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• Associations
• Blogs
• ColdFusion
• CSS Frameworks
• CouchDB
• .Net
• Flash
• FTP Software
• Hosted Forms
• Internet Explorer Browser Bug Fixes
• Javascript
• MySQL
• PHP
• PostgreSQL
• Python
• Ruby
• Silverlight
• SQL Server
• Tag References (HTML & CSS)
• Text Editors and IDEs
• Tips & Tricks
• Validators
• Web Application Frameworks
• Web Servers

Associations

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

http://www.acm.org/

IEEE

http://ieee.org/

Blogs

Joel on Software

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

ColdFusion

Adobe ColdFusion Home

http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/

CouchDB

Official CouchDB Home Page

http://couchdb.apache.org

CSS Frameworks

Meant to work like programming languages but for CSS, frameworks can help standardize layout and design CSS styles across multiple sites and projects. They also can lead to bloated code, adding styles that are not used. And it might be quicker to develop then refine a basic set of re-usable CSS styles over many projects.

960 GS

http://960.gs/

A CSS Framework

http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/content/a-css-framework

BlueprintCSS Resources

http://honeyl.public.iastate.edu/blueprint/

CSS Boilerplate

http://code.google.com/p/css-boilerplate/
Different take on Blueprint by one of its creators.

Clever CSS

http://sandbox.pocoo.org/clevercss/
Python mentality brought to the problems CSS frameworks try to solve.

Elements CSS

http://elements.projectdesigns.org/

EMastic

http://code.google.com/p/emastic/

Eric Meyer: Reset (and Reloaded)

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/
Meyer’s take on one important aspect of CSS frameworks: resetting values to ensure visual consistency across web browsers.

eswat

http://github.com/eswat/eswat.github.com

jQuery CSS Framework

http://docs.jquery.com/UI/Theming/API#The_jQuery_UI_CSS_Framework

LogiCSS

http://code.google.com/p/logicss/

SenCSS

http://sencss.kilianvalkhof.com/

Tripoli

http://devkick.com/lab/tripoli/

YAML

http://www.yaml.de/en/

Yahoo! YUI Grids

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids

Wikipedia Entry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_framework

.Net

Microsoft .Net Home Page

http://www.microsoft.com/net/

Flash

Adobe Flash Platform Home Page

http://www.adobe.com/flashplatform/
Includes links and information for AIR and related Flash technologies.

FTP Software

Filezilla (Win/Mac/Linux) (Free)

http://filezilla-project.org/

WS FTP

http://www.ipswitchft.com/?k_id=ipshome

Comparisons of FTP Client and Server Software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_FTP_client_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_FTP_server_software
While Wikipedia entries are not always up to date, or comprehensive, they can suggest tools to look into further.

Hosted Forms

These online services make it easy, for a small monthly fee, to host contact, event, and other forms on your website. You get security from spammers plus integration with CRM, email delivery, and other third-party tools to help quantify and use your form data over time.

FormSpring

http://www.formspring.com/

WuFoo

http://wufoo.com/

Internet Explorer Browser Bug Fixes

Older Microsoft Explorer web browsers are so bad, and so non-standards compliant, they merit their own section. Here are bug fixes we’ve found useful to force Microsoft browsers to behave like standards compliant browsers (e.g. Firefox). One caution: there are lots of complicated hacks online. These are fairly simple to implement and maintain over time.

Basic Explorer Browser Problems

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/internet-explorer.shtml

The first item, about how IE browsers calculate widths, is particularly useful: use the CSS child selector to tell standards compliant browsers what to do. Apparently the Explorer browsers don’t follow that standard. There are other useful hacks.

Disappearing Background Images

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/internet-explorer.shtml
See #3 on this page. Includes other IE bug fixes.

Double-Width Problem

http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/doubled-margin.html
IE6 helpfully and mysteriously doubles the width of floated CSS divs. The solution is non-obvious: add display: inline; to the DIV style.

Getting Fieldset Backgrounds and Legends to Behave

http://www.mattheerema.com/archive/getting-fieldset-backgrounds-and-legends-to-behave-in-ie
This IE behavior is particularly frustrating and nasty if you want to build a form with CSS instead of tables.

IE7 Hacks

http://www.last-child.com/ie7-hacks/
http://www.last-child.com/
A quick, clean discussion with examples about how to target IE6, IE7
web browsers. The site itself, www.last-child.com, is an excellent
source for small fixes.

Oversized Content in Expanding CSS Box

http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/expandingboxbug.html
How to get floated divs to degrade gracefully with oversized content in IE browsers.

PNG Image File Format Compatibility

http://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/
Remember to open the iepngfix.htc file to set the right folder path for
the blank.gif file. Otherwise you’ll have a mysterious red x to resolve
that appears in the upper left of your PNG image (in IE5 and IE6
browsers only, naturally).

Testing with Multiple IE Browsers on Your Computer

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
This is a nifty bit of software that lets you install and run IE5 and IE6 on your computer at the same time as IE7 without causing problems with any of the IE browsers. You can see how your pages look without using Browsercam.com right way, a service that shows how your pages look across browsers and operating systems.

SWFObject: Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script

http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/
Probably the easiest way to embed and customize Flash objects into web pages, for example, to create transparent backgrounds that work with Internet Explorer browsers. Highly flexible with a link to the Adobe EMBED and OBJECT tag attributes.

Javascript

Javascript Tutorial

http://www.w3schools.com/JS/default.asp
There appears to be no formal home for Javascript online comparable to PHP.net and Python.org. This W3Schools.com tutorial provides a good introduction to the language.

MySQL

Official MySQL Home Page

http://www.mysql.com/

PHP

Official PHP Home Page

http://www.php.net

PostgreSQL

Official PostgreSQL Home Page

http://www.postgresql.org

Python

Official Python Home Page

http://www.python.org/

Ruby

Official Ruby Home Page

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

Official Ruby on Rails Home Page

http://rubyonrails.org/

Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight Home Page

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/
Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe’s Flash software.

SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server Home Page

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/

Tag References (HTML & CSS)

These sites are useful when you have to look up all the elements of a tag.

HTML Help

http://www.htmlhelp.com
http://htmlhelp.com/reference/css/

Text Editors and IDEs

Many of these entries are suggestions from the comments section of a Smashing Magazine article, The Big PHP IDE Test: Why Use One And Which To Choose.

Coda IDE (Mac)

http://www.panic.com/coda/

Code Charge Studio

http://www.yessoftware.com/products/product.php?product_id=1

Codelobster (Free)

http://www.codelobster.com/

Crimson Editor (Free)

http://www.crimsoneditor.com/
http://www.emeraldeditor.com/
For Windows, an excellent text editor with color coding and other useful functionality for software and web development. Evolved into Emerald Editor but Crimson Editor also still works fine.

CSSEdit

http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/
This Mac-only tool is very good for creating and editing CSS.

Delphi for PHP

http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi-for-php

Dreamweaver

http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/

Eclipse PHP Development Tools (Win/Mac/Linux) (Free)

http://www.zend.com/en/community/pdt
This open source IDE also has a paid version with commercial support, Zend Studio. And Eclipse IDT is not to be confused with PHPEclipse, an open source PHP IDE project.

Expression

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/
While not free, Microsoft’s Expression includes an excellent debugger for Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 web browsers which is useful for html email (for older mail software like AOL that uses the Microsoft HTML rendering engine) and web pages.

IDE Comparison Charts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_integrated_development_environments
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pV8XyUSUOM7ET07rn4n7NYA

Komodo Edit IDE (Win/Mac/Linux) (Free)

http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/

NetBeans (Win/Mac/Linux/Solaris)

http://netbeans.org/

Notepad++ (Free)

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

phpDesigner

http://www.mpsoftware.dk/

PHPEclipse

http://www.phpeclipse.com/
Not to be confused with the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) platform.

Php ED (Win)

http://www.nusphere.com/products/phped.htm

PHP Edit

http://www.phpedit.com/en

Quanta Plus

http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/

RadRails (Win/Mac/Linux) (Free)

http://www.radrails.org/
Geared towards Ruby on Rails development.

Rapid PHP

http://www.blumentals.net/rapidphp/
Their WeBuilder editor has even more functionality.

Spket IDE

http://www.spket.com/
Primarily focused on Javascript and XUL/XBL with Silverlight support.

Textmate (Mac)

http://macromates.com/

Text Wrangler (Mac) (Free) and BBEdit (Mac)

http://www.barebones.com/products/
Both for Mac, Text Wrangler is free and comparable to Crimson Editor on Windows. BBEdit is comparable to Visual Studio and other IDE (integrated development environments) for software and web development.

TopStyle

http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/TopStyle/Default.aspx
This Windows-only tool also is great for creating and editing CSS.

VS.php

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/vs.php
PHP IDE that works with Microsoft’s Visual Studio.

WeBuilder

http://www.blumentals.net/webuilder/
Their Rapid PHP editor focuses on a smaller set of web-related languages.

Zend Studio

http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/
Built on the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) platform which is open source.

Visual Studio

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/
Microsoft’s war horse IDE that integrates their programming and database products, as well as a few other programming languages.

Tips and Tricks

Equalizing CSS Column Heights

http://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/viewissue.php?id=3&issue=70#7

Horizontal/Vertical Dropdown Menus with CSS and HTML Ordered Lists

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/csslibrary/item/suckertree-menu-horizontal/P70/
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/csslibrary/item/suckertree-menu-vertical/
The cleanest way (especially if you put the javascript at the bottom of your pages) to implement a horizontal or vertical dropdown navigation menu using HTML ordered lists (UL) that works across all browsers.

Ten CSS Tricks and Ten More CSS Tricks

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/css-tricks.shtml
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/more-css-tricks.shtml
Some of these are obvious, others clever. Worth a quick look in case you see something useful.

Translucent: See-Through Backgrounds for the Masses

http://www.wannabegirl.org/translucent/

Using a Background Image to Replace Text

http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text/
Great discussion about techniques and accessibility issues for screen readers.

Validators

These tools validate the quality and standards compliance of your HTML and CSS code.

HTML Help List of Validators

http://htmlhelp.com/links/validators.htm
Links to online tools as well as software that will check your links.

Web Application Frameworks

This section will be built out. For now, here is a decent overview and the comparison links to a comprehensive list of possible web application frameworks.

Wikipedia Definition/Comparisons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application_framework
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks

Web Servers

Apache (Win/Mac OSX/Linux) (Free)

http://httpd.apache.org/

Cherokee (Win/Mac OSX/Linux/Solaris) (Free)

http://www.cherokee-project.com/

Lighttpd (Win/Mac OSX/Linux) (Free)

http://www.lighttpd.net/

Nginx (Win/Mac OSX/Linux) (Free)

http://nginx.org/en/

Windows Server 2008

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/default.aspx

Wikipedia Web Server Comparisons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_server_software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_servers