Posts filed under 'Dreamweaver'
I have just added to my site a tutorial on converting a Spry Menu Bar into a server-side include. I have also been busy adding a bunch of brief articles to the Dreamweaver Cookbook on the Adobe site.
I answer a lot of questions in the Dreamweaver forums, and realized that a lot of the solutions I was coming up with for people weren’t easy to find after a couple of days. So, rather than letting them disappear into cyberoblivion, I decided to add any of general interest to the cookbook when I had a few spare moments. The Dreamweaver Cookbook is intended for code samples, and doesn’t have the capability of including screenshots, so I’ll continue posting longer tutorials on my own site. But I hope you’ll find my contributions to the cookbook useful.
Here are direct links to some of the articles I have added to the Dreamweaver Cookbook:
The Dreamweaver Cookbook is open to anyone to either request recipes or contribute recipes of their own. It could turn into a very useful resource if people start using it regularly. Check it out!
January 23rd, 2010
For the past two versions, Dreamweaver has come bundled with Adobe Bridge, a program that’s designed to make it easy to sort through visual assets, such as photographs, PDFs, and Flash movies. The idea behind Bridge is that it gives you quick access to items that you might want to work with in different parts of the Adobe Creative Suite. It’s particularly useful for Flash developers who want to build part of their movie in Illustrator or Photoshop. However, most Dreamweaver users seem to remain blissfully ignorant of its existence; or if they do know about it, they leave Bridge firmly shut.
That’s a shame, because Bridge has some very useful features. I use it frequently for batch renumbering my photos and for selecting photos to use in websites. The thumbnail images can be resized, making light work of choosing the best photo to zap into Photoshop and optimize for a web page. The other great feature in Bridge is what is called the Adobe Output Module. Among other things, this creates Flash-based web galleries of your visual assets. It’s incredibly easy to use, and produces really nice results.
The only problem is that the HTML file generated by Bridge makes the Flash movie fill the entire browser window, making it impossible to incorporate the gallery into an existing website. Well, it’s not really impossible. All it needs is a little editing of the HTML and JavaScript. I have created a new tutorial with step-by-step instructions to show how to incorporate an Adobe Bridge web gallery into a website. I hope you find it useful.
September 24th, 2009
About a year ago, Adobe asked me if I would become a moderator for Dreamweaver Community Help. The idea was to encourage people to use the Dreamweaver online Help files more frequently on the assumption that people would be more willing to do so if power users answered their questions promptly. It’s certainly worked. The problem is that some Help pages have become overwhelmed with questions. One of them is Customizing a Spry Menu Bar Widget.
It’s obvious that people love the ability to create a menu bar in seconds, but they hate banging their head on their keyboard trying to figure out how to edit the CSS. In response, I’ve created a couple of tutorials that are now live on my site. The first one goes into considerable detail, explaining the basics of customizing the CSS of a Spry Menu Bar, with instructions for both horizontal and vertical menu bars. The other, shorter tutorial shows how to centre a horizontal menu bar. I hope you find them useful.
September 20th, 2009
If you’re in the United States and own a Kindle, you can now get PHP Solutions, PHP Object-Oriented Solutions, and Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 delivered wirelessly to you in just a minute after placing your order on Amazon.com. This means that most of my books are now available on Kindle.
The only recent ones not yet available on Kindle are The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 and The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4. Both are long and contain a large number of screenshots, so it might take some time to convert them. Once they are, though, I’m sure Kindle owners will be delighted at no longer needing to lug such heavy books around. 
I only wish that Amazon would make Kindle available in Europe (and other parts of the world), too. I’ve been itching to get my hands on a Kindle.
March 20th, 2009
O’Reilly, the leading computer book publisher, has posted the results of a detailed analysis of the state of the computer book market in 2008. What both surprised and delighted me is the revelation that my book, The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP is listed by O’Reilly as the number 3 best seller in what it calls the Large Programming Languages category.
O’Reilly classifies a programming language as “large” if more than 100,000 copies of books dedicated to that language sell during the year. That’s the total for all titles, not how many copies of each book that sell. According to O’Reilly’s data (gathered from Nielsen BookScan, which tracks roughly 70% of book sales in the USA), books on PHP were the third most popular category, selling a total of more than 173,000 units. The bad news is that 129 titles were competing for the same PHP book market, making the average sales for each title a meagre 1,340. I haven’t seen my sales figures for Q4 2008, but I’m pleased to say that the figures for the first three quarters put my sales well above the average. However, they’re not all that big, which is why I was surprised to find my book at number 3. O’Reilly lists the top 5 as follows:
- Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform
- Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One
- The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP
- Head First Design Patterns
- PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide
It’s interesting to note that three of the top 5 are about PHP, confirming my belief that PHP is a strong language that’s here to stay for a long while.
With so many books competing for a relatively small market, you might wonder why authors like me continue to write. Researching, writing, and editing a book takes many months of hard work—and all for the sake of a couple of dollars royalty on each copy sold. Part of the answer lies in the fact that I like writing. I did it for many years in my career as a radio and TV journalist; it’s what I’m good at. It’s also nice to see my work in print. In TV and radio news, I might have been seen or heard by millions, but once the news bulletin was over, that was it. Although computer books have a relatively short shelf life, they certainly last longer than a news bulletin; and I hope my readers get practical value from them.
The other thing that drives many of us to write is the hope that, one day, we’ll hit the big time. O’Reilly has also analyzed the top three best-selling writers of computer books: David Pogue, Scott Kelby, and Andy Rathbone. Between them, they account for nearly 6 percent of the computer book market. Andy Rathbone, who comes in at number 3, sells more books each year than I have sold since I started writing about PHP and web design five years ago. David Pogue, the biggest seller, clocked up an impressive 190,000 copies last year. I’m sure he’s delighted—and let’s be honest, he deserves success because he’s a good writer—but it pales into insignificance alongside JK Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter.
Anyway, thank you to everyone who bought my book and helped me reach number 3 in the Large Programming Languages category. And thank you to O’Reilly for doing all the number crunching.
February 27th, 2009
The problem I reported yesterday with the friendsofed.com domain appears to have been resolved, and the main website is now back online. To get the source code for my books, go to the friends of ED downloads page, and select the link for the relevant book. The books are listed alphabetically using the full title, so for example The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4 is listed under T, not under E. You can also get the source code from my site, as indicated in yesterday’s post.
If you’re contemplating buying one of my books, and want a better idea of what they’re like, sample chapters in PDF format are available for each title. Just go to the list of web design books at friends of ED, and click the link for the title you’re interested in. This brings up a description of the book; you can download the sample chapter from the links on the right.
February 22nd, 2009
Normally, the source code for my books is available from the downloads page of the friends of ED website. However, there appears to be a problem with the friendsofed.com domain registration, and the site is currently offline. I have no idea how long it will take friends of ED to get back online, so I have uploaded the source files for my Dreamweaver and PHP books to my website (foundationphp.com).
You can find a link to the zip file for each book at the bottom of the following pages (files added for “Foundation PHP 5 for Flash”):
The problem with the main friends of ED website does not affect the friends of ED forum, where you can post any questions about the books and any problems you might encounter.
February 21st, 2009
In my experience, Dreamweaver is a very stable program; but like all software, it occasionally misbehaves. There have been a lot of reports recently about Dreamweaver crashing on start up. Nearly everyone affected is using an Acer computer. Apparently, there’s a known conflict between Dreamweaver and Acer eDataSecurity Management v3.0. If you’re on an Acer, and Dreamweaver won’t start, download the patch from http://www.egistec.com/oem-acer001/program-update.html.
Most of the time, however, the cause is a corrupted cache file called WinFileCache-********.dat or MacFileCache-********.dat inside your personal Dreamweaver configuration folder (the asterisks represent a series of letters and numbers that might differ from computer to computer). The solution is quite simple: close Dreamweaver and delete WinFileCache-********.dat or MacFileCache-********.dat, depending on your operating system.
The location of the personal configuration folder depends on your operating system and version of Dreamweaver. For Dreamweaver CS4, it’s as follows:
- Vista: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver CS4\<language>\Configuration
- Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver CS4\<language>\Configuration
- Mac OS X: Macintosh HD:<username>:Library:Application Support:Adobe:Dreamweaver CS4:<language>:Configuration
In all cases, <username> is the name of your user account on the computer and <language> indicates the language of your operating system. The language is usually represented by two pairs of characters separated by an underscore, as in en_US (English), es_ES (Spanish), or fr_FR (French).
Earlier versions of Dreamweaver locate the personal configuration folder in a slightly different location. This is where it can be found in Dreamweaver CS3:
- Vista: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
- Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration
- Mac OS X: Macintosh HD:Users:<username>:Library:Application Support:Adobe:Dreamweaver 9:Configuration
The Dreamweaver configuration folders are hidden on Windows, so you need to enable the option to view hidden files and folders in order to locate them, as follows:
- In Vista, select Start > Computer > Organize > Folder and Search Options > View. In Advanced settings, choose Show hidden files and folders.
- In Windows XP, select Start > My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > View. In Advanced settings, choose Show hidden files and folders.
Once you turn on this option, hidden folders are displayed as dimmed icons to remind you to treat them with care.
February 11th, 2009
I seem to be jinxed with the way phpMyAdmin “celebrates” the publication of one of my books by changing its setup process. It happened twice with Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. I updated the instructions between the first and second printings, but was caught out by a second change. Now it’s happened with The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP. The book was published on 1 December, and on the very same day phpMyAdmin 3.1.0 was released, changing the setup procedure yet again.
I’ll create a full tutorial on the revised procedure when I get time, but you can find a summary of the main differences on the updates page for The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4.
December 7th, 2008
Defining a local testing server in Dreamweaver isn’t difficult, but a surprising number of people get it wrong. So, I have created a couple of video tutorials that describe the options and then take you through the actual process in the Site Definition dialog box. Because the options are different for Windows and Mac OS X, I have created separate tutorials. Both are approximately eight minutes long.
The tutorials are hosted on an Adobe site, and the videos start automatically after opening in a new window. A control panel lets you skip to different sections of the tutorial, and most of the text can be read by opening the Notes tab. The videos are resizable, but are best viewed in a 1024 x 768 browser window. The Windows tutorial is here, and the Mac one is here.
November 21st, 2008
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