July 2008 - Posts
Today we opened registration for a new session of classes at Start to Web. Classes will start August 30, 2008 and last for 4 weeks. There will be two classes offered this session:
Introduction to Expression Web - updated to include Expression Web 2. This class will last four weeks. To view the full Expression Web syllabus at http://starttoweb.com/classes/ewd.php
Introduction to CSS - this class is web editor independent and designed to teach you the basics of CSS. For more information on this class see: http://starttoweb.com/classes/css101.php
Special Opportunity: be the first to take the new class from FrontPage MVPs Tina Clarke and Pat Geary: Migrating FrontPage Websites to Expression Web. Pat and Tina plan on offering a special sneak peak class in the August session at a reduced rate on to those willing to provide feedback to help them fine tune the class material. Check the Start to Web home page for more information as it becomes available.
I've recently had to make a couple of changes to some of the tutorials we offer here on by-expression.com because of bandwidth overage charges and I have to admit that I was wondering if it was worth the time and expense to create and make them available since there hasn't been much feedback on them.
Today I was skimming though the official Microsoft forums for Expression Web and came across a post by CassieRae that made my day. So I just wanted to say thank you back to CassieRae.
Now I'll take a moment to answer CassieRae's question on how applicable my Expression Web book is to the new version of Expression Web released a year after my book.
First, there are three types of new features in Expression Web 2 that were not in the original Expression Web.
- Insert media - this lets you insert Flash, Silverlight and Windows Media on your web pages created in Expression Web without having to write code or use swfobject (the most frequently recommended method of inserting Flash that works in IE without triggering the 'click to activate' message.)
- Insert picture > Adobe Photoshop - lets you bring in psd images with layers from Photoshop. I will admit that I have not actually tried this new feature because my web images are all created as layered pngs in Fireworks. When I get Photoshop files from clients I bring them into Fireworks to prepare and optimize for the web.
- Support for PHP - In the original version of Expression Web there was no support for PHP and what I consider to be a nasty bug actively caused problems with PHP includes and other PHP pages causing Greek characters to appear on the page. Not only has Expression Web version two solved the BOM - PHP issue but it has added support for inserting some of the most commonly used PHP script elements. It also allows you to preview your PHP pages in the Cassini web server that ships with Expression Web simply by installing PHP on your computer without the need to install and configure IIS or Apache. See Introducing PHP Support in Expression Web 2 for more details.
When I have a chance I'll add some content on each of the above topics to the secure portion of the book's website (don't forget to get the updated chapter 3 files if you have the first printing, and the credentials for accessing the secure section are printed in the book.)
The bugs discussed in the book that were resolved are the BOM and FTP userid/password issues. Though there is an issue with Expression Web and FTP with IIS 7 running on Windows Server 2008. When you go to publish via FPT on IIS 7 your user name will have a | in it and Expression Web sees that as an illegal character.
I'll add more info as I get a chance either here or on the book site.
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Bandwidth for the Creating a Basic Website in Expression Web tutorial is going over my budget. As a result I have made available from another website the full video tutorial as a Windows Media download to supplement the Flash version you can view online.
If you are planning on watching the video from start to finish (1:20) I would appreciate it if you would use the download option available at http://by-expression.com/content/fullbasic.aspx and watch it from your local hard drive. This does not mean you can redistribute it anywhere just that you can keep a copy for your own personal use. If you wish to share it with others, please send them to the preceding url.
If you are attending my presentation tonight at the HAL-PC Web Design SIG and would like to follow along you can download the source file bladesofglory.zip Included in the zip file are the images uses and two text files of content. One for the main section and one for the sidebar.
A not quite complete version of what we will be doing looks like the image on the right.
What remains to be added is the menu that we will create (assuming time allows).
Life with Expression Web would be much simpler if Expression Web supported root relative links properly.
I am seeing where people are using third party generators to create menus for their website. Then they want to put these menus into their Expression Web site.
In order for your menu links to work regardless of what level in your site the requesting page is at you need to use what is called root relative links. That means that when the page is requested it is resolved based on the root level of your website instead of where the the page requesting the link is located. Take a site that has a root, two folders: articles and products with additional folders and pages in each of those folders.
This means if you have a page in the "articles" folder in your site and the link goes to the "products" section Expression web using document relative links would create a link like "../products/page.html".
Translated the path means go up one level from "articles" then over to "products" and send the page.html to the browser.
With a root relative link it would look like "documents/page.html" without the ".." since it is instructing the server to go to the root and send the page.html in the documents folder.
If you had a folder in articles that was named 2008 and had a page named july-20.html and wanted to go to the documents/page.html the document relative path would be "../../documents/page.html" while the root relative path would stay the same as in the earlier example of "/documents/page.html".
The problems with document relative roots if the links are in a server side include page or are embedded in JavaScript that are generated using document relative links with root level of the site as the base is when you are on the "articles/2008/july-20.html" and the path from the page is "products/page.html" the server will be trying to find a the page at "articles/2008/products/page.html" because it is looking for a path that starts from the requesting page.
For links it is easy enough to modify the links created by the their party tool (assuming it doesn't support root relative links natively since many do).
For any of you who may be in the Houston area I will be speaking at HAL-PC (Houston Area League of PC Users http://www.hal-pc.org) Next Tuesday, July 22nd at the Web Technologies SIG. While my presentation will focus on Expression Web 2 I intend to provide a preview of Dreamweaver CS 4 as well.
If you are going to attend and would like to follow along with either program you can get a trial version of Expression Web v2 from Microsoft at http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc136529.aspx
You can get the public beta of Adobe Dreamweaver CS 4 at http://labs.adobe.com/ while you are there take a look at the Fireworks CS 4 and Soundbooth betas as wells. Other programs to check out are Adobe Photoshop Express and if you ever wanted a tool that would help you with your website color scheming check out Kruler, http://kuler.adobe.com/.
Hope to see you there.
Some of you may have read the announcement not long ago that Google would now be able to index Flash files. Some said that meant HTML sites were dead and Flash would become "de rigour". Something I disagreed with for a wide variety of reasons not the least of which was a strong "wait and see" attitude towards how well Google would be able to implement indexing of Flash content.
Seems that I might have been right to be skeptical that Google would get everything in Flash, at least if you read what they have to say over on Sitepoint. http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/07/16/google%e2%80%99s-flash-indexing-disaster/
While it may not be quite the disaster they are painting it certainly does seem that Google was a mite premature in their implementation and documentation.
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