esn studio

One of the problems we often encounter with front end development is a browser compatibility issue. And Internet Explorer seems to be the biggest offender of all when it comes to rendering CSS properly. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t have anything against Microsoft or Bill Gates specifically, it is just that I find it very frustrating when websites render correctly in Firefox and everything else but not in IE. There are quite a few versions of IE which are being used and therefore, you will need to test your website in various versions of Internet Explorer.

This is when MultipeIE comes in to save your day. MultipleIE is a Windows installer which allows you to install standalone IE3, IE4, IE5, IE5.5 and IE6 on a single computer along side IE 7 (or any IE version) without having to overwrite an existing version.

MutipleIE definitely is a life saver for me!

Note: You might also be interested in installing a standalone Internet Explorer 7 if you have got IE 6 installed with Windows.

Technorati Tags: front end development, css, cross browser compatibility, IE, Internet Explorer

Ryan Campbell has written an interesting article called Web App Autopsy which looks at 4 very different yet all popular web applications from behind the scenes. It gives readers an insight into development of startups and how much time and code it takes to launch a full-blown web application.

Graph taken from Web App Autopsy

Technorati Tags: web application, development, startups, web 2.0

phpminiadmin

One of the most important tasks of any developer is to know what errors occur in his application, because it is impossible to fix them if you don’t know if they exist in the first place. Although you may think that your application is perfect and bugs free, you can never be 100% sure because users might not operate the application in the way you expect them to. And this is when error logging come in, where you record any errors that users encounter in a log file which can be used to improve your application. In PHP, you can control how errors are handled and reported. The following is an example of how errors may be logged:


// Error Reporting settings
ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE); // log all errors except notices
ini_set(’log_errors’, true); // enable error logging
ini_set(’html_errors’, false); // disable html errors
ini_set(’error_log’, ‘/home/directory/to/your/error_log.txt’); // save all the errors to a log file
ini_set(’display_errors’, true); // do not display errors on screen


Related articles:

• Error Handling and Logging Functions
• How to set up error logging with PHP
• Logging With PHP

Technorati Tags: php, programming, error logging, development

The results are in for The top 100 Webware sites for 2007. The winners are:

• Firefox (Browsing)
• Gmail (Communication)
• Gaia Online (Community) *I thought Digg was going to win.
• Google (Data)
• Stardoll (Entertainment)
• Youtube (Media)
• Google Mobile (Mobile)
• ebay (Productivity and Commerce)
• WordPress (Publishing) *YAY!
• Wikipedia (Reference)

Technorati Tags: webware, winners, contest, web applications