Ramble On

I’m setting up this new domain and I’m having to setup my own domains and since Media Temple don’t handle .co.uk’s, I couldn’t set them up when I purchased the server space. So while I was waiting for a dns change to be propagated from a UK registration service. I wanted to test that I had configured the server correctly for the new urls and discovered a remarkably useful ‘hosts’ file in both Windows and OSX that allows you to override your dns server and redirect urls to ip addresses. Remarkably useful and I don’t know why I wasn’t aware of them.

On Windows there’s a file called ‘hosts’ in 

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

You can edit the file using a text editor and add in your testing servers url and the ip address to direct the browser to. e.g.

127.0.0.1       mywebsite.com

OSX also has a ‘hosts’ file in /etc/hosts

Again you can edit the host file by using 

sudo vi /etc/hosts

and then add the required host definitions.

Posted in General, Web Design

A interesting idea, an advent calendar of useful web development tips. It seems to have been running for a few years but it’s the first time I’ve seen it. The first article is a web developer’s checklist for a web designer. Personally I’m not too keen on their design, but they appeared to have covered a wide range of topics in previous years.

‘24 way to impress your friends‘

Posted in Web Design

If you are and have a habit of producing very quick and rough mock-ups with a pen an a piece of paper (or maybe occasionally using an Table PC), then you might be interested in Balsamiq Mockups. This is an Adobe Air application that allows you to paste together quick mockups by dragging and dropping pre-defined templates onto a work area, such as a browser window, menu bar, image holder, etc.

It’s a really simple idea and works really well

Source: Interface Matters

Posted in Web Design