CSS Editor - Kompozer

It was time to give the UI of the website I am working on a facelift. Nothing too fancy, but something simple that won't scare off the users when it is released... Before, I have far too often reverted to the safe path of tables and plain HTML tags, before getting myself into too much .css trouble. This time I decided it was time to put a bit more force behind the goal of handling the layout only with .css stylesheets...

First thing I looked into was finding a better editor than Eclipse for css and html... Decided against shelling out for Dreamweaver f0r now because of 1) price and 2) my favorite development OS is Ubuntu...

After some reasearch I figured out that many people are using the open source Kompozer (based on Nvu) editor, and decided to give it a try. 

My experience so far is that it is definately a helpful and worthwhile to have tool while designing your pages. It is definately no Dreamweaver replacement, but it provides you with an editor that let you preview your changes instantly, gives you easy access to the most used style settings, and provides you with an overview of your page structure in one tool.

I also had some problems while using Kompozer. The undo as well as the publish  function must be working in a way different than I am expecting, as I have lost work many times. I have resorted to not using any of those two functions, and making frequent backups for now... I am planning to research this more...

Overall I am happy that I took the time to learn Kompozer and is looking forward to continue to use it on all my machines.

Note: As an added bonus there is a "portable" version of Kompozer available, so if you are on windows you don't have to install another program. Goes nizely together with Portable Firefox and Firebug for the css development...

Update: My Kompozer usage has dropped to almost zero, as I managed to get my stylesheet automagically replaced with an old version again. I will have to Google this problem a bit and find a solution before I have the guts to spend any time with Kompozer again...

Assembla SVN, Wiki and Track

As a software developer you need access to a few basic services. My needs include a Subversion repository, a Wiki and a bug tracking tool. I used to host all of this myself, but I got tired about worrying about security upgrades, diskspace, downtime, changing OS versions etc...

So I have swithched to use Assembla. They provide hosted SVN, Wiki and Track access, and their basic subscription (meeting my needs) is free. I'm currently only hosting my Maven repository myself, I wish they also offered that...

I have been using Assembla for more than a year now and have experienced no stability issues so far. So thumbs up for Assembla, reccomended to everybody!

(no, I am not associated with Assembla in any way...)

1st blog picture

A pic of my laptop with my first blog post... Historical. Picture was taken on my Nokia E71 and posted to blogger.com by sending an email directly from my phone to the blogger.com email I set up... Sweet.

What is to come?

Yep, I am a bit lazy, so without further introduction a long list of keywords: Java, J2EE, Wicket, JSF, Guice, Hibernate, Weblogic, Maven, Maven archetypes, Amazon EC2, IceFaces, Warp-persist, Wicket-RAD, MySQL, Subversion, Assembla, Aqualogic, Eclipse, Ubuntu, Mobile Internet, Cloud Computing.