Web Development

IdolHands takes a look at BarackObama.com and JohnMcCain.com to see how they stack up against each other in standards-compliance and design. The verdict? Republicans still have work to do.

If you use Firebug, this is a must-have. Rainbow adds syntax highlighting to the Firebug Javascript debugger for Firefox. This really improves readability of the script you're debugging.

I just donated to the Eclipse Foundation and became a "Friend of Eclipse". I've been using the Eclipse platform for years for a variety of applications both professional and personal. It has certainly paid me, so I thought it was time to give a little back.

ATF, we miss you

One of the reasons I donated was to help support the PDT (PHP Development Tools) and ATF (AJAX Tools Framework) Eclipse projects (although I also use the Java and C/C++ tools pretty heavily too). PDT is rapidly become the standard platform for PHP development and ongoing work on the project has been robust.

The ATF is a great project, but has been a bit resource starved for the past year or so. ATF allows you to integrate with your favorite AJAX toolkit (like Dojo, jQuery or whatever) and then develop and debug Javascript code using the embedded Mozilla XULRunner. It's a very slick way to develop Javascript code without shelling out big bucks for a commercial package. Unfortunately, the last stable build was released nearly a year ago and doesn't run on Ganymede (the current version of Eclipse).

Hopefully, we'll see a new release from the ATF project soon.

If you use the HTML/Javascript Twitter badge, you've probably noticed that it has issues under Internet Explorer. It will generally work the first time a user hits the page, but if the next time, the badge will not show a tweet list. Here is a work-around you can use if you have access to your blog's code.