Internet and technology

I'm putting together an OpenLDAP authorisation system for a client's business web application, and wanted to test things out on my local windows machine. Well, I managed to get OpenLDAP working fine, but the authorisation using Apache has not been easy (in fact I'm still struggling with it ...). In the process, I've uninstalled and reinstalled php and apache a number of times to try and see where the problem is. This has in itself caused it's own issues, one of which was a php module not being loaded by apache.

Robin Good goes web 2.0 with his remix of Michael Arrington's "What is Web 2.0?" video. Michael remixes the original video so that we end up with the bits that stood out for him.

Good article that takes us through the fundamentals of good navigation, and how to make your website links usable.

Infoworld reviews 6 of the 'top' open source AJAX libraries. What I picked up from this article is that although we are still in the early stages of AJAX, there is enormous potential, and some great toolkits that will help you get started using AJAX on your webpages. For my first foray into AJAX, I didn't use any of the abovementioned libraries. I used scriptaculous to create a drag and drop sortable list that is automatically updated in the database.

If you are using ajax on any web pages, you will want to give some indication to the user that a request is being processed. Animated gifs like those found here are great for this.

I have been using phpMyAdmin for a long time now to manage MySQL databases via the web, and have really loved the functionality they provide when displaying forms. If there is a radio button or check box that needs to be checked, you don't have to aim for the box or button itself, you can just click on the text next to the button/box. And voilà, the button is checked. This makes it so much more useable, especially when filling in long forms. To do this all you need to do is put a label tag around the text next to the checkbox/radio button, and put in a 'for' attribute that tells the form what button or checkbox to check when you click on the label.

The latest version of wink now supports the recording of audio during capture. If you don't know what wink is: "Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.". Download it here.

I was trying to search for a certain bit of code in some files in dreamweaver, and was getting frustrated as there were no results, even though I knew the text was there. Turns out that dreamweaver was not searching in files that it didn't recognise (the extension was .men). I tried changing some settings to allow it to recognise the files, which it now does, but it still doesn't search them. Finally decided to change all the extensions to php as I know dreamweaver recognises php files and does search them. Found a nice freeware program that will rename multiple files.

Also, came across a nice feed aggregator from listening to the Mike Tech Show podcast (http://www.miketechshow.com/), called Omea Reader. Allows you to download podcasts directly from the reader. Check it out here: http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/

Came across a great FTP and SSH tool (WinSCP) for those of you who are web designers or web developers and spend some time transferring files and performing tasks on a remote web server.