What Makes Good Tequila

If you love good food or drink you've got to read this:

http://www.friday.com/bbum/2008/06/19/what-is-good-tequila/

Dreamweaver CS4 Beta

Adobe has officially started the Dreamweaver CS4 beta program.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/dreamweavercs4/

I expect to download and start trying out my extensions with the new version.

RSS Video from Common Craft

The guys at Common Craft also did a video about consuming RSS feeds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

They're perspective is one of blogging, but really anything can be an RSS feed. In fact, its the technology behind podcasting, photocasting, videocasting, documentcasting (note the use of the word cast). In any case, RSS is good for you.

Social Bookmarking Video from Common Craft

Here's a neat video explaining social bookmarking from Common Craft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU

Now here's the thing that they don't talk about in the video -- those public bookmarks impact search engine rankings. So if you're a webmaster you want to make it as easy as possible for social users to add your pages to their bookmarks because that means your pages get moved up in Google. Social Bookmarking is a win-win -- good for web surfers and good for webmasters.

Hilda Widgeon's Obituary

We're all very saddened at the loss of Grandma Widgeon. She was a
lovely lady. Incredibly clever and quick-witted. Loved to play bingo
or go gambling in Delaware. Here's the link to her obituary.

http://www.delmarvanow.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008806130314

Hilda Widgeon dies

I regret to announce the passing of Hilda Widgeon, Kim's maternal
grandmother.Funeral service will be Monday. Naturally we're all very
sad.

SociaLink's First Award

5 Star Award from Sofotex

Problem: Multi-Domain Shopping Cart

How does one create a shopping cart system that crosses domains?

The basic problem looks like this: I want to create a shopping cart
system that will retain it's state across multiple websites that
don't have the same root domain. For example: www.rnsoft.com and www.rssdreamfeeder.com and www.rssreplay.com and www.socialink.us -- all different domains. They don't even share a common root, so a
cookie-based system couldn't be shared.

I've been pondering this problem for a while. I figured I'd ask the
assembled masses and see what ya'll think. I'll be writing more on
the solution I've been cooking up later (it involves a mix of
javascript, ajax and php), but I'd really like your feedback because
I'm not sure my crack-pot scheme will work.

Thanks everyone.

My Booth Babe

Check out my booth babe from the Spring Break conference in Athens OH.

Update to SociaLink

I just updated SociaLink to v 1.0.1. If you have a copy you should
download this update. When I was demoing it as Spring Break I ran
into a small bug with the link manager. I also got feed back from
Adobe's exchange techs with another bug -- this time a javascript bug
with IE 6 on Win XP (doesn't happen on other versions of Win). Plus I
added a feature where it remembers where the support files are in
your website so you don't have to be prompted every time you place a
SociaLink on a page.

Anyhow, all of those things were fixed. Hope you enjoy the software.

JavaScript textContent vs innerText

OK JavaScript fans, this week's tip isn't so much a tip as a nod and link to the guys over at CoderLab. 

I was having problems last week with innerText -- the property of DOM nodes that capture the text without the HTML tags. And I was having this problem with Firefox and no other browsers. And that just didn't make sense to me. Sure, if it has been IE I'd have called it par for the course, but I just wasn't expecting it from Firefox.

Anywho, as it turns out, Firefox 1.5 uses the textContent property instead of innerText even though the DOM standard says innerText. Great move guys.

At any rate CoderLab wrote about this one back in April of 06, but I only just found a need for it this past week as I was finishing SociaLink. Here's the link to CoderLab:

http://blog.coderlab.us/2006/04/18/the-textcontent-and-innertext-properties/

SociaLink v 1.0 brings Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking to Dreamweaver MX, MX2004, 8, & CS3

I'd like to announce the immediate availability of SociaLink version 1.0, a Dreamweaver extension for placing Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking tools into webpage layouts.

Social Bookmarking websites like Digg or Del.icio.us allow readers to tag, store and share content that they find interesting — and if that is your content it can lead to a lot more traffic. And not just lots of clicks, but quality readers who are likely to get more from your site and give more in return.

All you need to do is give those readers a little button on your page for them to click on. You can make a link, right? Well actually its a little piece of javascript. A different javascript for each social bookmarking site. With different parameters for each one. Not to mention opening in a new window or not. And they take up a lot of room in your layout, too.

But it doesn't have to be that hard. SociaLink can add all that functionality to your web pages from the convenience of Dreamweaver without code or complications. Simply insert the SociaLink into your web page, select which of the social bookmarking sites you want to include, and how you want to present the buttons (lots of site buttons or behind a single icon).

SociaLink was designed with web designers and developers in mind. You can control the number of rows or columns of icons, the CSS styles formatting those icons, you can even control the HTML between each icon. Not to mention activation with clicks or rollovers, opening in new windows, and a slew of other settings that will let you fit SociaLink right into your website in every possible way. It even integrates with Dreamweaver's Templates!

And once your audience starts to use these social bookmarking tools you'll see you traffic go up. Readers from the social bookmarking sites will discover your content. Social bookmarks are also stored as public web pages which are searchable. That means more pages with links to your content, so you'll also see your rankings in the search engines improve (and that's good for SEO!).

Get your copy of SociaLink now and make the power of Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking work for you!

http://www.rnsoft.com/en/products/socialink

SociaLink makes it simple to add Web 2.0 Social Bookmarks to Dreamweaver-based web layouts. RNSoft, developer of the award-winning RSS DreamFeeder & RSS Replay, creates software with a focus on simplicity and usability for computer users, web developers and programmers