Dreamweaver 8 has got so many little features that make coding easier.

I'm in the process of converting a flat HTML website into something more palatable for the Joomla! CMS I'm using. The old website has something like 1500+ pages of HTML with some articles being MANY pages long... e.g. there's one article that consists of 34 pages.

Now, Joomla! handles articles differently: One long page of HTML can be pasted into the WYSIWYG editor and then you designate where the page breaks are going to be using the code {mospagebreak}

• To type this out every time is a chore!
• To cut & paste is OK, but what if there's a ton of other stuff on the clipboard?
• To cut & paste from, say, Notepad or Word is OK, but you have to keep maximising the program to grab the snippet

Dreamweaver 8 has this handy little function for creating, storing and re-using snippets of code in the snippets panel of the interface.

Here's how to do snippets:

To insert a code snippet:

1. Place the cursor at the insertion point where you want to insert the code snippet, or select code to wrap a snippet around.
2. In the Snippets panel (Window > Snippets), double-click the snippet.
   You can also right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh) the snippet, then select Insert from the pop-up menu.

To create a code snippet:

1. In the Snippets panel, click the New Snippet icon at the bottom of the panel.
2. The Snippet dialog box appears.
   Complete the dialog box and click OK.
   

So there you have it. Code Snippets. Quick & handy. Use them on big projects to save valuable time and avoid the tedium :)

Dreamweaver 8 converts tags to lowercase! Woohoo!

I was modifying some ancient files on a client's website today when I realised the HTML was a mix of old UPPERCASE HTML tags and lowercase tags too. It was a real mess.

Now I've personally never liked nor written my HTML tags in uppercase but there's a good reason not to... XHTML

XHTML 1.0 requires that all tags be lowercase and it's so much easier and forward thinking to write XHTML. So seeing the uppercase code made me groan. What to do? Cut & paste the code into MS Word and do a format > change case > lowercase ? No, Dreamweaver 8 has it sussed.

Highlight the offending code and right click > selection > convert tags to lowercase (it's way down near the bottom of the list) You can swap everything between upper and lowercase now but the option to just isolate and change the tags is a real winner.

Cheers Dreamweaver 8 :)

Next time you make a blog post and need to ping a number of services go to Pingomatic. It can ping FeedBurner, Technorati and Syndic8 amongst others. Once you've selected the feed sites and sent your ping, just bookmark (CTRL-D) the page and go back when you post again - it will auto ping to your selection for your new story.

Oh, you don't know about pinging? Well OK, basically places like Technorati list tons of blogs and their latest entries, so if you want to be listed too then just send a "ping" to their service... the ping is just a small communication to let them know you've updated/have a new post so they can put your URL in the queue and go visit you to be listed. Easy huh?

Ever had to know what your IP address is? Ever needed to enter your IP in, for instance, the Access Hosts box of a MySQL Account Maintnenace page on cPanel so you can then backup your databases using MySQL Admin?

Well, apart from running ipconfig in the command line and maybe getting the address of your firewall, router or whatever, it's so much easier to just hit the URL WhatIsMyIP.com

Easy