gregdoolittle.com

I got this ad from my webhost in my email:

Millions of people have the potential to visit your Web site from their mobile devices – are you ready for them? With NEW .MOBI, the world’s first mobile-optimized domain, you can reach out to an entirely new, high-tech audience that’s waiting to connect with you.

I’ve heard about .mobi before, but I really don’t get it. First of all, why would you need a mobile domain for your site? Who will remember that it’s .mobi and not .com? You’re going to have to register .com anyway! And since you’re going to have a .com address, you can just have a mobile stylesheet or use browser detection to redirect cell-phone users to a mobile-friendly version of your page.

secondly, unless you have a blackberry or a sidekick, i find internet on the phone to be completely annoying! the tiny screen, the numeric keypad… basically, surfing the web on a mobile phone is a pain in the neck. it’s also ridiculously expensive. if you can afford a cell-phone you can probably afford internet access at home. there are a few ocassions where you might need to surf the web on a cell phone: 1. to check your email on your boring commute home (but can’t you read a magazine, or just wait until you get home!), 2. to look up someone’s phone number (which is probably the ocassion where the price of internet on your phone is worth it, given the ridiculous rates that directory services charge. 3. to check the traffic on say, sfbaytraffic.info. but on that site you really need to have a mouse to get all the information. calling 511 is cheaper.

so there you go. thank you monolithic phone industry. i might sound like a crotchity old man, but i just don’t see the point of mobile-web-surfing. i’m sure there are plenty of gadget-dependent type A personalities out there, plenty to make a profit off of… maybe it’s time i learned some WML. i’m sure it would straighten out a lot of my confusion.

I don’t use Dreamweaver. I’m not really a fan of wysiwyg editors. I write all my code either by hand, or using syntax highlighting with GNU Emacs (hooray for open source!). But interestingly, today I heard from the PWD Podcast that Microsoft is coming out with their own version of Dreamweaver: Expression. I’m hoping for a browser-war-style contest where both sides of the force push each other to creating some neat new technologies. It’s good to see some competition with heavy-weights such as Adobe, even if it is competition from Microsoft.

The beta of MS-Expression is currently downloadable for free, but only exists for people running Windows XP. I use a Mac, so this won’t even affect me, I’m just passing the word along. I suppose I’ll keep using good ‘ole emacs for now…

Last week I finished my class in JavaScript. My final programming assignment wasn’t too exciting. Basically had to create a user registration login system. So… in a nutshell, the class covered all the basics of JavaScript: a healthy dosage of html review, writing good code in JavaScript, variable scope, functions with parameters, math functions, decimal formatting, the date object, arrays, loops, conditionals, recursive functions, dhtml and DOM scripting, event handlers, IE special effects, status bars, pattern matching and regular expressions, and cookies.
There were a few chapters in our book that we missed, and I really want to go back and learn the stuff before I look for jobs: the drag-and-drop feature, dynamic content, and the node tree.

Tonight I had my first day of Perl. The teacher seems a little rusty (I’m being very polite by only calling him “rusty”), and hopefully he’ll get get his groove back soon. I had to remind him that JavaScript does not run on the server, but Java does. Yikes! That was a bad sign. I’m sure he’ll get back into the swing of things soon enough. For the time being, I’m just keeping my fingers crossed, hoping I won’t drown. I read the intro to my book “Learning Perl” by Randal Schwartz & Tom Christiansen, and the Perl intro documentation through my terminal. We’re covering roughly two chapters a week, so it’s gonna go quick. So for the next ten weeks, if I haven’t updated, you’ll know why.

i needed a place to put my content. i’d asked around to see if anyone i knew had any suggestions for webhosts, and someone asked me: “why don’t you just set up your own server?”. i’ve always had a sort of nerd-fantasy of doing that, but after careful consideration, the logistics just didn’t add up. paying someone else to host my site is way cheaper than setting up a server, and a lot less to worry about for my small scale projects. i would have to set up a higher-bandwidth package from comcast, as well as buy a machine to act as a server. then there’s the whole installing apache and configuring the server, which would undoubtedly be a good learning experience (and i’m confident it’s something i could do), but i just don’t have the time or resources to do it right now.

i went with a host called bluehost.com. they’ll be hosting cssfoundry.com for me. the main benefits of bluehost: 1. no ads (godaddy.com tried to put ads on my site!) 2. i can ssh into my account. 3. can host up to 6 domain names on the same account. 4. free sub-domains. 5. free MySQL tables. the weird things that are annoying: (there really isn’t a whole lot to complain about!) 1. price is higher (but seems worth it so far), 2. the favicon doesn’t carry through to subdirectories of the site… um.. aside from that it’s pretty good… (remind me to update this after using bluehost for a few weeks, i’m sure i’ll have a real complaint or deeper opinion by then).

i recently finished reading a book for css design, by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag. i’ve never done a book review, so this is a first attempt:
the title is rather cheesy (the zen of css design), but the book is fantastic. if you’ve never heard of the “css Zen Garden” it is definately a site worth checking out. Started by Dave Shea in 2001, the site demonstrates the promise of CSS’s ability to control all design aspects in a remote document. Designers are given an HTML file which they cannot modify, and are asked to create a .css file that stylizes every element on the page. The best entries are featured on the site (sort of the “prize” for winning). The book goes through about 40 different css zen garden proposals and dissects the code and techniques that underly. The book starts from an art theory perspective and ends with some technical hacks for getting around different browsers. Quite a good mix of content. You can read the book from cover to cover. Two thumbs up.