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Sausage Sizzler - Fancy Food |
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| Editorial March April 11th 2002 |
G'day Sizzlers!
My whirlwind trip to Australia continues and something I had been
longing for was the Nepalese food at Gurkha's Cafe in Richmond!
It has to be some of the best food in the world at an affordable
price. I will be taking another trip there, that's for sure!
We are looking at redeveloping our online store which will
encompass everything from the actual buying of products, via a
shopping basket, to the management of Customer Support. We are
going to produce it in PHP so if anyone has experiences they
would like to share send me a line!
I received heaps of e-mail on my recommendation of VNC and all were
positive. People on slower connections recommended that you
all try out TightVNC, which is an enhanced version of the
original distribution.
Find out more at:
http://www.tightvnc.com
Feedback on my command of the English language was interesting
too. Most of you are in the "if we can read it and understand it
anything is fine" camp, while a few more are egging me on to keep
my Australian spelling! I even received an e-mail from an Oxford
University Professor who said that Australians follow a more
correct version of English than Americans. Either way I will
still be attempting to follow the American English rules and
spelling simply because that is where most of you are from. If I
slip up every now and then I shall have to just cop the flack!
Since relaunching the Sizzler and starting the HTML version
(branded with Lockergnome), I have been impressed by the feedback
I received. It really is so nice to hear how many people love the
newsletter or are getting something from it. Excuse me if I do
not have time to answer all of you, I do read the e-mails though!
Remember if you have a question you would like answered quickly
try out the Sizzler Forums.
Please note that this week we are running without the Dynamic
Tip. Unfortunately Rich has not been feeling the best and been
unable to write this weeks tutorial for building a Contact
Management System. You can look at it as a chance to catch up to
where he is!
Keep on sizzling!
Nathan Allan
Sausage Sizzler Editor
editor@sausage.com
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Not so basic!
Web Hosting, every Web site needs some form of it. Whether it be
free or fee. A lot of you have been asking me who I recommend and
what I look for. What I intend on doing is giving you all a idea
of what I look for in a host, so that you can make your own
decision!
Firstly you need to evaluate how important your Web site is to
you. If it is unavailable for minutes, hours or days how upset
will you be? Will your business be loosing money?
Secondly you need to evaluate what you need from your host. Here
is my priority list of what I look at:
- Customer Service
- Bandwidth Allowance
- Storage Space
- Database Capable
- Languages supported by Web severs
- Acceptable use policy of host
- Cost
You will notice I put cost last. In my humble opinion you pay for
what you get. You can not expect the world for $5 a month.
Personally I pat $9.95 for the hosting of my personal Web site
(
http://www.netbloke.com) and I am extremely pleased with all of
the aspects of the service provided.
So you are now armed with enough knowledge to probe potential
hosts for your Web site. Remember ask questions until you are
satisfied with what you are being offered.
Tip by Nathan Allan
Netscape to make a comeback?
This week a great topic of discussion has come up. AOL is making
moves to get more mileage out of Netscape, perhaps again trying
to regain lost ground. I think its safe to say that we all think
Navigator 4.x just outright sucks. It's quirky in every way. The
only reason I keep it around at all is that I know some people
still use it.
When recently looking at the traffic reports for one of my
companies' web sites, I discovered that Navigator in general was
barely 7% of overall traffic with 4.x approximately being one
third of that 7%. As a professional, the only time I find it
acceptable to ignore Netscape users is when offering a paid
service that costs money to develop. IE is much easier to
develop for so if the online product clearly disclaims that
Navigator will not work properly and IE will, then fine with me.
One fine example of this is Enflyer (www.enflyer.com). It's an
outstanding (OUTSTANDING) product, written only for IE5.5 and
above. There's great reason for this, mainly because the
incredible functionality of this product would be lost on
Navigator anything.
The point of that ramble is this: what are your feelings with
regard to the relevance of Navigator at all? Granted Navigator
6.x renders pages MUCH better than 4.x, but the way Navigator 6.x
is built, to me, makes it a bloated piece of C*R*A*P. My office
PC runs on an Athlon Thunderbird 1.33Ghz with 1.128GB of RAM and
Photoshop 6 opens faster than Navigator 6.x (6.1 to be specific).
I don't think its fair for Uncle Bill's company to have majority
share, but I have to admit for most things, IE is the best (at
least for me). It opens fast, it takes minimal resources, and it
renders pages as intended by the designer.
Out of curiosity, I went to one of my other favorite sites
(Sausage.com being one of them), Internet.com (www.internet.com)
and did a search on "Netscape." An article by Jim Wagner, dated
March 28, 2002, has the following title: "IE Continues To
Outpace Netscape." The intro says, "A new study released
Wednesday shows Internet Explorer (IE) continues to top the
browser charts, and what's more, is taking the Netscape faithful
with them." Check it out here:
http://www.isp-planet.com/news/2002/msft_020328.html
If you're interested, check out the article then come back and
discuss your feelings about Netscape and Netscape Vs. IE here:
http://www.sizzlerforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=163
Review by Bram Leland Scolnick
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Confusion about Graphics Software - Which do you use and why?
This past week was very difficult for me. I had an internal
conflict over which programs to use; ones that I know well, that
are easier to use and lighter to launch, vs. the "Industry
Standards."
(Author's note: I've received e-mail noting a variety of
programs, other than those I'll mention here. I'd like to keep
my focus on what I have experience with so please feel welcome to
contribute in the forum thread listed at the end of this
writing).
Why the software soul-search? I read an article this week
describing some great things about Photoshop 7.0 (Photoshop 7.0,
Linda Cole, March 26, 2002, Web Developers -
http://wdvl.internet.com/Reviews/Graphics/Photoshop7/index.html).
Many of you (myself included) use Paint Shop Pro. After this
past week, I realized just how strong the following is for PSP.
PSP 7 has tons of features, does lots of great things and opens
quite fast when compared to Photoshop 6 (and from what I've been
told, 7 too). PSP 7 has its own drawbacks as well, such as only
offering RGB mode editing, where as Photoshop offers 8 modes
including RGB, CMYK, HSB, LAB, and others.
After reading about Photoshop 7 and some of its great new
features, I felt even more pressured to become strongly familiar
with it, rather than just being able to do some things. Long
ago, I read that PSP6 was considered the poor man's Photoshop.
At many hundreds of dollars less, my biggest question is what
does Adobe pack into Photoshop that costs so much more? OK.
Multi-mode editing, great for magazines...but for web? Photoshop
7 (and 6 for that matter) has quite strong text editing. PSP 7
isn't weak, but I did find, at least with what I had to do, that
Photoshop 6 "felt" as thought it offered more control.
I had to edit a gif. No access to the original file and it was
too complex to recreate in the 5 minutes that this task
warranted. PSP 7 did this: NE W T E XT H E R E.
Photoshop 6 did this: N E W T E X T H E R E. I had some
kerning issues.
Anyway, so then I wondered does PSP not offer things that are in
Photoshop 6 or 7? Photoshop 7 is newer and I have hopes that PSP
8 Beta will be announced soon, with multi-mode support and a bevy
of new features.
My internal conflict spiraled out of control so badly that I had
posted questions in the Sizzler forums. The response I got was
great. I had even gone so far as to write to Linda Cole and
found out from her that she is actually an AVID PSP user, has
been for as long as she can remember and may only now start using
Photoshop a bit more. Other people said Photoshop all the way.
Next week I plan to compare two very different, yet very similar,
brands of illustration software.
Check out the following thread and share your thoughts.
http://www.sizzlerforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=109
Discuss your experiences with Bram Leland Scolnick
Colors & Theories, but not Color Theory
I'm starting to see things a bit differently as of late. I often
find myself thinking of something my 7th grade Spanish teacher
taught me: Keep It Simple Stupid or K.I.S.S.
Last week I found out that many readers think Flash has limited
application in everyday web design. It's nice, but perhaps best
kept for special things like ads.
Playing with color can be very powerful. Color is almost like
the force, a very useful ally. I've been looking at magazine ads
this week. Some of the nicest ads have a bright or dark
background, something eye-catching, and then simple text or text
and a simple picture.
The same thing works online. Some of the nicest sites I've seen
use a nice, simple blend of colors. One of the hardest things
about using color is CHOOSING the right color schemes and
matching them. In recent weeks, I've found that some of the best
tools for choosing colors are free.
I discussed in brief a few weeks ago a site that offers some cool
stuff, VisiBone (www.VisiBone.com). This week I'd like to look
closer at some of the offerings. There are online tools and even
some downloadables, all free. There are also some quality
posters and handy cards. All are low cost and quite useful.
One great resource is Color Lab (
http://www.VisiBone.com/colorlab/). It allows you to view,
online, how web safe colors will look together. You choose from
a flower like palette and then you're presented with a useful set
of color patches that you can print out. If you're not into
fancy shmancy stuff, there's a simple online color chart (
http://www.VisiBone.com/color/chart/). You can view either HEX
color codes or RGB color codes.
Also free (and useful and cool) are downloads. There are
downloadable charts (http://www.VisiBone.com/popups/) and swatch
libraries (http://www.VisiBone.com/swatches/) for a variety of
the most popular programs.
If print is more your speed, check out these cool 18 x 24"
posters (http://www.VisiBone.com/color/).
What means and methods to you use to find the right color or
design the right scheme? How in-depth do you go? Do you keep it
simple with just colored html or do you use layered images with
varying colors or both?
I'd like to know your thoughts. Please share them.
http://www.sizzlerforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=258
Discuss with Bram Leland Scolnick
Name: TextPad
Version: 4.5
Cost: Shareware US$27
Website: http://www.textpad.com/
Download: http://www.textpad.com/download/index.html#downloads
I use TextPad as a quick loading functional replacement for
NotePad. Yes I know there are a myriad of other possible programs
you could use, but I like this one.
It loads quickly, opens various types of text based documents and
the interface isn't too intrusive. Personally I love the simple
tabbed document window that allows you to have multiple documents
open, along with the other basics such as the spelling checker
and formatting options.
I actually use it mostly to put together the text version of
this newsletter!
Review by Nathan Allan
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