Joomla! 1.0.13 came out today. It's a security release so it is highly recommended that all current versions of Joomla! are upgraded, though with extra caution!

The Joomla! 1.0.13 upgrade contains:

• A number of low-risk security fixes
• An improved password storage system
• Simpler control over the "Register Globals" emulation
• ItemID backwards compatibility setting - allowing you to revert to pre 1.0.12 ItemID handling
  
• Improved admin session security
  
• Improved HTTP/HTTPS switch support

Go get your Joomla! 1.0.13 upgrade

I just found out something really cool in DreamWeaver 8's Find & Replace, here's the crack...

I had a compressed & optimised CSS file, with no line breaks. Thing is that I needed a version WITH line breaks so that it can be worked on a bit easier THEN optimised and compressed.

Trouble is that DreamWeaver doesn't appear to have the option I wanted... I wanted to replace every brace character } with a brace } and a new line/ carriage return/ line feed. I checked DreamWeaver's Help and it didn't enlighten me.

So I just went ahead and did what I thought might work, taking the CRLF knowledge from PHP into DreamWeaver, making sure, because this was a test, to only apply the Find & Replace to the current document ;)

Find: }

Replace: }\n

Replace All

It worked!

Obviously if your CSS is fully compressed you can give every single selector a line break with find & replace on opening braces { and replace with {\n and replace every semicolon ; with ;\n

Labels: css, dreamweaver, software, tools

This new Google Notebook feature is handy. At long last we don't have to just cut & paste URLs into our bookmarks or CTR-D the page when we get there, we can also note URLs from within Google and write notes to go with them.

Look, we've searched Google for 22i design Farnborough. In the page that Google displays there's a "Note this" link at the foot of the listing. The link opens My Notebook, the Google Notebook.

The Google Notebook is then your online, inGoogle tool to have all your bookmarks to hand AND to allow you to add notes to your bookmarks. Tres handy indeed although you do need a Google account to set this up. You can associate it with any current Gogole account you have or there's the option to disassociate it ;)

Labels: google, search, tools

A developer friend put me on to the Firebug extension for Firefox a few months back and yesterday it proved invaluable in identifying some troublesome code on a live web page. I specifically used Firebug to track down which classes and IDs in a blogger page template were causing my layout problems and it worked an absolute treat.

Folks, if you haven't already plugged in the Firebug extension/add-on for your Firefox browser then I recommend you give it a go.

Labels: browsers, development, tools

I've been busy using a huge array of free web tools over the last few weeks and the OctaGate SiteTimer has proved to be very handy.

Whilst optimising the HTML and PHP code in a number webpages I used the SiteTimer, checking to see if there were any noticeable speed gains, and the OctaGate SiteTimer not only showed the speed of the page but of the individual files that the page pulled in.

By that it showed me the speed and loading times of:

• The page as a whole
• Favicons
• Cascading Style Sheets
  
• External JavaScripts
• Image files

What the SiteTimer highlighted was that one of the pages I was pulling in had 3 favicons being called when there was only a need for the 1. So I dived into the CMS I was using, hacked the templates and saved 2x file calls and a good couple of seconds of server time.

In addition SiteTimer highlighted that there were a couple of redundant images I was calling in to my pages and not using... now time to hunt down the code for those images and kill them off too...

Labels: design, development, tools