“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”
Robert Heinlein
Archives for August 2005
Website Research Highlights Gender Bias
As pointed out on xBlog, (which linked to the Molly Holzschlag’s blog) a recent study conducted by the University of Glamorgan, has found that ” there is no doubt about the strength of men and women’s preference for sites produced by people of their own sex”. While key parts of the study seem pretty obvious to designers (men tend to like angles, women prefer curves, etc.), it is interesting to note the statistics the male/female ratio of corporate Web designers. I was rather surprised that so many designers, were men – especially in companies that sell products focused on a female market (beauty supplies etc.)
Designers and managers of design teams should take note when they approach a new (re)design, as the gender of your target audience is one of the key factors that should shape the design of your site, and overall marketing efforts.
Pasting Wrapped URLs into Firefox
Andrei Zmievski provides a quick bit of info regarding how to paste multi-line URLs into Firefox, which occur most often when a URL is wrapped in an e-mail. I need to make this change in my various Firefox installations. A bit more info, including a list of what the various settings mean, is provided on Jeremy Zawodny’s site.
Macromedia Developer Relations Podcast
I’ll be adding the Macromedia Developer Relations Podcast (found via moockblog) to my regular podcast list tonight. It appears to lean towards Flash, which isn’t a bad thing, but I hope they will spend some time discussing the new features in the recently released Studio 8. I am really interested in the changes and additions to Dreamweaver’s code view (I don’t find the design view very useful).
The current release documentation shows that they finally added a tabbed document interface for the Mac – about bloody time. Also, some of the useful functions that have been available in HomeSite for years have finally been added to Dreamweaver, including Code Collapse, which is incredibly helpful when working on large files. Site relative references, background file transfers (no more waiting on an upload/download to keep working) and file comparison are a tasty icing atop the upgrade cake.
Modifying DreamWeaver's Code Coloring
Macromedia – Dreamweaver TechNote : Changing and adding file extensions recognized by Dreamweaver MX
Adding this to the site to ensure I can easily find it down the road. The article describes how to add additional file formats to specific color coding styles. For example, I want to ensure that files that end with ‘.inc’, ‘.tpl’, ‘neo’ and ‘.class’ will follow the color coding guidelines for PHP, so I have modified the PHP line in MMDocumentTypes.xml so it reads:
<documenttype
id="PHP_MySQL"
servermodel="PHP MySQL"
internaltype="Dynamic"
winfileextension="php,php3,php4,php5,tpl,neo,inc,class"
macfileextension="php,php3,php4,php5,tpl,neo,inc,class"
file="Default.php"
writebyteordermark="false">
</documenttype>
Note: The code should be on a single line – I added carriage returns for readability.
OS X FTP Clients
Just a quick note to myself to check out these two SFTP clients for OS X:
While the built in support for FTP in OS X is nice, I want something that is secure and will integrate with a text editor like SubEthaEdit.