
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! Guest Author Gives Us Eclipse Advice Michelle Kempner is a software developer at Schematic, one of the nation's leading interactive agencies. She develops software in Java, PHP and ColdFusion. In addition, Michelle collaborates with her husband, creating robotic art as Robot Clothes. Recently, they presented work in progress on Inside Out Life Story at the Automated Biography event at Eyebeam Atelier in New York. Michelle has a BA in Media Theory and a Master's in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. Michelle has written a fantastic article for Community MX on Getting Started with Eclipse. This is part one of her series. Don't Have Any Buddies? Just Use AIM! With the newest version of AOL Instant Messenger, you'll never be without a buddy. That's because AOL decided to build a Shopping Buddy and a Moviefone Buddy into its popular AIM client. Each buddy is a bot, and you can ask each Buddy questions like "What movies are playing?" and "Where are the best deals?", and receive answers. These little buddies have not received a great response as noted in this ZDNet.com article. We searched Google Groups for "Shoppingbuddy" and "AOL" and only got a few results, but most were asking how to remove the new bots. How To Find The Best "How To" Articles Actually, we haven't reviewed Ehow.com's website enough to know if their "how to" articles are the best, but they do have a Wiki with 3,537 (and counting) articles that are strictly how-to guides. You'll find articles on how to reformat a hard drive, how to teach your cat to give a handshake, and everything in between. You can also sign up to write some articles yourself. If you're not sure how to write an article, they've got a how to article on that as well, of course. Speaking Of "How To..." Have you ever wanted to deconstruct a web page you found on the internet to see how it was built, or how the style sheet was applied? If you're on a Mac, you can use Xyle scope to view the style sheet of any web page. Not only that, but you can even change the style sheet and see the results. With Xyle scope, you can click on any part of a web page to see what style is affecting that section of the page. You can choose from Browser Mode, Selection Mode, Cascade Mode or Hierarchical View. This is great for learning, or just for seeing exactly what makes Community MX so stylish. Cranking Out Work... Literally Nicholas Negroponte unveiled his $100 laptop at the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society this week, and his demonstration was hugely popular. The laptop is built specifically for kids as part of Negroponte's non-profit "One Laptop Per Child" program. It sports a 7-inch, swiveling screen, built-in Wi-Fi with networking support, a microphone, a speaker and a headset jack. Power for the laptop is created by using a crank that will generate about 40 minutes of power. If they really wanted to market this to kids, they'd make it so that when you use the crank to power it up, a Jack-in-the-box pops out of the top. You can read more about the $100 laptop and an interview with Negroponte at Wired.com.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "This was an awesome article -- can't wait for part two!" "This was a very well written document. It really helped me in my understanding the differences between bitmap and vector objects. Thanks!" - Dave V. and Marvin L., CMX Subscribers, commenting on Kim Dudley's article, Bitmap Artwork Versus Vector Artwork: Part I Whether you're just starting out or need advanced support, Community MX will give you answers and ideas to work through your tough issues. Don't miss out. Learn more about CMX or sign up for a free trial today!
Great Quotes: "pixel, n.: A mischievous, magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology: Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence, and the trolls in the marketing department." — Jeff Meyer A $2,000 Jacket? Where Can I Buy It? Sure, $2,000 is a lot to pay for a jacket that you might only wear once or twice a year. But... it's not just a jacket. It's specially made for your iPod. There is a control panel in the sleeve that communicates with your iPod. There are no wires to worry about, since the jacket contains special fibers that send electrical impulses to the iPod, telling it to rewind, go forward, etc. To be honest, we're not sure it's worth $2,000, but if anyone is feeling generous this Christmas, by all means, send one (or several - who are we to cramp your philanthropistic style?) to your kind, deserving friends at Community MX. Read more about the jacket at SyncMag.com. Worst Worm of the Year The Sober-Y virus is being called the FBI-Paris Hilton virus, because it typically arrives in your email disguised as either an email from the FBI or pictures of Paris Hilton. Virus specialists have called this the worst virus of the year. Not only because it brings up the name Paris Hilton, but also because it's been more prolific than any other virus seen this year. Consider this a gentle reminder to update your antivirus definitions regularly. More on this at MSNBC.com. GPS: Gross Positioning Snafu An Australian couple traveling in their GPS-enabled rental car trusted that they'd get to their destination efficiently by using the car's GPS. Unfortunately, the unit in their car was set to find their destination using the shortest route- avoiding urban roads. What should have been a three-hour trip ended up taking about ten hours. The moral of the story? There's probably one in this article at TVNZ.co.nz somewhere, but we haven't found it. They really should have consulted Gilligan. He could have warned them... Browser Wars, But This Time Against a Common Enemy Representatives of each major browser manufacturers, including Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera met recently to discuss ways they could thwart the practice of phishing. Specifically, they're looking to better identify authentic websites through digital certification that scammers would not be able to copy. They hope they can prevent people from landing on a fake version of a PayPal or eBay page and divulging confidential information that could compromise a user's personal data. It's good to see the big corporations pulling together for a common cause, and TechWeb.com doing such a thorough article on it. Shoppers of the U.S., Unite! BlackFridayAds.com posts unconfirmed, but "pretty sure" sales taking place in all of the major retail outlets in the U.S., including Target, Circuit City, Best Buy and WalMart. Where they can, they specifically point out the sales that are taking place only on the day after Thanksgiving. One of the Community MX partners, who shall remain nameless <cough>It's Laurie!</cough> has been watching this site for the past month and planning a highly detailed buying route in order to maximize her low-cost buying potential.
CMX AJAX Loader Extension The CMX AJAX Loader behavior allows you to dynamically load new XHTML/XML from your web server and insert it into any element on the current page without requiring the user to perform a full refresh. By eliminating full page refreshes you can improve both the performance of your site and the end user's experience. Now you can start enjoying the benefits of AJAX technology without having to worry about the complicated scripting that makes it work! Take a look at this extension by CMX Partner Rob Williams
Fun and Freebies The Most Practical Voodoo Doll Yet "The Ex" is a five-piece cutlery set whose holder is in the shape of a person. Every time you put a knife away, you're not only killing a poor little plastic being, but you're keeping your knives organized and sharp! Where else would you find this but Overstock.com? Next Best Thing To An Imaginary Friend If you ask Santa for a video iPod this Christmas and you don't get it, don't worry. You can get put your own together for free. The Cult of Mac have a pdf that you can download, print and fold into your very own imitation video iPod. It won't have any fancy bells and whistles like storage space, a headphone jack, music or video, but if you flash it around real quick, people might actually think you have the real thing. If they do notice it's a fake, you might get lucky and get free psychiatric care. Either way, you win! What NOT To Ask For This Christmas From Yahoo.com, we have this list of the Top Ten Worst Products of 2005. Most of them are of the "Sounded like a good idea at the time variety" and are from manufacturers who are otherwise stable bearers of good products.
Adding Flash Video to Dreamweaver 8 Web video is suddenly all the rage thanks to Flash Professional 8, those wonderful people at On2 and Sorenson and the folks at Adobe who provide the video editing software. It is enough to make a web developer's head spin. Suddenly we are confronted with putting web video in our web pages because clients see the neat stuff the "Cool Kids" over on the Flash side of the street are doing and we get caught with a "Me too!" The guys at Macromedia must have anticipated this because they did something with Flash Video in Dreamweaver 8 that is rather amazing; they made it even easier to use. Best off all, it is free. Prior to the release of Dreamweaver 8, the Flash Video Kit for Dreamweaver MX 2004 was a spending decision on your part if you wanted to add Flash video to your pages. Mind you, the "Kit" included a copy of Sorenson Squeeze Lite and it is still an integral FLV creation tool if you didn't purchase either Studio 8 or Flash Professional 8. The Video Kit is now bundled with the application and is even better than the retail version of the Video Kit. This free article by CMX Partner Tom Green can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Working with SMIL, Part 4: Creating a Video List with XML, SMIL, and the FLVPlayback Component Robert Reinhardt Learn how to create multiple SMIL files for several pieces of video content, played within the new FLVPlayback component shipping with Flash Pro 8. Use the List component with XML data to specify each clip, which in turn loads a SMIL file responsible for the FLV files associated with the video content. The Working with SMIL Series: Working with SMIL - Part 1: The FLVPlayback Component and Progressive FLV Files Working with SMIL - Part 2: Detecting Bandwidth with Progressive FLV Files Working with SMIL - Part 3: Real-time Streaming FLVs with the FLVPlayback Component Working with SMIL - Part 4: Creating a Video List with XML, SMIL, and the FLVPlayback Component Show and Hide Content Based on User Access Levels [FREE] Danilo Celic Dreamweaver's native Log In User server behavior combined with the Restrict Access to Page server behavior can help you protect your pages from prying eyes. However, when it comes to more fine grained control of content on pages viewable by users from multiple access levels, Dreamweaver doesn't have anything built in to offer any assistance to you. Read on to learn how to show and hide content on a page based upon the access level (user group) of a logged in visitor. Buttonizing Movie Clips Paul Newman In this tutorial, you'll learn a little-known feature of Flash that makes your movie clips behave like buttons. A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - XHTML/CSS Construction Part 2 Zoe Gillenwater In this final article in the series documenting the creation of my personal web site, you'll see how I used CSS to style the content of my XHTML page to match my design comp. This included styling a list to look like a navigation menu, formatting links and other text, and using sIFR to replace the text in my headings with beautiful Flash-generated text. You'll also see how I created a print style sheet, plus learn how I tested and debugged my page. The CSS Web Design Case Study Series: A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - Planning A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - Visualizing the Design CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - Design Comp Construction A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - Slicing the Comp A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - XHTML/CSS Construction Part 1 A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - XHTML/CSS Construction Part 2 Attribute Selectors Gordon Mackay A demonstration of an addition to the CSS specification that will provide front-end developers with great power over the presentation of their documents. Reading Flash Metadata with PHP Rob Williams Flash 8 is the first version of the SWF file format to support standardized, native metadata. This is a great new feature that has the potential to make SWF files easier to manage, organize, and even locate through search engines. Unfortunately there's one small catch; although Flash 8 has made adding metadata to your SWF files extremely simple, at the time of writing there are very few applications/scripts/bots outside of Flash itself that actually have the ability to read that metadata! In this article we'll take a look at a custom PHP class that can be used to read SWF metadata, and how it can be used to realize some of these great new potentials. Bayesian Filtering for the Rest of Us Joel Martinez Math, I don't know about you guys, but I could not stand it when I was in school. Well, hindsight being 20/20 and all, I have now learned in my old age as a programmer that math plays a big part n modern systems. Specifically, I have recently been digging into the implementation of Bayesian Spam Filters, a statistical method of determining whether an incoming email is spam or not. To be more specific, here's what Wikipedia has to say about Bayesian Spam Filters: Bayesian email filters take advantage of Bayes' theorem. Bayes' theorem, in the context of spam, says that the probability that an email is spam, given that it has certain words in it, is equal to the probability of finding those certain words in spam email, times the probability that any email is spam, divided by the probability of finding those words in any email The interesting thing about this method of classification is that it learns over time. The more you train it in how to differentiate spam from "ham", the better it gets at doing its job. The very idea that an application can take a look at an arbitrary piece of data like an email, and know what to do with it intrigues me. By writing applications that learn over time and make decisions based on context, the art of application development is taken to the proverbial next level. The purpose of this article is to abstract the messy details of the implementation and give you cold hard code that you can implement in your own projects. Code is presented in C# Using Disk Files As the Data Source for a DropDownList, ListBox, CheckBoxList, or RadioButtonList Heidi Bautista This tutorial demonstrates how you can create a data source from a list of files on the server and bind that data source to four different controls: DropDownList, ListBox, CheckBoxList, or RadioButtonList. Introducing CMX JumpStart Cairo [FREE] Sheri German We are excited to announce CMX JumpStart Cairo, Egypt. It was designed and coded by Adrian Senior, and makes extensive use of lush gradients and glows. It is a centered, two-column, fixed-width design, and, like all CMX Jumpstarts, is constructed using valid XHTML 1.0 markup and CSS 2.1 styling. Cairo also follows the WAI and Section 508 accessibility guidelines to provide you with a solid foundation for any design. This article will introduce you to what Cairo includes in its bundle, as well as show you an example site created from its source PNG and CSS/XHTML files. CMX JumpStarts: Cairo Adrian Senior Welcome to the CMX JumpStart — Cairo. Cairo is a fixed-width two-column layout that has been developed as a learning tool to show how you can use background images and work with gradients and glows to produce designs that are a little different from the run of the mill designs we see so many of on the Internet.
Bayesian Filtering for the Rest of Us Math... I don't know about you guys, but I could not stand it when I was in school. Well, hindsight being 20/20 and all, I have now learned in my old age as a programmer that math plays a big part n modern systems. Specifically, I have recently been digging into the implementation of Bayesian Spam Filters, a statistical method of determining whether an incoming email is spam or not. To be more specific, here's what Wikipedia has to say about Bayesian Spam Filters: Bayesian email filters take advantage of Bayes' theorem. Bayes' theorem, in the context of spam, says that the probability that an email is spam, given that it has certain words in it, is equal to the probability of finding those certain words in spam email, times the probability that any email is spam, divided by the probability of finding those words in any email The interesting thing about this method of classification is that it learns over time. The more you train it in how to differentiate spam from "ham", the better it gets at doing its job. The very idea that an application can take a look at an arbitrary piece of data like an email, and know what to do with it intrigues me. By writing applications that learn over time and make decisions based on context, the art of application development is taken to the proverbial next level. The purpose of this article is to abstract the messy details of the implementation and give you cold hard code that you can implement in your own projects. Code is presented in C# Check out the Article by CMX Partner Joel Martinez
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Jim Babbage, CMX Partner Insert Comments For Fun and Profit There are many new productivity features in Dreamweaver 8, but one that I find myself using a LOT is the Insert Comment feature in Code View and the code portion of Split View. At the beginning stages of a web site, I usually have a confirmed list for the site's navigation, but sometimes, due to the nature of the site, there may not be content ready for certain links. Using the Add Comment feature, I can build the full navigation menu, then select the navigation components that aren't yet ready, and comment them out, so they are hidden from view. When the time is right, I can uncomment the elements making the links active and visible. I find this useful because it saves me from having to remember the hierarchy of navigation structure. It's all there, approved by the client, just waiting for the content to be sent to me for the new pages. And, according to Danilo Celic: In addition to the right click, you can also use CTRL + D to open a file that is linked into the current page. This has been around for a couple of vesions (04 has the right click and the key shortcuts). Would you like your tip published? Submit it to tips@communitymx.com. That's it for this week. Stay tuned for the next CMX newsletter!

CMX Weekly Newsletter

News
Fun and Freebies
Recent CMX Content
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats

Check the News!

Guest Author Gives Us Eclipse Advice

Michelle Kempner is a software developer at Schematic, one of the nation's leading interactive agencies. She develops software in Java, PHP and ColdFusion. In addition, Michelle collaborates with her husband, creating robotic art as Robot Clothes. Recently, they presented work in progress on Inside Out Life Story at the Automated Biography event at Eyebeam Atelier in New York. Michelle has a BA in Media Theory and a Master's in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. Michelle has written a fantastic article for Community MX on Getting Started with Eclipse. This is part one of her series.

Don't Have Any Buddies? Just Use AIM!

With the newest version of AOL Instant Messenger, you'll never be without a buddy. That's because AOL decided to build a Shopping Buddy and a Moviefone Buddy into its popular AIM client. Each buddy is a bot, and you can ask each Buddy questions like "What movies are playing?" and "Where are the best deals?", and receive answers. These little buddies have not received a great response as noted in this ZDNet.com article. We searched Google Groups for "Shoppingbuddy" and "AOL" and only got a few results, but most were asking how to remove the new bots.

How To Find The Best "How To" Articles

Actually, we haven't reviewed Ehow.com's website enough to know if their "how to" articles are the best, but they do have a Wiki with 3,537 (and counting) articles that are strictly how-to guides. You'll find articles on how to reformat a hard drive, how to teach your cat to give a handshake, and everything in between. You can also sign up to write some articles yourself. If you're not sure how to write an article, they've got a how to article on that as well, of course.

Speaking Of "How To..."

Have you ever wanted to deconstruct a web page you found on the internet to see how it was built, or how the style sheet was applied? If you're on a Mac, you can use Xyle scope to view the style sheet of any web page. Not only that, but you can even change the style sheet and see the results. With Xyle scope, you can click on any part of a web page to see what style is affecting that section of the page. You can choose from Browser Mode, Selection Mode, Cascade Mode or Hierarchical View. This is great for learning, or just for seeing exactly what makes Community MX so stylish.

Cranking Out Work... Literally

Nicholas Negroponte unveiled his $100 laptop at the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society this week, and his demonstration was hugely popular. The laptop is built specifically for kids as part of Negroponte's non-profit "One Laptop Per Child" program. It sports a 7-inch, swiveling screen, built-in Wi-Fi with networking support, a microphone, a speaker and a headset jack. Power for the laptop is created by using a crank that will generate about 40 minutes of power. If they really wanted to market this to kids, they'd make it so that when you use the crank to power it up, a Jack-in-the-box pops out of the top. You can read more about the $100 laptop and an interview with Negroponte at Wired.com.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"This was an awesome article -- can't wait for part two!"
"This was a very well written document. It really helped me in my understanding the differences between bitmap and vector objects. Thanks!"

- Dave V. and Marvin L., CMX Subscribers, commenting on Kim Dudley's article, Bitmap Artwork Versus Vector Artwork: Part I

Whether you're just starting out or need advanced support, Community MX will give you answers and ideas to work through your tough issues. Don't miss out. Learn more about CMX or sign up for a free trial today!

Great Quotes:

"pixel, n.: A mischievous, magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology: Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence, and the trolls in the marketing department." — Jeff Meyer

A $2,000 Jacket? Where Can I Buy It?

Sure, $2,000 is a lot to pay for a jacket that you might only wear once or twice a year. But... it's not just a jacket. It's specially made for your iPod. There is a control panel in the sleeve that communicates with your iPod. There are no wires to worry about, since the jacket contains special fibers that send electrical impulses to the iPod, telling it to rewind, go forward, etc. To be honest, we're not sure it's worth $2,000, but if anyone is feeling generous this Christmas, by all means, send one (or several - who are we to cramp your philanthropistic style?) to your kind, deserving friends at Community MX. Read more about the jacket at SyncMag.com.

Worst Worm of the Year

The Sober-Y virus is being called the FBI-Paris Hilton virus, because it typically arrives in your email disguised as either an email from the FBI or pictures of Paris Hilton. Virus specialists have called this the worst virus of the year. Not only because it brings up the name Paris Hilton, but also because it's been more prolific than any other virus seen this year. Consider this a gentle reminder to update your antivirus definitions regularly. More on this at MSNBC.com.

GPS: Gross Positioning Snafu

An Australian couple traveling in their GPS-enabled rental car trusted that they'd get to their destination efficiently by using the car's GPS. Unfortunately, the unit in their car was set to find their destination using the shortest route- avoiding urban roads. What should have been a three-hour trip ended up taking about ten hours. The moral of the story? There's probably one in this article at TVNZ.co.nz somewhere, but we haven't found it. They really should have consulted Gilligan. He could have warned them...

Browser Wars, But This Time Against a Common Enemy

Representatives of each major browser manufacturers, including Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera met recently to discuss ways they could thwart the practice of phishing. Specifically, they're looking to better identify authentic websites through digital certification that scammers would not be able to copy. They hope they can prevent people from landing on a fake version of a PayPal or eBay page and divulging confidential information that could compromise a user's personal data. It's good to see the big corporations pulling together for a common cause, and TechWeb.com doing such a thorough article on it.

Shoppers of the U.S., Unite!

BlackFridayAds.com posts unconfirmed, but "pretty sure" sales taking place in all of the major retail outlets in the U.S., including Target, Circuit City, Best Buy and WalMart. Where they can, they specifically point out the sales that are taking place only on the day after Thanksgiving. One of the Community MX partners, who shall remain nameless <cough>It's Laurie!</cough> has been watching this site for the past month and planning a highly detailed buying route in order to maximize her low-cost buying potential.

CMX AJAX Loader Extension

The CMX AJAX Loader behavior allows you to dynamically load new XHTML/XML from your web server and insert it into any element on the current page without requiring the user to perform a full refresh. By eliminating full page refreshes you can improve both the performance of your site and the end user's experience. Now you can start enjoying the benefits of AJAX technology without having to worry about the complicated scripting that makes it work!

Take a look at this extension by CMX Partner Rob Williams

Fun and Freebies

The Most Practical Voodoo Doll Yet

"The Ex" is a five-piece cutlery set whose holder is in the shape of a person. Every time you put a knife away, you're not only killing a poor little plastic being, but you're keeping your knives organized and sharp! Where else would you find this but Overstock.com?

Next Best Thing To An Imaginary Friend

If you ask Santa for a video iPod this Christmas and you don't get it, don't worry. You can get put your own together for free. The Cult of Mac have a pdf that you can download, print and fold into your very own imitation video iPod. It won't have any fancy bells and whistles like storage space, a headphone jack, music or video, but if you flash it around real quick, people might actually think you have the real thing. If they do notice it's a fake, you might get lucky and get free psychiatric care. Either way, you win!

What NOT To Ask For This Christmas

From Yahoo.com, we have this list of the Top Ten Worst Products of 2005. Most of them are of the "Sounded like a good idea at the time variety" and are from manufacturers who are otherwise stable bearers of good products.

Adding Flash Video to Dreamweaver 8

Web video is suddenly all the rage thanks to Flash Professional 8, those wonderful people at On2 and Sorenson and the folks at Adobe who provide the video editing software. It is enough to make a web developer's head spin. Suddenly we are confronted with putting web video in our web pages because clients see the neat stuff the "Cool Kids" over on the Flash side of the street are doing and we get caught with a "Me too!" The guys at Macromedia must have anticipated this because they did something with Flash Video in Dreamweaver 8 that is rather amazing; they made it even easier to use. Best off all, it is free.
Prior to the release of Dreamweaver 8, the Flash Video Kit for Dreamweaver MX 2004 was a spending decision on your part if you wanted to add Flash video to your pages. Mind you, the "Kit" included a copy of Sorenson Squeeze Lite and it is still an integral FLV creation tool if you didn't purchase either Studio 8 or Flash Professional 8. The Video Kit is now bundled with the application and is even better than the retail version of the Video Kit.

This free article by CMX Partner Tom Green can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Working with SMIL, Part 4: Creating a Video List with XML, SMIL, and the FLVPlayback Component

Robert Reinhardt

Learn how to create multiple SMIL files for several pieces of video content, played within the new FLVPlayback component shipping with Flash Pro 8. Use the List component with XML data to specify each clip, which in turn loads a SMIL file responsible for the FLV files associated with the video content.

The Working with SMIL Series:
Working with SMIL - Part 1: The FLVPlayback Component and Progressive FLV Files
Working with SMIL - Part 2: Detecting Bandwidth with Progressive FLV Files
Working with SMIL - Part 3: Real-time Streaming FLVs with the FLVPlayback Component
Working with SMIL - Part 4: Creating a Video List with XML, SMIL, and the FLVPlayback Component

Show and Hide Content Based on User Access Levels [FREE]

Danilo Celic

Dreamweaver's native Log In User server behavior combined with the Restrict Access to Page server behavior can help you protect your pages from prying eyes. However, when it comes to more fine grained control of content on pages viewable by users from multiple access levels, Dreamweaver doesn't have anything built in to offer any assistance to you.

Read on to learn how to show and hide content on a page based upon the access level (user group) of a logged in visitor.

Buttonizing Movie Clips

Paul Newman

In this tutorial, you'll learn a little-known feature of Flash that makes your movie clips behave like buttons.

A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - XHTML/CSS Construction Part 2

Zoe Gillenwater

In this final article in the series documenting the creation of my personal web site, you'll see how I used CSS to style the content of my XHTML page to match my design comp. This included styling a list to look like a navigation menu, formatting links and other text, and using sIFR to replace the text in my headings with beautiful Flash-generated text. You'll also see how I created a print style sheet, plus learn how I tested and debugged my page.

The CSS Web Design Case Study Series:
A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - Planning
A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - Visualizing the Design
CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - Design Comp Construction
A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - Slicing the Comp
A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - XHTML/CSS Construction Part 1
A CSS Web Design Case Study: Constructing a Personal Site - XHTML/CSS Construction Part 2

Attribute Selectors

Gordon Mackay

A demonstration of an addition to the CSS specification that will provide front-end developers with great power over the presentation of their documents.

Reading Flash Metadata with PHP

Rob Williams

Flash 8 is the first version of the SWF file format to support standardized, native metadata. This is a great new feature that has the potential to make SWF files easier to manage, organize, and even locate through search engines. Unfortunately there's one small catch; although Flash 8 has made adding metadata to your SWF files extremely simple, at the time of writing there are very few applications/scripts/bots outside of Flash itself that actually have the ability to read that metadata!

In this article we'll take a look at a custom PHP class that can be used to read SWF metadata, and how it can be used to realize some of these great new potentials.

Bayesian Filtering for the Rest of Us

Joel Martinez

Math, I don't know about you guys, but I could not stand it when I was in school. Well, hindsight being 20/20 and all, I have now learned in my old age as a programmer that math plays a big part n modern systems. Specifically, I have recently been digging into the implementation of Bayesian Spam Filters, a statistical method of determining whether an incoming email is spam or not. To be more specific, here's what Wikipedia has to say about Bayesian Spam Filters:

Bayesian email filters take advantage of Bayes' theorem. Bayes' theorem, in the context of spam, says that the probability that an email is spam, given that it has certain words in it, is equal to the probability of finding those certain words in spam email, times the probability that any email is spam, divided by the probability of finding those words in any email

The interesting thing about this method of classification is that it learns over time. The more you train it in how to differentiate spam from "ham", the better it gets at doing its job. The very idea that an application can take a look at an arbitrary piece of data like an email, and know what to do with it intrigues me.

By writing applications that learn over time and make decisions based on context, the art of application development is taken to the proverbial next level. The purpose of this article is to abstract the messy details of the implementation and give you cold hard code that you can implement in your own projects.

Code is presented in C#

Using Disk Files As the Data Source for a DropDownList, ListBox, CheckBoxList, or RadioButtonList

Heidi Bautista

This tutorial demonstrates how you can create a data source from a list of files on the server and bind that data source to four different controls: DropDownList, ListBox, CheckBoxList, or RadioButtonList.

Introducing CMX JumpStart Cairo [FREE]

Sheri German

We are excited to announce CMX JumpStart Cairo, Egypt. It was designed and coded by Adrian Senior, and makes extensive use of lush gradients and glows. It is a centered, two-column, fixed-width design, and, like all CMX Jumpstarts, is constructed using valid XHTML 1.0 markup and CSS 2.1 styling. Cairo also follows the WAI and Section 508 accessibility guidelines to provide you with a solid foundation for any design. This article will introduce you to what Cairo includes in its bundle, as well as show you an example site created from its source PNG and CSS/XHTML files.

CMX JumpStarts: Cairo

Adrian Senior

Welcome to the CMX JumpStart — Cairo. Cairo is a fixed-width two-column layout that has been developed as a learning tool to show how you can use background images and work with gradients and glows to produce designs that are a little different from the run of the mill designs we see so many of on the Internet.

Bayesian Filtering for the Rest of Us

Math... I don't know about you guys, but I could not stand it when I was in school. Well, hindsight being 20/20 and all, I have now learned in my old age as a programmer that math plays a big part n modern systems. Specifically, I have recently been digging into the implementation of Bayesian Spam Filters, a statistical method of determining whether an incoming email is spam or not. To be more specific, here's what Wikipedia has to say about Bayesian Spam Filters:
Bayesian email filters take advantage of Bayes' theorem. Bayes' theorem, in the context of spam, says that the probability that an email is spam, given that it has certain words in it, is equal to the probability of finding those certain words in spam email, times the probability that any email is spam, divided by the probability of finding those words in any email
The interesting thing about this method of classification is that it learns over time. The more you train it in how to differentiate spam from "ham", the better it gets at doing its job. The very idea that an application can take a look at an arbitrary piece of data like an email, and know what to do with it intrigues me.
By writing applications that learn over time and make decisions based on context, the art of application development is taken to the proverbial next level. The purpose of this article is to abstract the messy details of the implementation and give you cold hard code that you can implement in your own projects.
Code is presented in C#

Check out the Article by CMX Partner Joel Martinez

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Jim Babbage, CMX Partner

Insert Comments For Fun and Profit

There are many new productivity features in Dreamweaver 8, but one that I find myself using a LOT is the Insert Comment feature in Code View and the code portion of Split View. At the beginning stages of a web site, I usually have a confirmed list for the site's navigation, but sometimes, due to the nature of the site, there may not be content ready for certain links.

Using the Add Comment feature, I can build the full navigation menu, then select the navigation components that aren't yet ready, and comment them out, so they are hidden from view. When the time is right, I can uncomment the elements making the links active and visible.

I find this useful because it saves me from having to remember the hierarchy of navigation structure. It's all there, approved by the client, just waiting for the content to be sent to me for the new pages.

And, according to Danilo Celic:

In addition to the right click, you can also use CTRL + D to open a file that is linked into the current page. This has been around for a couple of vesions (04 has the right click and the key shortcuts).

Would you like your tip published? Submit it to tips@communitymx.com.

That's it for this week. Stay tuned for the next CMX newsletter!