Arachnophilia

Download from… http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia

Download size… 1.59MB
Installation size… 1.54MB

Unlike most of the other editors, Arachnophilia is designed specifically for web development. It used to be my editor of choice, but that was version 4.0 (which you can still download from the site). Since then it’s been converted to Java so it will run on most platforms. Unfortunately, as most people will appreciate, that also means it runs like, well, a dog. Particularly to start. It’s slimline in size, but that’s for a reason - there aren’t many options.

It looks as if it’s been designed by someone from Fisher Price and lacks basic facilities such as word wrap and an explorer bar. There is line numbering a good browser launch system, as well as useful features such as the ability to auto-complete an image size.

In an attempt to make an editor for all people he’s made it difficult to use because it doesn’t perform how we expect it to.

I used Arachnophilia in it’s non-Java form because it was quick to use as a simple editor (although it lacked PHP syntax colouring). Now it’s even lost that. It comes with a Windows Installer but.. and this is always a bug-bear of mine… there’s no uninstall option without going into Control Panel.

Summary

Slow editor that lacks facilities and looks awful. 2 out of 5 stars.

Source Edit

Download from… http://www.brixoft.net

Download size… 3.73Mb
Installation size… 3.88Mb

This is a quite powerful editor, very similar to a commercial one that I use at work (my day job… not web development). In fact, the site even has a syntax highlighter for the obscure language that I programme in at work (a first that I know of - we had to write our own for the product we use). As with some of the other products I review, this is a generic code editor, which includes compiler options amongst other things. Never-the-less everything I look at specifically have facilities for web coding.

Again, this looks a little old-fashioned, but it’s compact and quick. Line numbering can be turned on, as can word wrap but this is where I came across it’s big problem. Word wrap occurs at a set column position - by default at position 80. All the other products I use wrap to the side of the window, so if you re-size it, the word wrap changes. Indeed, there’s a further problem with the word wrap - where lines wrap onto seperate lines, they are given their own line numbers. So, in the test I used, I had a 24 line piece of code but after turning on word wrap it was 27 lines - this means that debugging code will become harder as line numbers reported by, say, PHP will not correlate unless you turn the word wrap off. I looked in the configuration but couldn’t find a way to change this - I’m sure some people prefer it this way, but I’d at least like a way of changing it.

On top of that there’s little support, or something that will do an equivalent, for launching the code in a browser - just viewing it in the default browser. A crude macro facility exists but I can’t see a way of passing the current file name into it. Maybe there is something but after the word wrapping problem, I pretty much gave up the product.

Summary

Seems quite powerful but unusual for me because of its line wrapping problems, so 3 out of 5 stars.

I had an email today from a good friend, asking for recommendations about setting up a personal domain name. I get asked this quite a lot, so I thought I’d Blog the answer for future. You know it makes sense.

Right, if you’re simply after a domain name for your email - i.e. having a nice personal email address such as joe.bloggs@artiss.co.uk - then this is easy. I use 1&1 who can supply them for £2.99 for 2 years. This gives you the domain name, but no email facility. You’ll need to keep your existing email but use the 1&1 Control Panel to divert your new domain name to your existing email address.

That means if you move ISP and therefore ISP-based email address, then you simply change the forwarding, and your friends don’t need to know anything different - they still use your personal email address.

Not only that but you can set up different diversions for different email addresses.

The down-side to this is that when you reply from most email account it will use your “proper” email address as the “from”. In other words, if you’re using an ISP supplied email address, it will use that when you reply. Google Mail, which I highly recommend, isn’t ISP dependant and will allow you to reply to emails using your personal email addresses.

Now, that’s the email covered. What if you want a domain name for a website as well? Well, the 1&1 offering will allow you to divert the matching website address to anywhere else. So again, you can divert, say, artiss.co.uk, to that free space given to you by your ISP. But, again, there’s a downside. The forwarding works by creating a frame with your website inside it. That means the URL doesn’t change as you move around pages, and makes providing specific links to page rather difficult. Now there is a way around this by pointing the “name servers” directly to the web space. However, this is dependant on both your ISP and domain name provider allowing this. It’s also a bit of a technical jungle at times.

So, if you want a website and want it to look all cool, froody and sophisticated, I’d suggest you look at getting a host - i.e. a company that can provide the domain name and webspace and link them together automatically. The additional upside of this is that they’re likely to provide a better quality service than the free offerings from your ISP.

Streamline.net provide a “power” option for £47.98 for 2 years. This includes your domain name, email forwarding, 750MB of space and even PHP & MySQL if that’s your bag.

UPDATE: A Blog reader has kindly pointed me to Microsoft Office Live. They provide a FREE small business package which includes email, 500MB of space and a domain name. It looks as if the email is their own mail service and you may have to use their own designer to create the website rather than upload your own. Plus I suspect it won’t allow PHP, MySQL, etc. So limitations you should be aware of… BUT it’s free, so worthy of investigation.

I’ve often been criticised for using tables in my website. I only really use them where I’ve found it necessary, but never-the-less, one table is often one too many for some. “Bad design”, etc, etc.

Well, I’m working on a re-design of the Copy+ site and have been attempted to banish tables from the site entirely. All looked well as I tested it in IE. Then Firefox. Oh my. It was a real mess. I tried to sort it, I really did, but eventually became stuck.

A post to discussion board yielded the following answer.. “the top menu ‘catches’ on your logo_box DIV.” The answer is to add “clear: both;” to my DIV.

So I asked how I was supposed to know this. The answer…

Same way as me. You do something, it doesn’t work, so you google it!

I use it so often that I have it defined as a constant in my PHP.

The other thing that I have done is that I get so fed up of fudging inconsistencies between browsers that I now detect the user’s browser and give them an appropriate css file, not a jack of all trades with indecipherable hacks in.

The conclusion… I’m not supposed to realise this. Instead I have to hack about to get the DIV’s right, probably losing sleep and hair in the process.

But, if I use tables I can get it right first time, without any of the above. Hmmm. Guess what I’m now doing to the new site??

A new year and lots more web work.

First of all, and the biggie, is adding on-line ticket sales to the BMTG site. All of this is being processed by PayPal. It’s now received committee approval and my final design has been tested today… hopefully it will all go live by the end of the week.

The back-end is a MySQL database containing two tables - one containing the ticket details and the other is a control table for the on-line charges. The ticket page then uses PHP to access the database and construct it’s content, including ticket tables, PayPal links and even writing the description at the top of the page to describe any processing fees (they currently intend to charge just a set charge per ticket bought on-line, but in case they want to do something more complex, such as add P&P fees or per-transaction fees, I’ve added that in).

However, how many sales it will generate I’m not sure about.. I remain sceptical (especially as there’s a 50p processing charge).

I’ve also changed the majority of the sites pages as I improve accessibility - nothing visually has changed, but a lot of code has been modified.

Meantime I’ve found a problem with my earlier change to make the YouTube code valid. It seems that when I blank the screen using script.aculo.us code, the YouTube video stays highlighted, getting the way of any photos displayed. This only occurs on one screen (the only one where video and photos are in close proximity) so I’ve had to change that back to the original YouTube code whilst I investigate further.