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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Mon 29 Sep 2008 at 22:36
When redesigning Lowter's homepage, one of the first decisions was to move the category list somewhere else because it took up a lot of valuable space. I decided to move the category list from the left-hand menu to the centre column towards the bottom of the page because, in the grand scheme of things, the category list is not very important. However, it would look horribly awful for the category list to remain vertical as it previously was in the left-hand menu. It made more sense to break the long category list into two columns to take adv…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Sat 27 Sep 2008 at 11:52
On the forums, Eugene (laserlight) pointed out a new website called Stack Overflow that is gaining some momentum in the development world. Stack Overflow is a "collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers". Personally, it reminds me of Digg with wiki capabilities, but geared towards programming. The site works by someone asking a programming question, people answer that question, other people revise the posted answers, and then people vote on that question. It sounds kind of complex, but the system allows for "good" q…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Thu 25 Sep 2008 at 10:41
As some of you have probably noticed, Lowter's homepage has been redesigned! The design was much needed and gave Lowter a nice facelift without redoing the entire design. An issue I personally have is not being able to do subtle design changes. Rather, every update to the design of Lowter is always radically different and retains very little from the previous design. However, Lowter's current layout works very well across browsers and in different screen resolutions, so there was no need for a major layout change.
The goals for the new h…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Sat 20 Sep 2008 at 12:37
- Comments
Version control is an important aspect of a good development environment. Even a single-developer project should have a version control system in place to manage their code changes. However, it is especially important to have version control for a project with multiple developers, to allow each developer to work on the project without screwing up everyone else's work. Unless you have your own server, you are going to have to find a company that offers hosted version control, probably for SVN or for CVS. Often these services are pricey (espe…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 17 Sep 2008 at 17:11
Many of you have probably heard of Feedburner, an online feed manager that tracks your feed statistics and provides other feed-related services (such as advertising in your feeds). Google recently purchased them as well, so if you are an AdSense user you may benefit from the AdSense-Feedburner integration that Google is currently working on. Lowter finally made the switch to Feedburner to manage our feeds, primarily to gather statistics on how many subscribers we have. Feedburner is certainly a very handy tool and it is easy to start using! …
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Mon 15 Sep 2008 at 21:24
- Comments
I am a programmer that, like many others, lacks basically any form of creativity. Sadly, I am not one of those talented people who can both design and program well. Hence, when I start working on a new website, I always play around with colour scheme generators to get the swatch of colours to use. I know generally what I want the base colour to be, but I just need a little assistance finding colours that work well with that particular base colour. Before, my favourite colour scheme generator used to be the one at Wellstyled.com, but recentl…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Fri 12 Sep 2008 at 23:35
- Comments
Two months ago, Jeff Atwood posted on his blog, Coding Horror, about his experience donating $5000 to the open source .Net project ScrewTurn Wiki. In a nutshell, Atwood donated $5000 of his advertising revenue into the project and four months later none of the money had been spent. Most single-developer applications simply run on time and not on money. Developers tend to work on open source projects, at least at first, simply for the enjoyment, doing the development in their free time.
Personally, I imagine if Ottoman was still an active …
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Tue 9 Sep 2008 at 21:44
- Comments
Awhile back I came upon this entertaining web comic about web development in the office setting: Web of Pain. It is not super funny, like xkcd, but it is funny nonetheless. There are the stereotypical characters of a tech office: the manager who doesn't understand anything about technology, the editor who just wants everything to work, the snobby designer, and the underpaid tech guy. It makes a few minutes of good distraction, so check it out sometime.…
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- Author
- Matt Oakes
- Date
- Sat 6 Sep 2008 at 11:35
After all the fuss about Google Chrome, you can't help but feel that it's just hype and that it won't end up being as good as originally promised. I must say, however, that after reading through the comic I was pretty excited. I don't want to get into the debate about whether Google should have their own browser, as well as give money to support Firefox. However, I do think that it's a great thing that a wider selection of browsers has opened up recently: first with the arrival of Mozilla Firefox and now with a high profile release from Goog…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 3 Sep 2008 at 19:35
- Comments
When I first started learning web development, I had a hard time understanding the differences between the two HTTP request methods POST and GET. Some of the early Lowter members will remember an issue with only being able to post forum posts under 2000 characters, which was a result of me accidently using GET to submit the user's posts. Matt actually spotted the issue and probably wanted to reach through the computer screen and slap me for such a naïve error. Alas, I've come quite a ways since then.
Now, there is a lot of technical …
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Mon 1 Sep 2008 at 21:10
Today Google, using a comic, announced that they have been developing their own web browser called Chrome. Basically, Chrome is Google's answer to improving web browsers and they have some pretty good ideas. The comic explains everything pretty well, but to list a few key points:
The browser is focused on each tab being "separate". Each tab runs in its own process so that if it crashes the entire application doesn't go down along with it. Plus the technical setup of the tabs (what they describe as a "sandbox") makes them more secure.
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- Author
- Daniel Malmqvist
- Date
- Mon 1 Sep 2008 at 18:09
Today I'm going to share a quick technique to spice up your paragraphs. If you have an extreme amount of text on a webpage, you know it can be awfully boring to look at. With some simple CSS you can really spice up your paragraph, from styling the first letter to floating an image within your paragraph. The possibilities are endless. However, today I am going to focus on showing you how to style the first letter of a paragraph, using CSS's :first-letter pseudo-element, to make it drop down, like in a magazine article:
p {
font: 11pt/…
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