Even mikeridley is longer than I’d like, but mridley and michaelr were both taken.  Sad.  Turns out I don’t have a global monopoly on my name and initials.  Who knew?

So anyway, if you’re already following me then I think nothing changes.  It’s the same account, I just changed the username.  But going forward I can be found on twitter at mikeridley.

In any event, we have been keeping busy with other projects.  We have a very exciting web application in the works, tenatively called Collapparatus.  It’s still early in the development process so I don’t want to say much more at this point.  But it definitely fills a niche on the web that isn’t currently being addressed.

Next week Heather is off to a marketing conference.  I’m hoping she’ll blog her experience.  She says she’s not much of a blogger but I’m hoping I can twist her arm a little bit.

Also next week we should be back to our regular weekly Delicious Day feature.

Those are all the updates that pop into the top of my head, so I’ll keep this update brief and wish the American readers a wonderful Thanksgiving.

I started looking for documentation on Zen Cart “template tags” and became frustrated by the fact that there isn’t really any such documentation.  I then decided to go about documenting the Zen Cart template functions myself.  It turns out, that’s actually not the best approach.

After speaking with some members of the Zen Cart development team, I realized that far fewer modifications are required to create a Zen Cart template as compared to a WordPress theme.  This is because most of the components of a Zen Cart site are configured via the Zen Cart administrative interface.  It’s not necessary to remove unwanted sections from the template PHP code.  They can simply be toggled off in the administration interface.

This is a very different strategy from WordPress theme creation, where a new theme is created from scratch, or at least from a very minimal template, and only those components that are desired are included in the code.

I was concerned that using the Zen Cart approach of leaving the individual page template files alone would limit my ability to customize the appearance, but that has not been a problem.  Even with restricting my customizations to the tpl_footer.php, tpl_header.php, and tpl_main_page.php files I have been able to customize the template sufficiently to fit into the required site design.

Disqus is a cross-site commenting system which has become very popular over the past few months.  We want to encourage high quality conversations on this web site and having a modern commenting system is a great way to start.

I do have two great services to cover so hopefully that will make up for my tardiness.  I’m going to cover Browsershots, a free alternative to BrowserCam and Total Validator, an (X)HTML validator with more features than the standard W3C Validator.

First let’s talk about Browsershots.  In the kick off Delicious Day entry, I covered BrowserCam which is a commercial service that helps web designers see how their designs are rendered across various platforms.  BrowserCam is a great service, but it isn’t free.  I came across Browsershots which provides a similar service for free.

To use the service, simply open up the Browsershots home page and enter a URL and specify the browsers you’d like the site rendered in.  Browsershots will then take you to the “job page” where it gives you information about how long your queue wait time will be.  There is no e-mail option so you have to keep refreshing the page until it has completed the rendering in all of the selected browsers.  It does give you the option to download all of the rendered images in a ZIP file which is wonderful.

The job experation time is 30 minutes, but sometimes the queue delay is longer than 30 minutes so you have to click Extend to get more time.  There is a cap on the number of jobs you can submit per day, but if you complete the free registration I believe you can submit an unlimited number of jobs.

Browsershots does not include the actual back end VNC access that is available with BrowserCam so it is not as useful for testing interactive/AJAX applications.  But Browsershots is a great tool to see if your stylesheet rendered presentation is consistent across a variety of browsers, and the price can’t be beat.

Their service works by volunteers allowing their computers be used as rendering engines, similar to the SETI@Home model.  If you’re feeling altruistic, you may want to sign up to use your spare computer time for job processing.

The other service I’m going to mention is Total Validator.  It is an (X)HTML validation service, similar to the standard W3C Validator but with more features.  To quote from their site:

Total Validator is a free one-stop all-in-one validator comprising a HTML validator, an accessibility validator, a spelling validator, a broken links validator, and the ability to take screenshots with different browsers to see what your web pages really look like.

They also offer a Java based desktop validation tool that can be used to validate pages before actually putting them on the web.

I searched around looking for a great time tracking solution that was free or cheap and Toggl seems to be the best one for our purposes.  We’ve been using it for several weeks now, and while it’s not perfect it meets our needs.  I would like to have better batch time entry capabilities and a few other features.  But all in all it works for our purposes.

Toggl offers a premium paid version, but the free service is sufficient for our uses.  And perhaps yours as well.  Check them out!

As it turns out, there’s none at all.  Chrome uses the WebKit engine, which is also used by Apple’s Safari.  So pages visually render very similar to how they would in Safari.  Because our design and development focuses on using web standards, we don’t employ a lot of browser-specific hacks in our (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or otherwise.

When a new browser comes along that also is focused on implementing web standards, the cost of supporting that additional platform is…zero.  Somehow I suspect the same will not be said when Internet Explorer 8 goes out of beta.

Fighting against standards is fighting against the tide at this point.  Futile and exhausting.

I am a huge fan of checklists and use many in my personal and professional life. So, naturally, my first favorite is The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period! This page is a compilation of what author, Stoney deGeyter, has put together, during his experience as a web designer, on what needs to be done for a web site for all its online marketing needs. It covers over 400 specific items over 23 topics. These topics include things such as website development, SEO, usability, accessibility, and much more. It’s not so much a how to as it is a guide. Stoney is always modifying the page to refine, add and delete as online marketing is always evolving. It is a great resourse to keep on hand.

Along with checklists, I love cheat sheets. Jacob Gube, of Six Revisions, put together 28 cheat sheets for web developers. The list provides cheat sheets for for Photoshop, Dreamweaver, typography and other web development topics. These will come in very handy for the beginning web developer as well as the experienced. One can always learn something new, right?

Do you have a favorite cheet sheet or checklist you use on a regular basis or have made yourself? Feel free to share your own resourses in the comments below.

Stay tuned each week for more of our favorite delicious bookmarks.