IDE

Every once in a while, I'll see some article on Digg about programming font alternatives and I'll find myself thinking, "is that really necessary?" I've been around programming for the last four or five years, and in all that time I've never once moved away from the default Windows IDE font.

For those of you who've never touched programming in a computer language, most programming integrated development environments (IDE) are set to use the monospaced Courier New font. Created in 1955 for typewriters, this font eventually found its way into Windows operating systems as far back as Windows 95. The strength in this font and many of the other monospaced fonts is that the characters all line up vertically. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

I've compared Courier New to Times New Roman because TNR is widely known as a popular font for word processors. As you can see from the guide lines in the image, all the characters typed in Courier New (the monospaced font) line up, while the characters typed in Times New Roman do not. A benefit to monospacing characters in code is that its possible to easily compare the content of various lines of code. If I want to compare a MySQL database connection string from one file to a similar string in another file, I can just copy-paste the two strings and compare their string length to check for any inconsistencies or differences between the two. With a font like Courier New you'll notices character differences between strings almost immediately.

Since I started coding, I've tried to switch fonts once or twice. I stayed away from TrueType fonts because I liked the look of monospaced characters, but finding a monospaced font I like was difficult. Every time I tried a different font, I thought the text was too small or the characters were too blocky. SOME monospaced fonts even boasted a special tiny size, as though I liked coding at size five font. No matter which font I tried, though, I ALWAYS moved back to Courier New. Call it stubborness, call it security, but I had found my favorite programming font a long time ago.

I suppose the perfect programming font is determined solely by personal preference. Personal experience tells me that, for a word document, non-monotype-fonts such as TNR are perfect because they set up words that look more naturally-spaced, similar to how someone would write. When it comes down to programming, monospace fonts are the way to go because of how neat the code looks easy it is to compare various bits of code. Just my two cents.

I've really dropped the ball recently. Its been, what, a week since the "Possible Downtime"? Well, I have a couple boring things to mention and a bit of a product review, so brace yourself! Excitement abounds in the land of the web designers and techies.

First off, let it be known that I hate LA and its impatient drivers. The only thing that keeps me coming back is getting paid $15/hour for easy work AND the time I spent on the road travelling there (2 hours each way). That is all.

In regards to the title, I've upgraded my blog's backend a bit. For the most part, I believe the front end, the bits of the blogging system that involve input from you the readers is complete. I've addressed spamming from bots, the numerous date problems have all been figured out, and the format of the posts are, I think, organized and easy to read.

The backend, on the other hand, the part that I get to see and use, has been in a state of disarray for a while, with half of the functionality actually implemented. Well, last week I decided to finish the missing components and make it that much easier for me to manage my blog when I'm away from home. I've decided to treat you all with a picture of the admin page, just so you can see what kind of management features I've stuck into my site:

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The Matt's Blog Admin page
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To be honest, there's not much to look at. The categories are self-explanatory, dividing up various tools into their appropriate groups. At the moment, everything with a link works EXCEPT for the "Categories" section. I'm still trying to figure out how to tag my articles to allow for easy searching, so I jumped the gun a bit and made that a working link. The "Comment Control" category will be removed because I've worked in comment deletion into the same page that you edit news posts from. I've found that lot easier to keep track of and delete only the comments I want to delete.

The "Database Connection Settings" link does indeed work, and through that I can...well, I'm sure you can figure out what that's for!

Last but not least, I have the option to "Edit Side Panels", the various link buttons you see to the right of the posts. That's no more than a <textarea> with some HTML in it, and in the future I'll have to flesh that out a bit more to make it more user-friendly.

I would have included pictures of each of the subpages, but I'd rather keep that to myself until I'm ready to release this as software for people to try out and perhaps buy...but that's a ways down the road.

Moving on...

If you've been reading my blog for the past few months, you'll remember this post I made about various freeware programs I use that replace commonly used commercial applications. One of the points I brought to light in that article was that I had yet to find a suitable free replacement for Dreamweaver. I have a bit of an update to that article.

About two weeks ago, I came across Webuilder 2006 by Blumentals Software in another one of my efforts to find a program that was as powerful as Dreamweaver without the cost. At first, I had disregarded this program because it cost money and thus would not have been a suitable FREE replacement for Dreamweaver.

Well, four months after that post, I decided to give Webuilder a try, drunk on the fact that I had just finished up with a client's website and I now had money to spend on such a program. Lets just say that I ended up purchasing the program (for a paltry $50) 5 days after downloading the demo. I was very impressed with what I had seen and experienced, and I am very comfortable in saying that this program could give Dreamweaver a run for its money.

The interface is very customizable. All of the toolbars under the menu items can be added or removed and moved around to suit one's preferences. I prefer a rather spartan coding environment, so alot of the available tools are hidden away. In the screenshot below, you'll notice that the buttons just about mimic the style of toolbars in Microsoft Office applications, and I think this helps the programmer feel more comfortable with his coding environment. The color scheme, fortunately, is customizable, too. Before I got my hands on it, the code used a lot of blues and purple and greys, and it made it difficult to tell where one block of code ended and the other began. I went in and modified the color scheme to use PHP's colors, making it incredibly easier to keep my PHP seperated from my HTML code.

You'll see two other panes to the left and to the right of the code. The Code Explorer to sealed the deal once I saw what it did. In PHP mode, this panel will show you EVERY CUSTOM-CREATED FUNCTION ON THE PAGE! Simply put, I can see all of the functions I've made and reference them without having to find out where they're located on the page. Dreamweaver never had this feature, and looking back I'm surprised that it went this long without it.

The File Explorer to the right is a pretty standard feature in coding environments, and Webuilder goes two steps forward by including FTP connectivity and "Projects" that you can set up to organize all the websites you're working on. Its very nice that all three functions are included in one pane because it keeps most of the program open for the code window.
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Webuilder's IDE, customized to my liking
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Like many other IDE's, Webuilder has a split-screen setup that lets you make changes on top and see the code rendered within Webuilder. The nice thing about the in-program renderer is that you can see the page you're working on in both IE and Firefox without having to have those programs open. I find this feature indispensible because I can see code changes without having to wait for a browser window to open up.
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Split-screen IDE
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Here's some miscellaneous pictures I took of the various features in Webuilder:
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Function hints for custom-created functions
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Publish files to the internet based on when you edited them
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Code hints and completion for CSS!
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So I hope this makes up for the week without a post. I'm going back out to LA with a friend tomorrow to do some more computer work, so I have four more hours of work to look forward to. AND, before I forget, look for tomorrow's big announcement! What could possibly be so amazing that I create this much suspense a day in advance? You'll just have to tune back in tomorrow to find out. For my fellow Americans, I hope you had a pleasant Labor Day, and for my international friends, I hope you had a very nice September 4th!