The Most Satisfaction?

While I enjoy most aspects of creating a website, the one part I enjoy the most is creating the initial design. I love tinkering about in Photoshop trying different colours, fonts, filters, and the likes.

I always feel good after I’ve completed a new design. I can’t say the same about coding. After I’m done coding a site/page I feel more relief than anything – relief that it’s done. But when I’m designing I’m always enthusiastic or excited. It’s a really nice feeling knowing you’ve created something new… fresh… never seen before.

What part of creating or running a website gives you the most satisfaction (not including the monetary aspect)? Is it creating the design or coding the HTML/CSS afterwards? What about search engine marketing or writing the content?

A HTML-Kit feature I never knew about!

While working on a site in HTML-Kit today I accidentally came across a feature that I really wish I knew about a long time ago.

I was happily coding away (oddly enough) in PHP and had highlighted a few lines of code that I wanted to move. Before I had the chance to move them I accidentally hit the tab button on the keyboard only to see all the highlighted lines get tabbed at once .

When I code in PHP I always indent the code like so:

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if (isset($_POST['submit']))
{
	// do something
}
 else
{
	// do something else
}

I find it makes the code easier to read and easier to spot if I’m missing any closing brackets, etc.

Sometimes after I have written some code, I decide that I want to enclose it inside another statement or another loop. So I write the new statement or loop and then manually tab each line inside it so the code is formatted the way I like it. I’ve had to manually tab anywhere up to fifthy lines of code before. Not any more .

If only I had known about this feature a long time ago. It would have saved me a lot of time and frustration.

Critical flaws found in Firefox

The vulnerabilities, reported on Saturday, were identified as “very critical”, but no cases had been reported of them being exploited.

Several security firms identified the flaws which could let websites run malicious code on a person’s computer.

Critical flaws found in Firefox

Firefox’s flaws fixed in upgrade

You can download the new version here.

Advanced Bells & Whistles

Remember back to when you first learnt how to design web sites? Remember adding all those bells & whistles? I certainly do. Why did I add them? Because it seemed cool at the time.

The thing is… I’m still adding bells & whistles! Only now they’re more advanced bells & whistles.

Now that I know how to use the likes of Apache‘s mod_rewrite module or PHP‘s include function, I find myself wanting to make everything search engine friendly or use includes left, right and centre, when I should be keeping things simple. It’s a hard habit to break. When you know you can do something extra special – even though you probably don’t really need to – you find yourself doing it anyway… because it seems cool.

What’s worse is, these advanced bells & whistles can cause you more headaches than just keeping it simple.

Keep It Clean!

This year I received a christmas present I certainly wasn’t expecting. When my sister was shopping for presents she said she came across this and couldn’t resist buying it – as a joke – for me.

What is it, you ask?

A Computer Cleaning Vac, similar to this one. It’s a small handheld vac with a couple of attachments to help get into the nooks and crannies of the keyboard and mouse.

When I unwrapped it, I must admit it brought a chuckle. We have a very similar sense of humour, so she knew when buying it, that it would do exacting what she intended.

Nice one sis’ and thanks.

It hasn’t been put to the test just yet, but will be in the near future I’m sure