Monday, June 11, 2007
Safari for Windows
Apple is offering a public beta of Safari for Windows. Of course I downloaded it as soon as I found out about it, since I’ve been depending on my Mac user friend to test out designs for me. So far I love the UI but don’t like how thick the fonts look (which I guess is Apple’s font-smoothing technology they included with this release).
Of course, within five minutes of installing it I went to Slashdot and saw an article about Safari vulnerabilites discovered within the first day of release. Is this supposed to be shocking? It is a beta version…
Friday, June 08, 2007
Multiple Monitor Setup
Today I hooked up an old 17” Trinitron CRT monitor I had laying around to my laptop. Wow! The difference made by having two screens is amazing. I can’t believe how much easier it is to work in Adobe programs with all of the palettes and toolbars. It took me a minute to get used to dragging windows across different displays, but now I’m hooked.
The only problem I had was that my ATI graphics card only allowed for cloning rather than an extended desktop. After doing some research I found UltraMon, which is a program that gives you lots of control over your multiple monitor display settings. So if your graphics card isn’t allowing you to set up your displays the way you want, give this program a shot. You can try it for free for 30 days, then after that it is $40.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Link Checkers
One of the most common problems with websites is broken links. It seems like no matter how careful a designer is building a website, there’s going to be a few broken links. While Dreamweaver has a built-in link checker, I also like having other options available.
The W3C provides a completely free link checker tool that checks your website for broken links. All you need to do is type in the web address and click Check. The options can be left as they are.
Other free web based link checkers I like include:
Thursday, May 24, 2007
CSS Layouts: Breaking Out of the Box
Sitepoint has a great article about making CSS layouts fun and interesting. The author breaks down in steps how she took the website from a basic wireframe, to a basic CSS-based layout, to adding a few more elements for a beautifully simple yet unique design.
Read the article Breaking Out of the Box on Sitepoint.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Website Feedback Forms Using nms FormMail
While finishing up the contact page for BunnyOne Design I decided that I wanted to include a feedback form. I was looking for a way to send the form results to an email address, and ended up using nms FormMail.
nms FormMail is a nice little Perl script that is open source and allows for tons of customization options. This is a great script that allows anyone who knows how to create HTML forms to . Below are the instructions on how I configured it on my website. My webhosting is provided by InMotion Hosting, so configuration for your website may be slightly different.
nms FormMail is written in Perl, so make sure your host supports CGI scripts.
Installation
- Grab the latest version of nms FormMail from here. I used the compat package. Save it to a place where you can find it.
- Unzip the files to your local computer's hard drive.
- Navigate through the folders until you find the file "FormMail.pl" (without the quotes).
- Edit the settings as needed using a plain text editor such as Crimson Editor. See below for more information on which settings to change.
- Upload the file to the /cgi-bin/ folder on your webhost's server.
- Set the permissions on the script to 755 (chmod 755). If the permissions aren't set to execute, an error message will show after the visitor tries to submit the form.
- In some cases you may need to rename the script from "formmail.pl" to "formmail.cgi".
Configuration
Basic configuration of this script requires changing only a couple of fields.
- @referers (should be around line 47) - change the code inside the parathesis to the name of your website (mydomain.com). The default value is
dave.org.uk 209.207.222.64 localhost. After you are done, the line should look something like this:@referers = qw(mydomain.com); - @allow_mail_to (should be around line 48) - change the code inside the parathesis to the email you want the form to be sent to. The default value is
you@your.domain some.one.else@your.domain localhost. You want it to instead read:@allow_mail_to = qw(you@emaildomain.com);
This is the bare minimum setup I needed in order to process the results and send them to an email address.
