Thursday, May 29, 2008

IETester - makes web page testing on IE less painful

Previously I was switching between several virtually installed Windows XP instances on Parallels (for Mac OS X), just for testing a web page on different versions of Internet Explorer. Now I have installed IETester, a free Windows tool, which allows to run simultaneously (and switch between) the following IE versions:
  • IE 5.5
  • IE 6
  • IE 7
  • IE 8 beta 1

Monday, May 26, 2008

Notapad - the start of a dojo based WebIDE

Niccola Rizzo has been working for a couple of months now on the CodeTextArea dojo widget for in-browser Javascript code editing and he has just launched a public demo and test site named notaPad.

The editor provides Javascript syntax highlighting and additional functionalities with the following key bindings:

CTRL + space - autocomplete
CTRL + l - GOTO LINE
CTRL + b - GOTO MATCHING BRACKET
CTRL + c - COPY
CTRL + x - CUT
CTRL + v - PASTE
right click on the row numbers - BOOKMARKS

Sunday, May 25, 2008

blogger.com not updating homepages

Shame on you, Google ! The last few posts of this blog did only update my blog homepage after about 24 hours. I guess updating the homepage is not part of the transaction when a new post gets stored somewhere on BigTable. So if you wanna see the actual homepage of this blog instead of an out-of-date cached version, type in:

http://rsaccon.com/index.html (instead of http://rsaccon.com)

Anyway, real men build their own blog engine, instead of complaining. Right now new blog engines are popping up like mushrooms, as result of some 60000 developers messing around with Google App Engine. Unfortunately those real men are facing real problems when trying to completely import old blogs into their custom blog engine, at least that is what happened to me when I tried some years ago with a custom Rails blog engine. So for now let's hope the blogger.com issues are just temporary ...

Update: It's getting worse. Right after posting, http://rsaccon.com/index.html also continued to serve the outdated cached version.

Update II: A couple of hours later, at least the .../index.html home page got updated.