Please be seated for my sermon. There's an evil force out there, and its responsible for the majority of failed websites. This force seduces you into focusing too much on questions like:

"Is that the right shade of blue? Would a drop shadow make that element pop? Why do links have to look ugly, can't we tone them down so they bend in better with the design?"

The evil force wants you to focus on those dumb questions so that ignore the really important questions:

Here's the programs and frameworks that I use everyday, and couldn't function without. I figured this list might be useful to someone who's just getting started in web development.

Turning your computer into a web server:

• XAMPP ( only noobs develop on the live remote serve....r)

Programs

• Code editor: eclipse (a distro for php)
• MySQL "crutch" (a gui) : Navicat
• Version Control : Subversion via the elcipse plugin
• Image Stuff, Designing, Wireframing: Adobe fireworks

Getting stuff onto the server

• For barbarians, and as a method of last resort: FTP through FileZilla
• Using Subversion, simply typing the command "svn update" in a shell, via the SSH client putty.exe. This is the only civilized way to update files on a web server.

Frameworks

• JavaScript (or ajax, or whatever): jQuery
• CSS, Layouts, Grids, Typopgraphy: BluePrint
• Everything else: Drupal

Note

If you've been living under a rock, you may want to check out firebug too.

I was doing a little SEO work for a friend. I thought the job would be simple enough... but that was before I knew of the iWeb. Even Dreamweaver, back in 2004's wysiwyg editor seems like a forward thinking, beacon of semantic markup compared to this monster.

But I'm getting ahead of myself... lets go back to why she had to pay me to do SEO work:

Usability Post offered a cognitive argument for curved corners that boils down to:

• If you have to squares of equal width on top of each other, with a line dividing them the eye could perceive it it as two separate parts, instead of two sections of a whole.
• However, if you add curves to all four corners, it appears as an unmistakably whole.

They offer proof of this principle with the worst magic eye poster ever. I don't mock the example because its an obvious principle (its not obvious until someone points it out), but because curved corners are so 2003. If web designs are houses, then curved corners are now mostly used like a sort of spackle; sometimes, they're good artistic flourishes too. On the otherhand, this grunge design movement offers a more ambitious example of the principle. It bellylaughs at these crude boxes with rounded corners.

Stumbled on a really awesome overview of object oriented programming for PHP 5. If you're looking to get out of the php 4 mindset, this is a good place to start.

PHP Design Patterns

From the man who brought us Wikipedia, comes Wikia: an open source search engine, backed by a reported $14 million dollars of venture funding.

Wikia, more or less, is attempting to wrangle the same forces that chiseled Wikiapedia into future world history books, and apply them to a for-profit search engine. A really unsexy way to describe Wikia's idea in reality is this:

Wikia will use a traditional search algorithms to produce a (primitive) "first draft" of any given search result. This first draft's rankings will be open to the public for re-ranking (and moderation). At first, the results will suck, but after the project reaches a critical mass, and has an active user base comparable to Wikipedia's -- guarding and improving the quality of results -- the search engine will blast off into the galaxy, leaving Google orbiting the moon.  

By Carl Poland (guest contributor) -- CEO, Compubiztech Solutions, LLC, and Professor of Computer Science

The other day, I stumbled on a post by some "blogger" named Kathy Sierra. Her post advised that code "...cannot be merely functional, it must be beautiful, as well. " This idea is not only stupid, but dangerous, and even stupid, as I'll show. Code is supposed to be ugly. If it weren't ugly, than it wouldn't be code! People who claim otherwise merely reveal their inexperience.

Some whippersnapper programmers, (those I've noticed, I'll merely number 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 [i really hate these guys...]) think their "metrosexual" code makes them smart.  I'll get to them later: these smarty-farties are naive, idealist amateurs. I should know.

I've been programming enterprise grade applications since 1971, and haven't learned a new thing in 30 years. There is no "silver bullet", as I've always said[see editors note #1]. 

Now, I consider my code my personal property, so you're not allowed to see it. However, I can tell you that its the work of an expert, and I want to share a few of my tricks. As a computer science professor [see editor's note #2, #3], I realize that the youth could benefit from my experience.

Lesson 1: Good code is Manly Code

1. KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID --  I'm not impressed by APIs, they only confuse matters. Long ago, I've learned that every situation is unique, and therefore, no code is ever reusable. Attempting to allow other code to interact with your code is just going to lead to trouble. I rest my case.

Over the past three weeks, Web 3.0's stock has quadrupled on the BWAH* index. I feel a bit out of character as I'm not particularly cynical about the Web, version 3.0 . Actually, the more this buzzword has developed, the more madly I fall in love with it.

(*Note: BWAH is the acronym for the  Buzzword, and Hype's index -- a key indicator of the overall health of market-driven buzzwords)

As far as I know, Dan Gillmor was the first to seriously use the term -- and in April of 2005, no less. Dan writes:

I've decided to keep my copy of windows XP. And that will be my last windows operating system. 

Since I want to be riding the wave of the future, I shall be installing linux on my laptop's other partition. The windows XP installation will die, but not until its time has come.

Since linux admittedly, is not the best platform for entertainment, I'll be picking up a Mac sooner rather than later.

As a consumer, I'd like to thank Microsoft for helping me make an informed decison.

Thanks to Microsoft, I now know that if my hardware crashes twice, I need to buy a new copy of VISTA. (In contrast, my 2001 copy of Windows XP Pro has made it through four motherboards, and will never die on account of my hardware... not to mention XP has finally made it to the 'mature' point in its software lifecycle.)

Here's a quote to hang up on your wall:

Functional specs force you to make the most important decisions when you have the least information. You know the least about something when you begin to build it. The more you build it, the more you use it, the more you know it. That’s when you should be making decisions – when you have more information, not less.

-from Getting Real