You may have noticed the release of the CMX mobile/handheld device CSS reference resource yesterday. With mobile access becoming an increasingly important area of our work. and information in general on CSS support for mobile browsers being scarce we thought it would be good to have an open source mobile reference point, a place where you can search for mobile device/browser information and also add devices to the resource.

When designing for the mobile internet you need to be aware that not all handheld devices' browsers support the handheld media type, many only see the screen media type which means your small screen design needs to be carefully planned out to ensure that you get the display you need. Further to this some handheld browsers read both the screen and handheld media style sheets so you need to be fully aware of the rules of specificity and how to implement them to deal with these browsers correctly.

Don't get caught in a trap where you think just declaring a handheld media type is good enough, it isn't.

You can access the desk top search interface here: http://www.communitymx.com/mobile/mobileD/ For info on handheld browser support you would be best searching for the browser name.

You can add your device to the database for others to reference by visiting here: http://www.communitymx.com/mobile/ this is only accessible by handheld devices though. If you do add your device please complete the CSS reference point checks.

An article on using and how the data collection works is available here: http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=AA8A9

Look forward to hearing any comments you may have.

This week we have begun a Let's Learn ColdFusion learning track.

The series with dedicated forum support which provides a group learning experience is aimed at folks that have absolutely no server-side knowledge or experience at all. If you are a CMX member or would like to join in order to participate in the Let's Learn ColdFusion learning track now is the time to do it. Part 1 featuring the installation and set up of your local development environment was released this week, in forthcoming weeks you will learn how to implement ColdFusion and gradually build up to creating your own simple CMS.

What a great idea! myBlogTunes provides the ability for you to add music to your blogs by creating online radio stations with their own custom player.

Dan at myBlogTunes had this to say when I spoke to him about the concept...

myBlogTunes allows bloggers and webmasters to create online "radio stations" and post them on their own blog or web site via the myBlogTunes player.

Salt Lake City, UT (PRWEB) May 15, 2006 -- Tornadostream, LLC (www.tornadostream.com), a multimedia company from Salt Lake City, Utah that specializes in streaming media of all types, announced today the beta launch of their new myBlogTunes player which allows bloggers and webmasters to create online "radio stations" and post them on their own blog or web site.

A first of its kind, myBlogTunes has a simple user interface in which bloggers can create new stations, select songs for that station to play, and then ad a simple line of code to their web sites to display the player.

As a blogger creates more stations they are automatically displayed in the player on the blogger’s site without ever having to change the code.

Jesse Harding, co-creator of the tool says he and Dan Smith came up with the idea while trying to find a convenient way to share new songs they had discovered. “We’re both music fanatics. We built the player so that we could point each other to new songs online, and then realized the potential this had for the blogging community.”

Harding and Smith are both avid bloggers and both have had the player on their own blogs for the past two months.

“The response has been great.” said Smith. “People love the ease of use and the idea that they can check out new music as they read my blog”.

Interested bloggers and webmasters can sign up for a free myBlogTunes beta account at www.tornadostream.com.

A short while back I had an email from a guy in Australia, his name is Bill Gillespie.

Bill is a teacher, and a pretty good one by the looks of things. The children at Kanwal Public school have entered a website design competition, the theme for the competition is water, and the children have specifically chosen water safety as the theme to work with.

The children are aged 10 and 11 years old and have been learning how to handcode html and CSS within Dreamweaver with Bill's guidance and they have done extremely well, lots of talent there for sure.

The image to the left shows the final website. I think you'll agree that they have done a fantastic job and deserve congratulating on both the presentation of the website and the graphics they have made to get the importance of the theme across, great job guys!

Not only have they completed the design but they have also been out and about interviewing the relevant authorities on water safety; so the website will not only look good but carry important information on water safety in general.

Something tells me that Bill might be able to sit back and put his feet up in the not to distant future while the kids just get on with it, excellent work.

I am so fed up with snail mail junk mail I thought I'd have some fun. I recommend this for anyone who hates junk mail!

Say you get two sets of junk mail, you know the ones they have pre-paid envelopes inside so you can get your "cost the earth" credit card or perhaps the latest kitchen...

Here is what you do....

You put the kitchen blurb in the pre-paid credit card envelope and send it to the credit card company and then you put the credit card blurb in the kitchen company's envelope and send that to the kitchen company.. I'm sure you get the idea.

It means that each has to pay to have a load of rubbish sent back to them, highly recommended and great fun! You never know, if enough people do it it might kill the junk mail altogether!

I don't know how many of you know Paul Dell, a Birmingham lad from the UK living in Spain. He runs and owns dellwebsites, and Dell the computer giant aren't very happy that he should dare to use his own name and are suing the ass off him as we speak. If you can spare a dollar or whatever your currency is to help Paul you can do it here and get a very nice template design into the bargain.

Paul needs all our support, let's see if we can't rally round him and give him the support he desperately needs.

I, for one, have bought my last of anything from Dell.

Read about it at the register

I treated myself to the all singing all dancing Logitech MX 1000 cordless laser mouse, 20x more proficient than the optical mouse so they say.

I have to say after the best part of two weeks use I am impressed, the laser tracking is superb; I would imagine a must for fiddling with graphics and the like. I kid you not; the laser is that good I can use my head as a mouse mat - probably the best use for it anyway - and navigate around anywhere I choose as if I was on a perfect "mousing" surface.

I also treated myself to a Logitech web cam this means that I now have the ability to frighten anyone in the world that happens to unwittingly catch a glimpse of me coding at the machine...

Damn baton! stupid idea :~)

I've been batonised at least three times today, so decided to give in and blog it...

Total Volume

I have no idea how much I have on my machine, not much for sure. I tend to be a CD buyer.

Last CD Bought

Le Roi EstMort, Vive Le Roi! by Enigma

Translates to the "The King is dead, long live the King!" should you be at all interested. Sort of trance electronic music, nice to chill out to.

Song Playing Right Now

Heroin - Lou Reed from the live Rock'n'Roll Animal, album, cool song gets up and bites your ass!

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

All the songs that mean a lot to me are the ones I listened to when I was a kid.

• Heroin - Lou Reed
• Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven
• Mountain - Nantucket Sleigh Ride
• Hendrix - Machine Gun
• Steppenwolf - Born to be wild

Five People to Whom I’m Passing the Baton

1. Holly Bergevin
2. Brian Edgin
3. Danilo Celic
4. Derrick Ypenburg
5. Joel Martinez

It occurred to me that we have nothing in the way of Macromedia user groups in the North of England, which is a shame. We have a lot of talented folks up here in the north and I thought it would be a great idea if we could perhaps look at getting a Macromedia User Group - MMUG - up and running.

So, if you are in the North of England and fancy getting involved or have an interest in attending MMUG events, such as presentations and good fun evenings out where we can discuss all things web related let me know. You can mail me at adrian at webade dot co dot uk and if we generate enough interest then I'll see what we can do about starting up a group for "us northern folks"!

Don't forget I will need a mail address to keep you informed of developments, sending that to the webade address would be great, cheers.

Funny how it is always your own site that gets neglected, I've been meaning to redesign mine for quite some time.

Today I finally managed to complete the job, and it all went live. The site is loosely based around the Paris JumpStart with one or two additions built into the CSS.

If you want to take a look you can find it here, My new site. The JumpStarts make this kind of thing very easy, you can quickly add in a few extra bits to personalise the design and the structure is easily tweaked. If you have any of the JumpStarts you've customised then post a link to them here and let's see what you've been up to.

Well folks, today saw the release of our first CMX JumpStarts design, Paris.

Paris has been created using the CSS positioning design technique and meets the standards as laid down for xhtml 1.0 transitional and CSS 2, it also meets the accessibility specifications for 508 and WAI. With the excellent support provided in our forums this could be an ideal time for those of you looking at moving your work forward to meet this level of accessibility.

Paris provides a fantastic opportunity to move your design work on to the next level, both from a coding and an accessibility view.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on Paris, and any ideas you might have for future releases in the CMX JumpStarts series.

The sound of rat-a-tat-tat grabbed my attention and I looked through the window towards the front door, a neighbour was there. I got up out of my favourite chair in front of the computer, opened the door and said "Hi Bert, what can I do for you?" - name changed to protect the guilty :). "My computer won't start," was the reply. "Well it will but it crashes out without ever allowing me to access anything, could you take a look?" Bert is a nice guy, always helpful. I slipped my shoes on and walked with him down the road to his house.

The symptoms he had described were correct and after a few attempts his machine - running Win ME - managed to stay afloat long enough for me to have a look around the system. 29% free resources, it was a modern miracle it was running at all this time!

His son is a music fan and had been downloading, ahem "free music" from a well known warez site; and a ton of stuff he no doubt didn't think he was getting. Spyware running everywhere on startup, hence the problems Bert was experiencing. Could I remember the URL of search and destroy? Could I heck as like. MSN Messenger to the rescue.

I noticed the little green guy in the systray and opened him up and logged in. A quick scan down my contacts and I could see Laurie and Patty Ayers online. I sent a message to both of them asking for the URL I couldn't remember. Both came back with the excellent search and destroy URL. I thanked them and logged off. A voice behind me could be heard to say...

"Bloody hell, I've never even used that, where does it get the answers from?"

"Which, Bert?"

"That little green guy, how did he know what you needed?"

"Oh, right. They were friends I was contacting for information."

"Really!"

Bert is amazed at this point...

"That's bloody marvellous, technology hey, amazing what they can do these days, bloody amazing!"

Bert went quiet....

Then...

"How did they know you were here?"

It took a little while to explain, and he now has me as his only MSN Messenger contact. :) Poor guy, me of all people!

Anyway, back to the machine, he had over 200 instances of various spyware running on his machine. All are now happily in spyware heaven - hell? who knows? - and his resources are running at 70%. Not great, but better, and the machine is usable again. It was a fun hour, a few brews and a good laugh along the way.

Well today it all starts again! It is just like it used to be at Christmas when I was a kid, except better :)

Today is the first day of the new Premiership campaign, football is back - with a proper ball :). I'd like to hear from any of you with an opinion, what are your thoughts for the coming season.

• Who do you support?
• Which team do you really dislike?
• What are your hopes and dreams for this season?

Tomorrow I'm on holiday, I'll see you all when I get back. By then a few games will have been played, things will be taking shape and opinions should be many!

Sun, sea and sangria, here I come....

When you first install Dreamweaver it is very easy to get caught in "the sweetie shop" with regard to extensions, we all love them! They ease our workflow and allow us to implement functionality in a few clicks, often saving a great deal of time on repetitive tasks. After a while we see the error of our ways, we look at what we grabbed from the sweetie shop and realise most we never use at all. The weeding out begins!

I think it would be kind of cool to share what remains in our Extension Managers after the weeding out has taken place. We could share information on the extensions that we REALLY find useful here, we could point other Dreamweaver users to where they can get them and explain to them why we think they are so useful.

I'll start the ball rolling with some of my favourites, in no particular order:

• Tom Muck's dynamic SQL Search and his Recordset navigation suite
• Danilo's CMX create include
• Massimo's check image upload

The dynamic SQL search extension by Tom Muck is just such a huge time saver, and it is so easy to implement. From selecting the searchable columns to setting the high-lighting of the search words in the results. The time saved in producing a really professional search facility is immeasurable!

Another one of Tom's extensions is the recordset navigation suite, very nice. You can check this one out here, easier to see it in action than try to explain. Incidentally this site also uses the dynamic SQL Search extension, try searching for mice from the banner to see the high-lighting in the search results. This site is still under going some work, so one or two little issues around.

Danilo's CMX create include, just makes the whole include process a breeze. Select your code and create the include from the context menu, job done!

Massimo's Check Image Upload, the perfect solution for a multitude of situations. Catches the width and height on upload for inserting into the database, makes image upload facilities in a CMS a breeze. PC browsers only on this one though.

The three I have mentioned are all to do with server-side technologies, feel free to point out extensions of whatever category you feel helps you most.

What do you have in your box of tricks?