Latest Articles on Design
Mountaindays.net V2 at last!
After months of work, on and off, we can finally announce the launch of the new look Mountaindays!
New look mountaindays.net
I created this website over six years and it now attracts in excess of 50 thousand visitors a month. To try and keep up with the demand for reviews of books and other climbing related kit, I decided to implement the site in a content management system. This would also allow me to implement some additional dynamic functionality such as a membership and commenting scheme. Plus it also needed a new look and feel made using schematic HTML.
After much trawling around and a few false starts I settled on ExpressionEngine. This is a php based content management system build around a blogging metaphor but with a large user group. There is a free version available for individual use, I decided to purchase the personal edition, mainly to make use of some of the additional features available such as the photo gallery.
As with all new software and development environments it took some getting used to but I have to say I am very impressed with what can be acheived and the new version of ExpressionEngine looks very promising indeed. In terms of the Mountaindays rewrite, well the new design and template creation was the simple task. As with all projects of this sort, the migration of the existing content was the real time consuming job, especially seeing as the bulk of the pages were static and used table…
IE Tester - the answer to all our prays
For years web designers across the planet have struggled with the same problem, how to ensure their sites backward compatibility with older versions of Internet Explorer. Previous efforts such as Tredosofts Multiple_IE have been ok but have had draw backs in terms of stability and JavaScript compatability.
Well now there is a new tool available in the guise of the IETester from Debugbar. Unlike Tredosofts Multiple_IE this is a single desktop application which allows you to run up different versions of Internet Explorer in separate tabs. The application will support all versions from IE5.5 onwards, including the latest beta version of IE8. It will happily run web applications with a heavy reliance on JavaScript and AJAX which is a great help, especially with the current trends in web design.
Although its still in alpha release, it seems pretty stable. There are some known problems, which are listed on the website, but I’ve been running this for over a month now and have only had it crash once. All in all I would recommend everybody takes a look at this new offering and support the project going forward 
IETester Screenshot
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