eStudios bares all!

I’ve always been a fan of the open source mindset. The idea of knowing you can freely obtain and view the inner workings of your favorite applications–interact with what makes them tick. Why live in a world where everything is veiled by cloud of secrecy? Which is why I have decided to make eStudios open source.

Every page and file on my website is completely open to viewing through the directory listing. Even the source of my page, which displays the source of a file is open source! In the footer of every page you will now see a little icon: Clicking this icon will show you the source of the page you are currently viewing.

My goal here is not to enable people to just blindly copy everything. I want to enable and encourage people to learn from my code. To better their own abilities. This however is just the beginning. An idea sparked from something so simple; a project is currently underway to bring that level of understanding and learning to a whole new level and I cannot wait to reveal more about it.

Click here to learn more!

For the longest of times, I’ve always considered Adobe’s, (previously Macromedia), Dreamweaver a beginners tool to web development. I always thought of it as a sub-par way of designing and developing websites. In all honestly, I still feel the same way.

But things have changed. I recently learned of a feature within Dreamweaver that allowed you to setup a “Dreamweaver Site.” This Dreamweaver function allows you to remotely connect to your server hosting your website, locally edit those pages and just as easily update them.

I had always found myself logging into cPanel and using its file editor to do my work. It was faster then downloading everything to my local test machine and then uploading it again. Yet, it was still slow and there were, (and still are), some rather irritating bugs within cPanel that made working with files all that much harder.

It wasn’t until a friend of mine mentioned Dreamweaver had the capability to allow you to connect and manage your websites in the way it does that I had decided to rethink my previous opinions on Dreamweaver. With a click of a button, I can quite literally edit my pages and as soon as I save it, those changes are made remotely on my server as well as locally. This kind of website management is extremely efficient combined with a popular FTP program such as FileZilla.

But that is just the beginning. Dreamweaver offers a check in and check out function which allows you to temporarily lock any files on your server while you are working on them. This is great in a multi-user situation where more then one person has access at any time to your server and your website. With this check in and out system, you can rest assured no one is editing your file at the same time you are, potentially overwriting your recent changes. Aside from that, another feature I found extremely useful, was the ability to load all dependent files. So lets assume you have your index.php page and on that page you include your header, footer and a configuration file. When you open the index.php file off of the server, Dreamweaver will actually detect these included or dependent files and open them along with index.php. This makes editing various parts extremely easy.

Not to mention, I have a terrible problem with making backups of my work. On too many occasions have I lost everything due to server rollbacks or crashes. Considering Dreamweaver saves your work both locally and remotely, losing something on my server is no longer a problem.

With that in mind, I will leave the rest up to you to discover. While I still feel Dreamweaver is a bad method of designing and developing a website, Dreamweaver, to this date, has offered me a means of managing my websites with extreme efficiency and organization.

Solely for this feature withing Dreamweaver, I highly suggest to other developers to take the time and look into Adobe’s Dreamweaver.

I’ve always been a sucker for valid markup code. I personally cannot stand the sight of that little red bar when heading on over to W3C’s Validator. So heres a little tip for you all on embedding valid (X)HTML videos in your blog (or webpage).

There are a couple key things to take note of. Normally, the code you use to embed videos, like that of a Youtube video, makes use of the embed tag. This tag, among other elements, was never part of any standardized versions of HTML. And so, using the embed tag produces invalid markup. There are a lot of other elements which would produce invalid markup, such as the classid or the codebase attribute.

You’re probably thinking, thats all fine and whatnot, but just tell me how to do it already! So here you go, just copy this bit of code replacing the appropriate values.