Apple has announced that Leopard will ship October 26th. Wo-hoo!

My pre-order from Amazon has updated with an estimated ground-shipping date of Nov. 2nd. This means that Nov 2nd with be a “holiday” here at Stringer Sites.

Link: Pre-order from Amazon for $109 (includes a $20 instant rebate!)

For those reading this blog through a feed reader, I invite you to come by and see our new digs. The StringFoo site just got a remodel of sorts. As the saying goes, the cobbler’s kids have no shoes. Such is the case with StringFoo. The demands of client work (also known as the primal need for income) have always meant that a much-needed update to StringFoo always took a back seat. Well, I finally got sick of looking at the boring, gray beast and decided to redesign the site.

In the process, I took the opportunity to create a Word Press theme from scratch. This task was surprisingly easy in many ways. Changing the basic look and even altering the structure of existing pages was a straight forward and well-documented task.

However, I found adding entirely new pages and functionality to be a bit of a sticky wicket, so my goals to add a tag cloud page will have to be postponed until I can spend some more time on my decidedly pro bono project.

I’m also having a few headaches with the two Spry widgets on the page. The main menu makes the AdSense iframe disappear, and the Accordion widget is a herky jerky mess.

What do you think? What do you like, what do you hate? I’d love your feedback.

Ack! I made a wonderful discovery today. In my recent bout with Catastrophic Data Loss (consult your doctor for possible side effects), it appears that another casualty is the comments table. And here I thought that it was just quiet. Alas, no, all the comments ever made by anyone on any topic on this blog have gone *poof*. <sniff> Bye, bye comments. We hardly knew ye.

My apologies to those kind enough to comment on my aimless ramblings. I only hope that you will do so again on future stories.

This year’s Webmaster Jam Session was a resounding success. Many thanks to J. Cornelius and the Coffee Cup staff for putting this conference together.

The WJS, if you don’t know, is a small conference held here in Dallas that attracts some of the top developers and designers in the business. Attendance is kept to 300 people, so the whole thing feels very intimate and focused, and while the conference is sponsored, the conference is devoid of booths and is, hence, free of the noise and distractions normally found at conferences. I can sum up the quality of the speakers by saying that in almost every case, I regretted not being able to be in two places at once.

Two things struck me at the conference that I wouldn’t have expected:

1) The majority of attendees were Mac people. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was among my peeps and didn’t feel like the outcast in the room for whipping out my shiny white Mac Book.

2) The general animosity towards Microsoft was palpable. Throughout the two day conference, jibes, hisses, and boos were thrown in Redmond’s general direction. What’s even more amazing was that Microsoft was one of the show’s sponsors, and they had representatives in attendance! What struck me most is how much this one company has made each and every web developer’s life a living hell. It’s one thing to read about this. It’s quite another to see 300 people in a room actually demonstrate this sentiment.

That aside, the point of the conference is to learn how to become a better web developer. Toward that end, the sessions were aimed a particular topics of interests to professionals doing work on the web. A small selection of the best sessions I attended:

The Dawning of the Age of Experience by Jared Spool
A look at how experience design is changing the Web
Jared is a highly entertaining speaker and gave this year’s keynote. The session focused on the radical notion of improving the user experience on your sites. If there was a common thread, it would be that simplicity rules.

Viewports and Byte-ranges and Bandwidth. Oh my! by James Craig
Standards-based, practical tips for developing for the next generation of mobile devices
James gave a very insightful talk about designing and developing for mobile devices. While he focused mainly on the iPod Touch and iPhone, he advocated the need to keep all mobile users in mind through standards compliance and previewing through emulators if you don’t have the means to test on actual hardware.

The Broken World by Molly Holzschlag
Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All
Molly is famous in the web world for her decades-long advocacy for web standards, and is one of the rare characters in our community. She’s a nut. And I mean that in the good way. Her session focused on why we are where we are with regard to standards support in the various browsers, and after hearing her speak, it’s amazing to me that we have a web at all. I definitely have a new appreciation for the difficult job the browser makers have, and the makers of Safari, Firefox, and Opera are to be commended even more.

Design is in the Details by Bryan Veloso and Dan Rubin
Sometimes the smallest things make the largest impact.
Brian and Dan from Sidebar Creative are two of the most talented designers I’ve come across in a while, and their camaraderie made for a great session. The take-away: pixels matter. As with many of the sessions, simplicity was the theme, here. Give your designs “breathing” room by bumping up fonts and increasing padding & margins. But most of all, take the time to check the alignment of your elements. They did a fantastic real-time fix up of the horrible Fox News web site. By aligning elements and giving the design some breathing room, they improved the site about 1000%. Great session.

All Systems Go by Stephanie Sullivan
Preparing your content for takeoff with CSS
Stephanie is the goddess of CSS and is, in fact, responsible for those fantastic new CSS templates that come in Dreamweaver CS3. She gave an engaging and informative talk on semantic markup and compliant CSS. Again, the drum beat here is simplicity rules (noticing a theme here?).

Real World Accessibility by Derek Featherstone
Get the scoop on creating accessible Websites from one of the world’s top experts.
The closing keynote was given by Derek, one of the world’s leading advocates and experts on developing accessible web sites. Developers need to do more than simply run down a QA checklist and make a site “compliant” (whatever that means). Rather, you should put yourself in the shoes of those who use your site in an unconventional way and pay attention to details. Just one great example: Google Maps. By failing to make their controls actual button elements which could have been styled to look exactly the same as the current controls, those using a screen reader were completely shut out from the app. Something so simple had such a massive impact on the user.

I could keep going since there were many excellent sessions. You can check out the rest of the session details here, and the WJS site promises to have podcasts available soon. In all, the WJS was a fantastic conference and an incredible value. If you get a chance to go next year, I highly recommend attending.

Adobe’s Spry Framework has been revved to v1.6. Get the Spry Updater for Dreamweaver CS3 from the Adobe Labs site.

When I’m working in Code View, I have used Courier New. Until now.

My friends over at 43Folders tipped me off to this nice, free monospace font called Inconsolata that is excellent for use in code view, be it in Dreamweaver, TextMate, BBEdit, or whatever. The font, which is the creation of Raph Levien, is very readable and scannable. If you live in code view all day, or just want a very readable screen font, check out Inconsolata.

Yesterday, I discussed a technique to recover data if your database has gone <skrewed>poof</skrewed> using Google’s cached content. There’s another technique that has saved my bacon more than once: The Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine.

I once ran into a situation where the data on a new client’s server was corrupted, and there were no backups available. The graphics were jumbled or missing altogether, and the original artist was missing in action. Without the original source files, or any data backup to speak of, my client was pretty much pooched. And because the site had been in this state for quite some time, Google had cached the corrupted content. What to do? Visit the Wayback Machine, that’s what.

If you aren’t familiar with the Internet Archive, it is a non-profit that has been quietly taking periodic snapshots of the Internet–yes, the entire Internet–since 1996. Unless you have been one of the idiots who have requested that the IA stop
“stealing” your content, images of your site are probably in the Archive.

To use this technique, simply type your URL into the Wayback Machine’s search tool. You’ll get a list of snapshots in return that will, in most cases, date back to the birth of your site. Clicking on one of these snapshots should reveal a navigable (and, hence, content-extractable) version of your site as it appeared on that day.

In my case, I was able to find most of the images in an uncorrupted state. Simply by saving the graphics directly from the browser into my client’s site, I was able to reconstruct the site and get my client back on the web.