Caching? Aint that something that Browsers do?

Well, to some this might be the obvious answer, but actually there is more to caching, than the browser cache. There is more that you can do, as a web developer!

Why is caching important? Because on sites with a wide array of content and many users you will want to deliver information as fast as possible and reuse information that has been accessed or searched for already by other users. Cache file for search query results or other dynamic information can be stored on the sites space and be accessed alot faster than by query or parsing through script languages. Reading a file is still the fastest method around to retrieve information.

There are quite a few ways to implement caching and now there is an interesting option i have found that uses some Apache modules and let the webserver handle caching. Read more about how to use those modules as askapache.com.

Search the official W3C CSS 2.1 Documentation

Something nice and useful i spotted today. Peter Freitag has launched a documentation shortcut site that has indexed the W3C CSS 2.1 Specification. The usability is increased by a script.aculo.us based auto completion feature.


Additionally there is a Plug-in for Firefox that will add cssdocs.org to your search engine favorites, making this a very handy and fast to use tool, when you are looking for attributes of a specific CSS element.

So if you are a web developer be sure to bookmark http://www.cssdocs.org and if you happen to use Firefox as your preferred developing browser get a hold of the Plug-in (from the page take the link at the top, reading "CSS Documentation") aswell.

Firebug 1.0 Beta (public)

Rejoice of fellow DOM tree viewers, CSS stylesheet editors and HTML tag diggers! Firebug 1.0 Beta is finally available and oh my it is a tool i will never want to miss. Combining DOM Inspector, Javascript Debugger and HTML structure viewer all in one, while beiing able to change any values on the fly or debugging your bugged javascript.

Main features:

• Just the way you like it
• Inspect and edit HTML
• Tweak CSS to perfection
• Visualize CSS metrics
• Monitor network activity (will be my new favorite)
• Debug and profile Javascript
• Quickly find errors
• Explore the DOM
• Logging for Javascript
  

Apart from Firebug beiing available for Firefox there is also a "Lite" Version for IE, Opera and Safari! Integrating Firebug in this way is a little bit "clumsy" though since you have to add a javascript reference into the page you want to debug. Can still be of use, should you be in a location where Firefox is not available or you are not allowed to install extensions.

24 ways tingleing to Christmas

Once again, in followup to the first successful and funny approach of 24 ways, to bring witty CSS and Javascript examples to us, until Christmas day to us, 24 ways starts off again.

The examples given are mostly out of the natural you might want to look for, but definitely give new ideas for future development. People come up with some many different ways to use the tools given to them to model the web.

Make the wait until Christmas a bit shorter. For any webdevelopers not having a "Adventkalender" at home, this is the perfect replacement :D

jQuery a different script.aculo.us

jQuery appears like a lightweight script assortment for visual appearances tweaks similar to those of script.aculo.us . The approach is a bit different in execution, since it follows a sort of chains of commands principle. The documentation and examples cover a wide range and further investigation will reveal if its up there with script.aculo.us or not. I for one like to see a different flavor of these new generation effects arising. A little competition and learning from each other never hurt.

• jQuery Demos
  
• jQuery Documentation
• jQuery Tutorials
  
• Visual jQuery

Another way to push some simple stuff, that was previously done with Flash, to Javascript :)