How many times did someone send you a word document complete with numbered paragraphs and ask you to convert to (x)html? It happens to me all the time. Next time I am going to try this on-line as it worked very well on a demo. Daring Fireball: Markdown Web Dingus.

You can also get a markdown perl script here if you want to run it locally or on your site. It appears to be an open source project … but then there is a $50 license fee for commercial work. I don’t quite understand how the two go together. If you do, please leave a comment.

Browser Header Checker is a nice little site to check your browser header string, remote address and other browser variables. Very handy.

I have been working on understanding CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) better as they appear to be where it is at for good web design. I really enjoy looking around the Zen Garden Project and the Word Press CSS Contest. These are awesome examples of style separated from content.

One of the things that tended to confuse me was the use of three character colors in Cascading Style Sheets. What did #fff mean? Well it took a bit of digging, but I think I have it now. The math majors tell me that if you use a six character red, green, blue (or RGB as commonly referred to) color scheme, you need six characters to form 16,000,000 colors. Conversely if you limit yourself to a 256 color web-safe palette, you need only use three characters. So the CSS wizards decided you could avoid needless repetition by simply using the shortcut method.

In case there is any confusion, you simply give the first letter of each color pair (example f in a three character RGB color would become ff) is simply repeated. So it is #RRGGBB. Hex numbers are represented by the characters 0-9 and letters A-F, for a total of 16 characters. So long as you are satisfied with staying within the color cube, using the three character color codes in CSS will make for smaller file sizes and less typing.

Independent Testers.org – Home Page is a site that will have various volunteers look through a site on different browsers and provide a report back. Interesting concept as long as the volunteers don’t mind the grind 🙂

I often am looking at something on my computer and think, now that is a nice color … what is it. In the past I most often look either at the coding (if it is CSS for example) or save the image locally and then look using my photo/image editing software. So today I said ENOUGH! I went looking for a free dropper and found one that I like: Color Picker Eye Dropper. It has many options like which color format to show/use, copy and paste to the clipboard or a color dialog, etc. Very nice.

I have posted a new “tutorial” although it is really just an accumulations of findings I had in trying to solve the broken box model in Internet Explorer 5. This results in problems for css layout sites when viewed in IE5 unless some adjustment is made. In this article, The Box Model Hack and other solutions to fixing the IE5 problem with CSS layout: HTML FIX IT . COM, I attempt to cover the very basic of five ways I found to get around the problem. I hope it is helpful to you.

An excellent article on how to use Google’s Search Engine for good and evil: The perils of Googling.

It both points out how you should carefully think through what you do in your day to expose data/information, and suggests many helpful ways to use Google to find exactly what you are looking for. Certainly worth a read!