Some time back when I was looking for some tutorials to create a website from scratch i.e. the process from designing the PSD to slice it and CSS/XHTML it, then not many quality results appeared. But that was like almost an year back and a lot of water has flown down the river Thanes since then. In this list I will give you links to some wonderful tutorials teaching you in a step by step way to design a website. These tutorials are ideal for someone who is learning web designing and has grasp of basic CSS, XHTML and little designing on Photoshop.
How to Design and Code Web 2.0 Style Web Design
Designing and Coding a Grunge Web Design from Scratch
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It is very important to do backup of your MySql database, you will probably realize it when it is too late. A lot of web applications use MySql for storing the content. This can be blogs, and a lot of other things. When you have all your content as html files on your web server it is very easy to keep them safe from crashes, you just have a copy of them on your own PC and then upload them again after the web server is restored after the crash.
All the content in the MySql database must also be backed up. If you have spent a lot of time making the content and it is only stored in the Mysql server, you will feel very bad if it gets lost for ever. Backing it up once every month or so makes sure you never loose too much of your work in case of a server crash, and it will make you sleep better at night. It is easy and fast, so there is no reason for not doing it.
Step 1: Log into phpMyAdmin on your server.
Step2: You can select the database that you would like to backup from the drop-down menu called Database.
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There’s this perception that the best coders tend to code on a notepad and I will leave that to you for any criticism but you must always go with your instinct and choose the option that suits you the most. WYSIWYG or “What You See Is What You Get” does provide the option for the noobs to deal with code and create amazing stuff. It has simplified code for the new users and thus helped in better adoption. Here are some of the Open Source WYSIWYG text editors that are worth checking out.
KompoZer: Kompozer is a open source web development tool built on NVU. It is a full featured web authoring system that has an integrated FTP client, an intuitive tabbed user interface and support for all major operating systems.
Quanta Plus: Quanta Plus is a web development tool for the K Desktop Environment. It is designed for quick web development and is rapidly becoming a mature editor with a number of great features. It is highly extensible and able to run custom script. It has an excellent visual CSS editor that has code hints and auto-completion of syntax.
CSSED: Cssed is a GTK2 application for creating and maintaining CSS style sheets. It is a small editor that tries to ease the CSS editing. It features autocompletion, CSS syntax validation, selector wizard for complex rules, color wizard, box wizard and other useful features to help web developers to create and maintain CSS style sheets.
Aptana: Aptana is a new integrated development environment for building interactive web pages. It’s likely to be a big hit among Web 2.0 developers since it facilitates speedy coding of JavaScript behaviors and CSS styles. Aptana has a nice code assistant that’s customizable and the application ships with several popular JavaScript libraries that developers can import and employ. The application comes with third-party libraries like JQuery, Prototype, script.aculo.us, Yahoo UI and Dojo among others.
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It’s time that we get our say expressed about WordPress 2.7 which has a pleasantly compact Administrator panel along with some other changes of varied significance. Some developers hopped onto the WordPress 2.7 big time by creating their WordPress themes which are compatible with the latest version of WordPress or by porting their existing themes to work smoothly on WordPress 2.7. The major difference in WordPress 2.7 has been regarding the pagination of comments and following are some of the most beautiful WordPress 2.7 compatible themes. Have a look.
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MySQL is the most popular open-source database. Whether you’re an aspiring web application developer or a person working on an existing database-driven web application like a content management system, ecommerce platform, or blogging platform there are a variety of handy applications that you can use to make MySQL database design and administration. So here the 10 applications to help you create, write, manage and visualize your database.
TurboDB Admin: TurboDB Admin is a free web-based AJAX application that helps you manage, explore, and edit MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. It gives you the ability to export your database into a downloadable file which you can keep as a back up in case you need to restore your database. Installation is very simple, just upload the application to your web server, edit the config.php file to reflect your database information, and it’s ready to go just navigate to your installation directory in your web browser to access the application. It works in Apache and IIS HTTP servers, and requires PHP installed and enabled on the web server.
SQL Buddy: A web-based MySQL administrator with an Ajaxed interface was designed to meet the demands of modern web developers and its completely open source and free for everyone to use. It uses the MySQL user table for authentication. Therefore, you can get started right away by using users that already exist. Most people will want to login as root because this level of permissions is necessary for certain tasks (like adding users, for example). However, you can login with any user that you wish.
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Tooltips are the coolest way to show the additional information or special reference which is often shown with mouseover or click actions, Here We’ve Collected 20 Tooltip Scripts vary from CSS, Ajax based, mootools and jQuery with cool Animation which you can easily incorporate into your future designs.
CSS Tooltips: A simple demonstration of using custom CSS tooltips as a drop-in replacement for the browser-based title attribute.
Demo
Box Over: BoxOver uses or DHTML to show tooltips on a website. Implementation of the tooltips, however, requires no knowledge of DHTML or Javascript. Flexible DHTML tool tip in numerous formats. Appears immedately and fades in during loading.
Demo
qTip: Works for all elements, not only for links in most browsers - IE 5.5+, Firefox, Safari and Opera.
Demo
Bubble Tooltips: Bubble Tooltips are an easy way to add (via a bit of CSS and javascript) fancy tooltips with a balloon shape to any web page.
Demo
Super Note: Supernotes are like regular footnotes turbocharged with javascript ,so they display as tooltips in modern browsers, and remain accessible elsewhere.
Demo
Popup Balloon: The balloon.js package is written in object-oriented JavaScript and allows you to add configurable balloon tooltips (AKA popup balloons, bubbles, rollover tooltips etc., etc.) to your website.
Demo
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Professional webmasters do have to check out the compatibility of their sites across multiple web browsers. Times have changed a lot in last few years because earlier you could excuse by setting it up for Internet Explorer but things are moving quickly out from the IE domain. We will see some browser compatibility tools today so that the header fine intricacies stay intact irrespective of the web browser.
Cross Browser Testing does precisely what it says across multiple web browsers like IE, Firefox, Safari and Camino etc. on various Operating Systems. What makes this service unique from others is that you can do Javascript and AJAX testing using it. You will have to shell out some money to use it though.
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Last night a Designer friend of mine who primarily uses Macbook pro contacted me to help him fix a stylesheet for a design he is working on to work perfectly fine on IE6 and IE7. He had not secondary machine or desktop to render the same design and so he was facing difficulty.
For designers especially, It is useful to install microsoft’s operating system on the MacBook Pro. If you have latest Macbook Pro, Apple is now using Intel chips which should make it even more easier to install the same.
Latest Macbook pro is coming with Apple’s Boot Camp utility preinstalled. The process starts by using Boot Camp on OS X to specify a partition size for Windows. It’s then simply a case of restarting the MacBook Pro with an XP or Vista installation disc in the drive and following the usual Windows installation process. The total time taken is less than an hour.
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Firebug: The firefox extension which lets you edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
CSS Sprite Generator: It reduces the number of HTTP Requests while rendering webpages.
CSS Tidy: It optimizes and parses the CSS code and thus reduces the file size by removing unnecessary code.
CSS Grid Builder: The Grids Builder is an online GUI designed to work with the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) CSS Grids tools.
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Blogging is a very open communication with people you don’t even know but there are times when you seek a response from your reader. One way is to directly ask them in your blog post and expect some of them to reply in the comments section and the other thing you can do is to create a poll. Having a poll sometimes add a whiff of fresh interactivity which is sometimes really sought on a blog.
There are two ways to create a poll on your website, the first is to use the help of polling services which manage the polls for you and keep the complicated part to themselves.
Following are the easiest of all, Web2.0 services that you may use to get a ready-made poll which you can readily deploy on your website or a blog.
Poll Daddy
Poll Authority
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