School Preparation – Ugh!

I have to read 2 books for school….2 really boring books (well at least the first one is, I haven’t even got up to the 2nd one). The first, “A Tale of Two Cities”, is well…I want to like it. I mean it has to be a classic for some reason, but I just can’t. The author (Charles Dickens) apparently got paid by the word and well, it definitely shows. Everything I’ve read so far (250 Pages) could’ve been written in 100 or so pages! The book is for the most part boring and hard to understand, but it’s slowly starting to pick up a little.

The 2nd book is “Down and Out In Paris and London” (George Orwell). Like Dickens, Orwell’s books have been very popular, especially “1984″ which led to Apple’s famous 1984 SuperBowl ad. I haven’t even touched this one, as the other book is taking way too long to read. Hopefully this one should be better (since the author is rather recent, he may have gotten paid for the popularity of the book which is a very good incentive to keep it interesting), but who knows?

Did I mention I only have till Wednesday to finish these! That’s about 135 or so pages (up to Book the Third) on the 1st book and the whole 2nd book.

Well, I guess that’s high school, eh? (no I’m not Canadian, I just did want to use the same Onomatopoeia (Lamence Terms: sound word) as the title again

Well other than that, it’s been rather boring…

I’m not talking about the Apple event at all, because I’m sure you’ve heard so much about and I’d rather not contribute to the hype. I will conduct my “evently” task of watching the event stream for myself before seeing what’s been announced (thanks to a MacRumors “evently” post. It’s more exciting that way. That day will be my first day of school so I ‘ll hopefully use that to keep myself away from the computer (at least I don’t have an iPhone to ruin that).

Side note: Our family is due (overdue by a couple years actually) for new phones (no not going to get an iPhone, I wish…). My father is planning on getting LG VX8300′s for all of us, but I’d really rather have the LG VX8550 (more commonly known as the new Chocolate). He’s focused on all of us having the same phones for some reason (even though all the phones have the same interface, thanks to Verizon, so support isn’t an issue), so unfortunately we’ll probably be forced to that so commonly had (I saw at least 5 people today with the same phone) VX8300. Ah well, I can try can’t I? Can’t I?!

Anyway, life’s boring, school work sucks, what’s new?

Damn Timezones

I was planning on watching the WWDC 07 keynote by myself (without spoilers) and thought I would have no problem because I have a Final tomorrow and won’t be home till 1 PM or so, so I couldn’t even try to “peek”.

Well….

I just realized that 1 PM here (New York) is 10 AM in San Francisco (3 hours back), the exact starting time of the keynote! It’s going to be tough to keep myself away from the computer.

I’ll bike that’s it, that should keep me busy for 2 hours or so…..ahh! What am I going to do!

All apple fanboy comments go in the comments. Where they will be refuted or dutifully ignored

Finals and Apple Events!

Here’s hoping to a quick end to Finals!

Here’s hoping to a good Apple announcement!

The Perfect Website Editor

Well the perfect one doesn’t exist yet. So, what’s needed to make a perfect web site editor. I’m going to use 2 popular web site editors to help me explain: Realmac’s RapidWeaver and Google’s Page Creator.

Let me start off saying that I believe the things to create the perfect website editor do exist, but haven’t been integrated and combined together correctly (hint: Apple). Okay, so here are 7 features that I believe will create the perfect web site editor.

Optional Page Management

RapidWeaver handles your pages for you. It allows you to drag and drop pages around. In other words, it organizes your sidebar so that you don’t have to. It also allows you to drag pages into other pages creating a hierarchy style site. With that however it allows you to not include certain pages in that hierarchy. RapidWeaver also allows you to customize everything about the place where the page links are kept, keeping customization.

Page Creator on the other hand doesn’t include page management. This allows for great customization and is perfect for some. As you can tell however a normal person isn’t going to like this style.

Website Wide Settings

RapidWeaver has an inspector devoted to Site settings. These are things that stay the same all through the site. Some things that can be set: Header, Footer, and Style. Again there is an Anti-Feature, a inspector devoted to Page settings. Exceptions can be made for certain pages even if it was set in the Site inspector. This is done on a page by page basis, preventing accidental exceptions.

Page Creator on the other hand only keeps the style the same for the whole site. Nothing else and no exceptions. As you can tell this feature would be extremely helpful to people.

Browser Compatibility Checking and HTML Validation

Taking a cue from Dreamweaver, I don’t think these 2 features need an explanation. RapidWeaver doesn’t let you edit html so this isn’t a problem. Page Creator allows very limited editing so this really isn’t needed, but would be helpful. These 2 things should be 2nd nature to for any web site editor.

Anti-Features (Exceptions)

For almost all features and especially the above 3, these are extremely important. It’s important to do things like this, to create features and “anti-features”. It’s important for any program allowing you to create custom things (like websites) to have these. For Page Management: allow pages to be excluded and allow the feature to be turned off. For Website Wide Settings: allow exceptions on a page by page basis. For Browser Compatibility Checking and HTML Validation: Allow it to exclude certain browsers (like IE5 for example) and allow certain HTML problems to be ignored (not needed but it could be useful for testing stuff, it would ask for confirmation first before ignoring and it would be more of a hidden feature like hidden in the menus).

Automatic Changing of Links to Pages

Again from Dreamweaver, if you link to a page on your site (ex. test.html) and then you decide to change the name of that file (ex. complete.html) any links to that page should be changed (ex. from”…/test.html” to “…/complete.html”). Very useful once tried. Not in Rapidweaver but possibly in Page Creator.

HTML and Graphical Editing

I happen to like working both ways. I like being able to design something graphically and keep it under control and clean in the HTML as well as adding a couple of things. You can easily see the benefits of working that way. Rapidweaver has Graphical editing, but not HTML editing. Page Creator has both, but it very limited in HTML editing and isn’t that great graphically (in regards to Rapidweaver).

Editing Online and Offline

This is feature is a big one. Page Creator’s main advantage is the fact that it’s fully online (and comes with free space and subdomain). Rapidweaver is definitely disadvantaged here. If there could be a way to edit offline and edit online without losing the main idea of editing (extra features can be shed, but editing must be similiar to offline). The offline editor would then sync it’s copy with the copy that is on the site. Themes can be synced up to the site to allow changing themes through the online interface (only ones synced to site). You should also be allowed to edit the HTML of pages online as well as graphically. Essentially a content management system that the editor provides.

Also the sites should be stored in a file/folder like iMovie. So if the editor was called “Perfect Web Site Editor” then it would be a .pws file (perfect web site). Inside would be all the html files so simple editing can be done to inside files. There should be an option to export the site to a folder and all the pages, theme elements, and media would be included.

Okay so that’s what I believe are extremely important. There are a bunch of other things, but those aren’t as important as these. So what do you think? Please comment below.

Update – Finally!

I’ve been debating between this blog and my Opera blog. They’re both good, but who knows what will happen. I’ll update this periodically on what happens.

By the way, does anyone know how to add some html code for my box widget in the sidebar?

Hello world!

Hello World! I didn’t have such a great experience with blogger so I came here looking to reinvigorate my blog. I am very happy with what I have seen so far and can’t wait to start blogging again.