Apple Safari 4 Beta

Apple just released Safari 4 Beta into the wild. It seems like Apple might be following others in this release.

• Top Sites looks like Opera’s Speed Dial
• Tabs on Top looks like Google’s Chrome and kind of like Opera
• Developer Tools is kind of like Developer Tools (extension in Firefox).

Other than that, the new features seem to be better system integration. Download it an try it out. Let me know what you think—especially if you are on a Windows machine. The Javascript engine is supposed to be really fast!

Dreamweaver CS3 Untitled Style Sheet Bug

There is a bug in Dreamweaver CS3 when creating external style sheets (which—by the way—you should be doing any time your are using style sheets with few exceptions).

Basically, when you enter the style sheet name in the Save As field, it ends up being named as untitled.css, rather than the name you typed. The good news is that Dreamweaver is consistent in that the link to the style sheet that is created uses untitled.css as well.

Basic 1-Column Layout

Most websites have a similar structure consisting of a header, content, and footer. The header is located at the top of the page and contains the title of the site, along with perhaps a logo, tagline, and some other branding. The header is usually consistent from page to page.

The content is where the “meat and potatoes” of the page goes. The information here will change for each page. Often this section of the page is divided into two columns with one being primary content and the other being secondary content.

WordPress Search & Replace

As a follow-up to the MySQL Search & Replace post, if you are using WordPress and need to make site wide changes there is a WordPress Search & Replace Plugin available.

MySQL Search & Replace

It seems like every six months or so I need to do some site wide replacing (not often enough to commit this tip to memory it seems). If the site was built as flat HTML pages, I’ll use the find/replace feature in whatever editor I am using at the time. These days—more often than not—the actual site content is somewhere in a MySQL database. When that is the case, this one-liner comes in handy.

update table set field = replace(field,'find_this','replace_with_this');

As with any database change, you should first back up your database, or at the very least duplicate the table (with the content—of course).

Let’s say you wanted to change the words “Web site” to the more commonly used “website” in all of your site content. If the table holding the content is named tbl_content and the field was named page_content, then your MySQL command would look like this:

update table_content set page_content = replace(page_content,'Web site','website');