Web design

In which I discover CSSEdit2

One of the things I’ve really struggled with in web design is choosing the right tools. The first program I every used to design websites was Dreamweaver 2. Yar. But there was something about Dreamweaver that never sat right with me. It did shit to the code and I would try to work in the WYSIWYG mode, but I would make a change that I thought would do X and it would do Y instead. Or nothing at all. Sure, the program got better with time but it still didn’t feel right. I’ve worked with BBEdit for awhile, but haven’’t liked the way the CSS integration worked. So I’ve kind of bounced back and forth between Dreamweaver and BBEdit. I think the last version of Dreamweaver I bought was 8, so it was a fairly recent purchase. Well, within the past year or two at least. ><

But while I'm really, really comfortable writing HTML and XHTML, sometimes CSS is a bit more of a challenge for me. I'm getting better at it, and I'd probably say I'm "good" at it (whatever that means). But I'm not an expert and it's not intuitive to me. Even when going 'under the hood' of other people's sites, I struggle with figuring out how they've structured things and gotten them to look the way they do.

Then I heard about CSS editors, particularly Style Master from the nice folks over at Westciv (who are also involved in the Web Directions conferences which I attend religiously). I played with it a few times, but it just didn’t seem to fit the way my mind works. Some kind of Goldilocks-type mental dissonance. I like things I can poke around in and quickly understand – if not understand fully, then understand some of the basic ways in which it works and how it can benefit me. I don’t think it’s a shortfall of the product, I just have the attention span of a gnat and like things to kind of ‘snap into place’ in my mind, if that makes sense.

So while poking around teh interwebz, trying to learn more about StyleMaster, I discovered CSSEdit2. Oooooh. Shiny. Pretty. And while playing around with the demo, within about 5 minutes I used its XRay feature to diagnose and fix a couple of problems I was having on another one of my sites (yes, there are several. and no, you cannot have the URL). The XRay function lets you not only look at the style sheets of web sites, but see what effect changes to the various styles will have on the design in real time. I went from trial version to paid & registered version in about 10 minutes.

Now I’m trying to find a text/code editor that works for me the same way. I’ve used BBEdit for yonks, but like StyleMaster it just never really seemed to suit. I think it’s more like how some people like Crocs and some people don’t. More a matter of personal taste than anything. So now I’m exploring Coda and will probably try out TextWrangler as well. TW is freeware made by the same company who makes BBEdit, so I’m not 100% sure it’s going to be what I’m looking for. I’m not even sure I know what I’m looking for – all I know is I know it when I find it.

And yes, I wear Crocs. But not now because it’s winter and my toes would get cold. Socks with Crocs? Dear God no.

Geek stuff

a rant about my internet connection

When I got up this morning, I found my husband in front of his computer, surrounded by printouts of Excel spreadsheets for his fantasy football team. Before we went to bed last night, he had been complaining that he didn’t know what to do with his team – should he make a particular trade or not, yada yada yada. As I walked by I kissed him on the top of the head and said, “I knew I’d find you here.” I smilled and started to head into the kitchen for a coffee. “Yeah,” he replied, “but the internet’s been down all morning. It just keeps saying ‘Negotiating...’”

I froze in my tracks.

I ran to the cable modem only to see all the required lights on and steady. I winced. That meant it was something bigger than the random outages we used to suffer fairly regularly. There might be a problem with the authentication server or with our account codes. The authentication servers had gone down a few months ago and our net was down for five hours. And our ISP, iPrimus, had once accidentally erased our account codes. That brought our net down for five *days*.

I tried calling the iPrimus support number – I didn’t so much as want to talk to someone as much as I wanted to see if there was the standard “customers in the ACT may have problems connecting to the internet” message. There wasn’t. I hung up as we were going to be late if I stood there and waited for an actual customer service rep to come on. I figured I’d check the net to see what was up once I got into work.

So once settled in at my desk, I fired up Firefox and checked out the iPrimus service status page. All lights were green, everything was ‘OK’. The thing is, those “lights” are ALWAYS green. There can be a message on the iPrimus phone support number saying customers in three states can’t connect, but the iPrimus service status page won’t reflect that. All the lights will still be green.

My next stop was the Whirlpool forums. I was hoping to see if other iPrimus customers were reporting similar problems. They weren’t, but there were some Internode customers in my area saying they were having the same problem and that Internode had posted a status message saying it was a problem with the Telstra Wholesale message. So I followed the link to that status message, and from there I found my way to the Telstra Wholesale service status page which informed me that yes, there was a problem in the ACT that was keeping people from connecting. A little bit of manic refreshing first thing, followed by some followup refreshing at lunchtime, and it looks like the problem was resolved around 9am this morning.

And here’s my rant. Why did my ISP not tell me what was wrong on their web site? Why did the iPrimus page say everything was just fine? Why did I have to go to the support pages for two different companies, neither of whom is my ISP, to use the internet to find out exactly what the problem was? Bah. We used to suffer frequent outages with iPrimus – it would just go out every couple of days, for anywhere between 2 minutes and 2 hours. Usually it was no more than 30 minutes, and I was lucky in as much as it only happened to me once during a raid (I play WoW, remember). But it often happened on weekends or late at night when I was doing things with my friends online and I found it really frustrating. Those outages have been much less frequent recently, but the straightforward Aussie guys I used to speak with at iPrimus have been replaced by an Indian call centre where they don’t seem to get the fact that a customer can actually know something about computers. And the website isn’t helpful in the least.

A little investigation reveals that we could churn to Internode’s ADSL2 service without any interruption in service. And I think I might just do that… Whether it’s good or bad, the internet is an integral part of my life and I don’t enjoy being disconnected from it. And when I am, information about what’s going on is the only thing that’s going to pacify me. iPrimus just doesn’t give me that.

Heading home now. Dear Lawd, I hope it’s working.