Last December, 24 Ways launched a web developers advent calendar with excellent content added each day from December 1st to Christmas day. This year they’re back with more great content. This year Drew McLellan kicks off the series with aTasty Text Trimmer that uses JavaScript to emulate the ‘Article Length’ tool in Apple’s Safari RSS reader. Be sure to add this site to your feed reader and check it each day!
Jack Slocum has created an excellent reusable component for resizing elements. The component uses his custom version of the YUI JavaScript library and is very easy to include an use in your scripts. Be sure to scroll down his page to check out some very cool examples.
If you are working with Flex 2.0 on OSX and would prefer to use Textmate instead of the Flex Builder Beta, Daniel Parnell has created a Flex 2 bundle that automates the build process and a few auto-complete features.
Ben Maurer has devised a simple JavaScript that will create a free/busy schedule using Google Calendar and JSON. This is perfect if you want to publicly make your schedule available while only giving details on whether you are free or busy.
Rails vs Django is a nice evaluation of the two most popular web application frameworks. Rails uses the Ruby scripting language while Django uses the Python scripting language. Both are very capable and offer a unique set of features. This evaluation shows you how long it took to write the application and compares the lines of code along with some syntactical differences.
Paparazzi! is a new tool I’ve added to my MacBook Pro that makes it super easy to make complete screenshots of web pages. Simply drop an url onto the Paparazzi window and get a PNG back. It is important to note that the resulting screenshot is the entire webpage and not only the part of the page that would be viewable within a browser window.
If you’re looking to give the Django Python web framework a try, here is a nice 30 minute screencast that will show you how to Build a To-do List.
Since receiving my MacBook Pro a few months ago, I’ve been looking for a capable and free archive/unarchive program. The Unarchiver is a great freeware application that handles most common compression formats like zip, gz, rar, 7z and many others. It has great Finder integration which makes it extremely easy to extract files. I would highly recommend this great piece of software as a replacement for the out-of-the-box OSX compression tools.
UPDATE : Vincent’s site is now by invitation only. I have written my own solution and it can be found here.
Vincent McCurley just saved me a bunch of time. After spending a good part of 30 minutes trying to setup Coldfusion to hook up to a local instance of SQL Server 2005 Exress, a desparate Google search came up with his excellent tutorial - Vincent McCurley: Connecting ColdFusion to SQL Server 2005 Express. Worked like a charm! Now onto some Flex/CF goodness!
Wow! Did I miss hell freezing over? Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! - the three major search engines - have United to Support Sitemaps. This can be nothing but good for web developers and content creators. Sitemaps are simple XML files that help search engines determine how to spider your site and how often to do it. For more coverage of this news check out some of these links…
