Mar 09 2009 at 12:38pm

Is Dreamweaver Are static web pages dying?

I just stumbled upon an article about the increasing obsolesence of Dreamweaver and tools like it. The point is that websites are becoming increasingly dynamic. Building static html pages with a tool like Dreamweaver just doesn’t cut it anymore.

In the relatively near future every website will be a dynamically-generated web application and all of today’s sites built on multiple static pages will be ripped out and replaced.

I was trying to explain this to people in a meeting a few weeks ago. Static files clearly can’t handle the demands of todays websites. Even attempting to build in your own functionality by coding your own php is fraught with problems. Why should you do it yourself when you could just use (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, your CMS of choice)?

Will there become a time when nobody publishes static html files anymore? Will new designers jump right into Wordpress instead of building static websites first? An intersting topic to ponder.

Posted in Web Culture, Wordpress 18 Comments

Jan 10 2009 at 12:52pm

How not to handle technical difficulties, take 2

I meant to post this at the time but never did. Why do I never finish my drafts???

On Wednesday, October 8th our websites suddenly disappeared. Our VPS (virtual private server), hosted by VPSville, was completely unavailable. There was no explanation on their website. Our only information came from a thread at Web Hosting Talk.

The VPSville site was still live, but their forum was no longer active. Supposedly they did post something on their forums early on, but quickly took the forums completely offline. Over 24 hours passed before VPSville let their customers know what was going on.

The original announcement was vague. In light of later news that some of their servers had been hacked and all the data erased, this announcement was outright misleading. Needless to say, this was completely unacceptable. Not just that they lost the data. No, the worst part was that they didn’t tell their customers what was happening.

What do do when things go wrong (revised)

1. Find out what actually happened.
2. Fess up. Admit that your systems weren’t able to handle the traffic (or whatever the problem was). Do not blame the users.
   1. Make sure this information is published and availble to clients.
   2. Ensure that communication channels are open. Make every attempt to respond to customer questions.
   3. Do not attempt to cover up the problem.
   4. If you don’t know all the details, that’s okay. Tell people what you do know.
3. Promise to get things working ASAP.
4. Do get things working ASAP.
5. Give paying customers a refund for services lost.
6. In the future, make sure your servers can handle the traffic, or plan other ways to avoid the problem.

Posted in Usability 4 Comments

Nov 30 2008 at 11:24am

How to search & replace colours in a vector graphic

Today I wanted to find and replace colours in a vector graphic. The greens weren’t quite what I wanted, but the image was full of gradients that I didn’t want to have to change by hand. Can any vector program search and replace colours? I wasn’t sure, but instead of searching around for one my husband helped me come up with this SVG solution:

Replace colours in a vector graphic

1. Save your graphic as an SVG. You can use Inkscape, Illustrator, or pretty much any other vector program to do this.
2. Make note of your “before” and “after” colours as hex values.
3. Open the .svg file in a text editor. You’ll see some mark-up that looks much like HTML (that’s because SVG an XML specification).
4. Search for your “before” values and replace with the “after”.
5. Save.

That’s it! Now, if only Internet Explorer would support SVG so I didn’t have to export these as png’s…

Posted in Design, How-to's 2 Comments