Author: Michael
Date: September 18, 2008 at 8:37 am

The other day I wrote about the Stack Overflow Beta.  The site is now publicly available.  The creators are continuing to add improvements and you can follow along with their back end work at their blog and podcast.  As I predicted, while the beta was very Windows-centric due to the social group involved, as the site as become public the mix of technologies covered has expanded a lot.  Even into hardware synthesis.

I haven’t yet thought of any great questions to pose, and the few answers I have submitted are not the most exciting, but I do like the site.  The amount of time questions spend in the queue before being answered is typically very small, depending on the obscurity of the technology in question.  The next time I run into a development brick wall, I’ll try asking the Stack Overflow community.

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Categories: web development
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Author: Michael
Date: September 12, 2008 at 7:45 am

In the course of developing web sites for clients, we incorporate a lot of off the shelf open source software. This includes packages such as WordPress, MediaWiki, Gallery2, Zen Cart, and others. To use these applications in our client sites we need to customize the templates and possibly add in extensions, but we don’t want to include the entire application in our client site Subversion repository. (more…)

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Categories: web design
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Author: Michael
Date: September 11, 2008 at 7:49 am

We have posted before about our delicious bookmark list. We try to add links there for the resources we find helpful and we encourage you to check out the list. But sometimes it’s hard to find the real gems, so today we’re starting what I hope will become a regular feature of highlighting specific entries from the delicious list. For the inaugural entry, we’re going to cover BrowserCam and the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker.

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Categories: web design
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Author: Michael
Date: September 7, 2008 at 8:08 am

I have been checking out the beta of Stack Overflow, a soon-to-be-launched developer Q&A web site. The concept of the site is that you ask a question pertaining to anything in the realm of software development, and people answer. It’s a community site, and the community votes up the best answer which then rises to the top of the answers list to be displayed directly beneath the question.

As the site grows the goal is to provide a central repository to all software development Frequently Asked Questions. As well as those that are not so frequently asked. I’ve been able to add an answer to one question so far, although I’d like to contribute further. Alas, every time I log in I find that most of the unanswered questions are pertaining to Windows development and I’m a UNIX guy. I’m sure that will even out after the site goes out of beta.

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Categories: web development
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Author: Nicole
Date: September 6, 2008 at 10:49 am

As a freelancer or when starting a web design business, the tools of the trade can seem overwhelmingly expensive. HTML editing software, graphics programs, web hosting…the list of potential expenses goes on and on depending on what you’re trying to do.

However, I’ve found that there are ways to slash these costs, so you don’t spend your first few months just trying to make up for your overhead costs.

The standard HTML editing software is Adobe Dreamweaver. Most other web designers I’ve talked to use it and love it, but its price tag of $399 caused me to hesitate. The thing is, there are many features in Dreamweaver that are simply unnecessary for a skilled web designer, and I for one did not think I should be paying for all these extras that I didn’t need to get the job done.

That’s when I found Notepad++. It’s a free notepad replacement that allows you to edit source code and publish it for the web. It has many of the same features of Dreamweaver, like syntax highlighting, design view and auto-completion, without all the bulky extras. I highly recommend this software for EVERYONE, not just those on a strict budget.

(more…)

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Categories: Uncategorized, web design
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Author: Michael
Date: September 3, 2008 at 8:50 pm

Communications Tool & Die has set up a profile on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. Check out our page here. Personally, I’m more used to furl but delicious seems to have won the mindshare of the digerati so…if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Nevertheless, it will take a little bit of practice with the system to understand the best way to organize links using tag clouds.

In any event, feel free to check us out. We hope to develop a useful repository of web design and development links.

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Categories: web design, web development
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Author: Michael
Date: August 24, 2008 at 9:47 am

We are big fans of the Dojo Toolkit, but unfortunately the Dojo book that is linked to from the main Dojo web site is of limited utility. A lot of the information is out of date and there are limited programmatic examples. While the #dojo IRC channel on irc.freenode.net is a wonderful resource of knowledgeable, helpful folks, the Dojo community has recognized the need for better documentation. Enter the new Dojo Docs Project on dojocampus.org. If you’re interested in making a wonderful open JavaScript UI toolkit even better, help them out!

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Categories: web development
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Author: Michael
Date: August 23, 2008 at 5:38 pm

Nicole wrote a post the other day about our design process. As she mentioned, when we set up Communications Tool & Die we were trying to determine a design process that would work for our company. Although we had worked in large organizations and as freelancers, it wasn’t clear what the best process would be for a small custom web design and development shop. After reading 37Signals’ article Why We Skip Photoshop we agreed that it would be a duplication of effort to design a visual mockup and then have to take the time to duplicate that effort in web technologies. But after some experimentation we have found that there are some very good reasons for us not to skip Photoshop. (more…)

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Categories: web design
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Author: Nicole
Date: August 21, 2008 at 2:15 pm

When creating a website, there are a couple ways to go about it. There are pros and cons to both; it’s really just a matter of figuring out what’s going to work best for the project you’re working on and the resources available to you. (more…)

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Categories: Our Web Site, web design
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Author: Michael
Date: August 17, 2008 at 10:45 pm

Our JavaScript examples page has a demo AJAX quote generator application built using the Dojo Toolkit. It’s the only page on our web site that does not validate, outside of our blog (Wordpress theme validation is another topic for another day). It also does not follow our typical design philosophy. The page will not load properly in a browser that does not support JavaScript. It is a page that we’d never release to a client. So you might be wondering why we included it on our examples page, where we are supposedly showcasing our talent. (more…)

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Categories: Our Web Site
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