Pick the next WebAssist t-shirt

Maybe you don't know it, but I work at WebAssist building Dreamweaver extensions, and it's been a while since we've had any WebAssist swag. It seems that that's about to change what with a contest where you get to help decide what the next WebAssist t-shirt will be. I won't try to sway you at all on which is my favorite, so head on over to the WebAssist blog entry and cast your vote for one of 6 different t-shirt styles and you could a $50 Amazon gift certificate.

Note: contest ends 12/31/09 at midnight

Update: Winner of the the t-shirt contest announced.

Dreamweaver Design Time Style Sheets and Diagnostic CSS

From time to time WebAssist ( my employer) in releases some free web development related training/education material called RoadMaps. Recently I contributed to this effort by writing an article on how to use Design Time Style Sheets for page diagnostic purposes. Essentially, what this means is that you can use CSS to visually determine how well your page is doing from a standards/best practices perspective. This is especially useful when taking over pages created by others.

One example discussed in the article uses CSS to cause all links that have an event attached to them, say onclick, to be rendered with a thick red border. This allows you to quickly identify when you may want to move to an unobtrusive method of applying JavaScript on your page. To read more up on the subject, take a look at Diagnostic CSS Styling (Issue 7).

Let me know if you have any questions about the article.

Starting out on the curve

I've been involved with Dreamweaver since I got a copy of Dreamweaver 1.2 ( for free on a CD that came with a British technology magazine that I don't recall the name of). I think that Dreamweaver 3 was about to come out or that it was just out and the 1.2 freebie was the incentive was to get 3 with an upgrade price. I was immediately struck with how lacking my then svelte Notepad-Netscape 3 driven development seemed so lacking. :-)

From there thinking back a bit, it seems that the learning curve really hasn't flattened out.

After getting Dreamweaver 4 and Fireworks 4 studio I really started looking more at the way that Dreamweaver was truly built to be extended and I rooted around in the configuration folder and learned a ton. I struck up some friendships on the Dreamweaver forums and on the recommendation of Angela Buraglia I volunteered and was accepted to join Team Macromedia for Dreamweaver in early 2002 or so (has it been that long already?). With the Adobe purchase of Macromedia a couple of years ago I became part of the Adobe Community Experts with my primary focus still being Dreamweaver. Along the way I've written a number of articles and tutorials at CommunityMX a great resource site for all things Adobe, contributed a chapter to a book and have been the technical editor for quite a few Macromedia and now Adobe product related books.

I'm working at WebAssist (3 years June 1st this year, time files) where I mainly build extensions for Dreamweaver using the fantastic extensibility layer as well as coding ASP (JavaScript & VBScript), ColdFusion and PHP.

But as with all things, nothing stays the same; so I'm always looking for something to learn to stay on the up good side of the curve (notice a trend here? I'm parenthetical)(he says parenthetically). I've been doing a good bit of playing around and reading up on JavaScript libraries including Adobe's Spry, Script.aculo.us jQuery, and MooTools among many many others and how they can be used to enhance the user experience. When WebAssist had their latest redesign I helped put in some Moo.fx flavored actions. Intriguing also are content replacement/enhancements such a sIFR, swfIR and SoundManager. I've also been thinking a bit about the possibilities that Adobe AIR (and by extension Flex) offers to web developers like me by bringing the technologies I know to the desktop.

I hope to be able to keep on learning new and interesting technologies as well as learn about new ideas and trends, both in the realm of the technology I work with and the greater world at large. So join me and I'll join you in this fantastic learn experience that is life.

Well I guess that's enough linking around, so I'll sign off this initial post.