the Instant Payment Notification (IPN) which basically sends feedback about a “Buy Now button” transaction.

Most importantly: it has had numerous bugs and downtime the last year or so (as you can see in their sandbox status blog). Some desperate people even mentioned PayPal intentionally wanted you to test on their live system performing real payments.

Secondly, here is a list of problems they should solve or things they should improve:

• First of all, when accessing their cart, a pre-2000 JavaScript script performs a window resize. Why?
• In sandbox mode, an invalid credit card number is prefilled: you cannot use it, why prefill?
• The JavaScript page reload that is triggered after country change is a big no-no.
• You have to sign in to the developer central in a different tab or window in order to test: why?
• The whole sandbox is painfully slow (at least when accessing from Belgium).

Does this again prove that big companies suffer from their size when building products? I cannot imagine this would happen over such a long period of time in a small business.

Edit: it just happened again. You’re testing the IPN response and all of a sudden the exact same test order you made just does not work anymore. Without changing a single thing.

Why shouldn’t they? When you’re bailed out by the American government (with tax payers money), you are safe. Nothing can happen and so it is time to relax.

Why not do that in a nice luxurious resort? With catered banquets, manicures, facials, pedicures and massages?

The executives of AIG got that right.
You can at least say they did this thoroughly.

As a reference: AIG got bailed out for 85 billion USD last week and received another 38 billion USD today.

At least they can pay that bill now.