The IE DevToolbar has a nice DOM model viewer but the tool that comes with Firefox one's it up - a video about CSS development/debugging:
[camtasia:FireFoxDOMTools:450:400]
In the above video, I discuss the DOM Viewer in the IE DevTollBar and show a feature available through the Firefox DOM Inspector (comes with Firefox but you must choose to install it).
In IE, once you bring up the DOM Viewer, you can select Find->Select Element by Click which then causes all of the HTML page elements to highlight as you mouse over them. Click on the element brings up all the CSS details in the Current Style section of the viewer. You can easily add rules to your CSS and see how your layout is changed right away by clicking the [+] key in the attributes panel. This is a really nice CSS debugging tool.
Firefox also has a Select Element by Click but it doesn't seem to work as nicely as in IE in that you don't get the mouse-over highlight. You can still find your elements easily in the tree-view. Where Firefox goes beyond the IE DevToolBar is in the ability to view "CSS Style Rules." So, in Firefox, you must first load the DOM Inspector by clicking on Tools->DOM Inspector or Shift+Ctrl+I. The Inspector will load and the current URL defaults into the window. You may change the URL if you'd like. Click the [Inspect] button. At the bottom of the Inspector, the page will load. Select Search->Select Element by Click and select an element on the page. All of the CSS details will be displayed. Now the piece de resistance: In the top-right panel of the Inspector you should find, by default, the DOM Node. You can change this panel to view the CSS Style Rules for the selected element by clicking on the down-arrow in the menu bar to the left of the title:
Select this option to load this tool and you'll see the hierarchy of CSS files and rules affecting the selected element including the browser default styles. This is a GREAT tool for debugging CSS issues.
So Chiwi is a Community Server forum member who wrote an incredible Photo Gallery management tool that I've wanted to talk about for months. This tool gives another option to Community Server users to bulk upload photos to their gallery. Also within this tool, you can do image rotation, resize, file naming, provide photo titles and descriptions. Check out the site at http://www.luzern.co.nz/blogs/dev_blog/archive/category/1028.aspx and https://sourceforge.net/projects/csgallerytool/.
I'd talk about the things I'd like to change about the tool but since it is now a community driven project, I really need to shut my hole and do something about it and I just promised my wife that I wouldn't start any new projects until I clear up my current list.
Here's a screenshot of the tool as I use it to create my "LakeShots" albumn:
I guess the top two features about the tool that I love are:
- Simple bulk upload
- Resize - my pics are HUGE - I set them via options->Settings->Image Resizing to resize to 1229px. Good enough for you, small enough for my server :).
I'm sure I'll write about it more in the future - it really is a great tool for Community Server users!
I've been working with CS 2.1 quite a bit and there are a few things that I'm mad in love with about the new system (there's a lot more to the new version than I'm going to talk about here but these are the things that I'm really stoked about):
- Moveable, resizable modal windows - when you go to edit a content part, you can now drag the edit window wherever you want and enlarge the edit space or whatever - that's really nice!
- More blog rollers - I believe it's officially called Content Mirroring and it's not a big deal for my personal site at this point but you can now create multiple rss rollers - this is a really simplified explanation of what is probably a much bigger deal for my personal site which is that you can now include rss aggregation directly within your blog. This is quite mind-blowing.
- Streamlined posting - there are new options on the post creation form to: save and continue editing, save but don't publish, and publish. Categories have been replaced with tags which should be on a line by itself but now when creating a post, your categories/tags are right there under your post so you don't have to switch off the Post tab to create and categorize your post.
- New syndication - Feedburner support! If you want, you can off-load your syndication to a 3rd party such as feedburner - visitors who hit your RSS will be redirected to feedburner. Scott Watermasysk noted that you can configure your account with feedburner to keep your domain if you'd like.
So - go git some Community Server! Rumor has it the next version is codenamed Chameleon - is that the group that did Ridin' Dirty? I love that song!
A great question came in to me today about Community Server and I wanted to share.
In Community Server, when you view all of your posts in the control panel, there's a link on the "views" field which links to a "referrers" page. So the question is basically, what's the difference between a trackback and a referrer.
First, trackbacks are active pings to your site when a post is published on a site that supports trackbacks. I'll spare you the really great technical details but when a post is created on a site that supports trackbacks, the server will parse the post and send a trackback ping to all URLs it finds in that post. If your system also supports trackbacks, your system will record these pings as trackbacks.
Port25, by the way, does a really interesting thing with their trackbacks - check out the right nav of this post. I love that!
Referrals, on the other hand, are recorded based on, to the best of my knowledge, the HTTP Referrer of an HTTP Request. When someone lands in your site from a link somewhere, Community Server records the referrer to the blog post. This referrer could be almost anything - a link on someone's homepage, a search engine or even a blog post. Basically - this records where people are landing on your site from.
I thought that was a great question - hope you like the info!