I had the most interesting conversation with one of my friends the other day.

Adam: "Whew... finally finished with my latest web project!"

Friend (in awe): "Whoa! That's awesome! How did you make that?"

Now, of course, this project of mine was a full-fledged ASP.NET web application; a simple question like "how did you make that" could easily end up with me not only explaining what I did, but how I did it, and which tools and technologies I used. That way, instead of wondering about the magic that makes all those fancy programs out there on the internet work, my friend could understand exactly what goes on to make that happen.

Well, that couldn't hurt, right?

Adam: "Do you really want to know? I'm warning you... this could get messy."

Now, at this point, my friend gives me one of those funny looks like I'm completely crazy. But being a web developer, I'm already used to that.

Friend: "Well, sure..."

And so it begins.

In many ways, I'm pretty old school. When I learned HTML, I painstakingly handcoded my pages in the esteemed Notepad. Only when I became a master of HTML-fu did I allow myself to try Dreamweaver. (Okay, fine, the ability to buy a license with educational pricing may have had a lot to do with it, too.)

I loved Dreamweaver. One of the things that always made me a little sad when I first tried Linux was that there wasn't a real Dreamweaver-esque type application. Times have changed, however. There are a number of HTML/web development applications out there that are free (as in speech and beer) and feature filled.

But I'd be really amiss if I just mentioned Linux HTML editors in a vacuum. There are a number of tools readily available in repositories that make coding, layout, uploading, and testing easy and (dare I say it) fun.

Because seriously, if it isn't fun, what's the point?

Over the next few weeks we're going to take a look at web development tools in Linux. We'll do a run down of some popular XHTML/HTML editors, FTP and transfer software, and neat little tools for creating content that make some of the drudgery of "back-end" web work less painful.

It isn't every day that Douglas Crockford (the father of JSON and JSLint) pops up with a new tech talk. In this one he discusses the current state of Ajax development, why mashups are inherently insecure, why the standards process is broken, and how our best hope for a newer better platform may be mobile. Say what?

Basically he proposes the idea that because the replacement rate on mobile phones is so quick (around 2 years) it would be possible to move that industry to a new platform for website interactivity. The traditional PC market moves slowly and requires that you support many many legacy platforms. But with mobile, you can run and gun with your technology and count on people upgrading. A new web platform for mobile could be Flash, it could be Silverlight, it could be a future version of ECMA Script (JavaScript) with a better CSS implementation.

The video also gives a good overview of the history of computing over networks and why the web has lagged behind on everything from rounded corners to security.

How often have you stumbled across a killer coupon or deal on the web, only to discover - sometimes too late - that the offer expired months or even years ago? If you're still counting, you might be happy to hear that a new meta tag from Google seems to be the first step in the right direction for combining and filtering time-sensitive information when searching.

This new meta tag, according to HighRankings, is called "unavailable_after", and it'll allow webmasters to easily instruct search engines to stop crawling pages after a specified date. This will be a simple and streamlined way for sites to ensure pages like limited-time discount offers or subscription-only content get removed from search results and caches on a pre-set date. In other words: you shouldn't have to worry about finding a 2 month old GoDaddy coupon that expired long before you even thought up the domain you're looking to purchase.

While this is a great step forward into the realm of automatically calculating the element of time in search results, we're excited to see the search companies further explore time and its effects on content and search because there's still a lot of work to do. Searching for something like game console sales statistics in Google and Yahoo! still returns popular links from 2003/04, even if the query is altered to "game console sales 2007."

We understand, however, that significant changes to our search tools and the ways we think about them take time (ba-dum-ching!), so we'll just have to sit back and watch how this all plays out.

[via search engine land]

Panic, the fine folks that bring us Transmit, finally revealed the top secret app they've been developing over the past year with the release of the web development application Coda V1.0. This is not a WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop, do-all application. Coda has a specific target audience that consists of people who edit raw code using multiple tools such as a text editor, FTP client, CSS editor and Terminal.

Coda brings all these tools together in one neat interface. You can organize your files using Sites, edit with the text editor, utilize the built in preview functionality, style your pages with the CSS builder and even access Terminal with one click for those times you need to do a little MySQL or other Terminal task. You can make your changes locally then publish to the web, or edit the files directly on the server using the built in Transmit FTP engine. And as an added bonus, for those times you are stuck trying to remember syntax or learning something new, it also includes access to HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP reference books from within the interface.
After using Coda for a couple weeks it amazes me that this is just a version 1.0 release. Panic has released a 1.0.1 update, but it's hard for me to find anything to complain about. If you are a hand coder, you should definitely check out the 14 day free trial. Coda will retail for $99, but for a limited time it's available for $79. If you are a current owner of Transmit 3, knock another ten bucks off and it can be yours for $69. Sorry Windows users, Coda only runs on Mac OSX 10.4 and higher.

Adobe's just-launched Apollo platform could be the ticket to a whole new world of applications according to TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. He writes of the announcement, "I honestly believe that entirely new classes of companies can be built on this platform, which takes Flash, HTML and javascript completely outside of the browser and interacts with the file system on a PC."

You can pick up your free (as in beer) copy of the Apollo Alpha SDK and follow Arrington's admonishment to "go build something". Adobe's stated target is "allowing web developers to build and deploy web applications to the desktop", which could help define a whole new class of network aware applications. While Apollo promises to be a cross-platform environment, although support for Linux isn't expected until sometime after the full 1.0 release; a real shame given its incredible potential.

We're interested in anything Apollo related, so if you spot the first examples of Apollo applications in the wild, hit our tip box and let us know the skinny, dig?

[via TechCrunch]

Each day sees more and more Ajax tools, tricks, demos, and libraries come online. MiniAjax.com is a place that collects, on a very fluid and easy to browse page, all of the latest and greatest Ajax scripts that you can download and implement on your website.

There is a lot of good stuff to explore here such as:

• GreyBox - a simple window you can use to launch another webpage within your website
• Reflection.js - create cool image reflection effects
• Heatmap - a hot (pun intended) utility to let you see where users click on your website
• AjaxIM - a browser based IM client.
• and many many more.

The author says he'll add links to 60 more scripts in March. Better add this baby to your bookmarks!

If you've been anywhere except under a rock for the last 18 months or so, you're probably sick to death of the phrase "Web 2.0," and for many people, Web 2.0 has become almost synonymous with Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails, though, has some major drawbacks for the average web designer. Ruby, while gaining steam, is still not as popular as more established programming languages. There aren't as many programmers who know it as there are who know, say, Perl, Java, ASP or PHP. So developing RoR applications means investing time and money in training yourself or your team in a new language.

That may be a minor hurdle, but Rails offers more serious barriers to adoption. First, it expects to run its own webserver, which will conflict with your main webserver listening on port 80. It can be made to use an existing Apache or IIS server, but the configuration is not simple. Even when running on an existing server, it expects to run as a separate application in a mod_ruby environment. While that makes RoR applications very efficient (like mod_perl applications before them), it also means that using Ruby on Rails requires control over you servers. That's great if you manage your own hardware and internet connection, but most people don't. The majority of websites, even those owned by medium to large-sized businesses, are hosted with web hosting companies where individual users don't have dedicated equipment or access to server configurations. Even at my workplace, where we do most things in house, my department web space is just a small part of a server infrastructure maintained by a completely different network and server administration department. Adding my Rails applications to the forward-facing servers isn't in the cards.

Enter Maypole.

Maypole is a rapid web application development framework written in Perl by Simon Cozens and maintained by Aaron James Trevena and others. It will run anywhere there is Perl, which is most of the world's webservers, and provides a powerful environment for "agile web development," including database abstraction and the powerful and popular Template::Toolkit templating system. Best of all, it is platform agnostic. It can run under either mod_perl or as CGI, an will check for itself to see which environment it is running in. That means You can start using it today on your Dreamhost (in fact, I have a Maypole application running on one right now) account, and pick it up tomorrow and move it someplace else without hassle.

The Maypole site has some good introductions and links to some great articles, as well as the Maypole Perl module itself. As with any Perl project, though, the best way to get it is to install it directly from CPAN and read the perldocs.

Script.aculo.us is an amazing framework for enriching your website's user experience very easily. Built on top of the very popular prototype javascript framework, scriptaculous makes AJAX cake, and gives everyone the power to have a sexy AJAX-powered website, yes everyone. Scriptaculous is a tiny (140kb) javascript framework that gives you the power of effects, several dynamic data components, and all you need to know is a little bit about HTML and how to read. If you already have your own website, it is not hard to do. Follow these steps to AJAX up your site in no time:

1. Download script.aculo.us. Click on any of these links to begin downloading the zip, tar.gz, or tar.bz2 version.
   
   
2. Unzip the archive somewhere, preferably somewhere you will find it again. This is key.
   
   
3. Upload the whole thing to your web server, and put it where ever you like, again, it should be somewhere you can find it. Once again, finding it is key. You will need to link to these files from your web page, so putting the files in a sub folder of your home directory (root for you unix junkies) is a good idea.
   
   
4. In the header section of your web pages, you need to put this code:
   

   <script src="ajax/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
   <script src="ajax/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

   As you might notice, the code has to point to your uploaded script.aculo.us files. You would replace the "ajax/" portion with your own path depending on the name of your subfolder.
   
   
5. Next, put the one line of code into your pages or posts where ever you want the effect to take place. Let's say you have a content div element you want to have all the sudden appear in the page, all you do is wire the "SlideDown" effect (one of many in script.aculo.us, download the cheat sheet here) to a button, link, or other clickable element on your page. The code to trigger the SlideDown effect from a link looks like this:
   
   <a href="#" onclick="Effect.SlideDown('content');">SlideDown Now!</a>
   
   Why use an <a> tag? First, it is super simple to code (everyone knows it), and second, users think it is an ordinary link. They will be quite surprised when they find out it isn't normal at all. I call this "hacking old-skool users into using web 2.0 unknowingly" (or something like that).
   
   
6. Anyway...be sure your div tag has the id="content" because that is the name of the element the SlideDown effect will be applied to once you click the "link" we just made. Make sense? Good. NOTE: Something to remember is that your DIV will be shown on the page automatically by default, unless you first hide it, so the visual magic of an effect such as SlideDown can really be displayed. To "hide" our div by default so your content won't appear until you click the link we just made, you will need to add an inline CSS style (or add one in your CSS file, if you have one) so the content div ends up looking like this:
   

   <div id="content" style="display: none;">This is the content.</div>

   You'll notice (I hope) that the underlined code is the part that hides this div by default. When the SlideDown effect is triggered by clicking on the <a> link, it will automatically change the div's display property, so don't worry about having to do that.
   
7. Try it out, and have fun! It should slide down your content, which can be anything you put in that div tag, video, audio, pictures, more javascript, an iframe, whatever, use your imagination. There are tons of different effects you can use, so you should check them out at script.aculo.us's website, since they have great demos and even combination demos for different sets of effects.
   
   Since the script.aculo.us wiki is large and contains a lot of information to consume all at once, I have compiled a basic script.aculo.us effects cheat sheet of sorts for your quick and dirty coding enjoyment. You can download my PDF cheat sheet here.

Have fun AJAXing your site, and once you're done, come back and give us a link to your site so we can see what you've done with the place. I'd love to check out your site with the framework in action. It can do some wicked cool stuff. You can build entire sites out of script.aculo.us including AJAX drop-downs, AJAX page loading, and custom stuff. Let me know how your site turns out with it.

NOTE (to lightbox and TinyMCE users): There are some special instructions on integrating script.aculo.us with both of these other frameworks, since they all use Prototype to some extent. You can find TinyMCE help here (script.aculo.us wiki) and most lightbox frameworks list this info on their support page or forums section of the site. Have fun!

Yes, I know, bad pun. Sorry.

Anyway... if you need forms of any kind for your web site but don't have the time to program one from scratch (or the money to pay someone else to do it!), Icebrrg might be the solution for you. It lets you easily create a variety of forms - surveys, contact forms, job applications, invitations - through a simple WYSIWYG interface. Icebrrg handles all the back-end logic and data collection for you.

One huge benefit of using Icebrrg to build forms instead of a hosting them on a third-party site is that the forms you create will match the look and feel of your site. You can create an account for free and find out if Icebrrg fits your needs. The free account limits you to a maximum of three forms and ten fields, and doesn't include data storage options, but paid plans start at an affordable $9/month.

KavaScript is a project that claims to "breathe new life into JavaScript by extending it with syntax and features inspired by expressive, dynamic languages like Ruby and Perl." It's definitely interesting. It adds interesting features like string interpolation, new string and array literals, closures, macros, and file includes. I don't really expect this to see wide adoption in web development, as JavaScript is already a fairly powerful language and every extra kilobyte of library code serves to bog down the user experience a bit more, but it's an intriguing project nonetheless.

Alessandro Fulciniti at Web-Graphics has collected his top 20 bookmarks of 2005. They're all, of course, web development links with a focus on CSS and JavaScript with some design, typography, AJAX, and search engine optimization thrown in. Every one is a must-read for anyone doing web development in 2006.