There's so much going on in the world of development, it's good to remember sometimes what a small piece of the pie we're actually working with.  As a designer and developer my main focus is implementing technologies like XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, etc.  I can't get out of my head lately the idea of all those people behind those technologies, the ones essentially enabling me to do what I do.

These are what I like to call the Enablers, who I'll admit I know very little about.  Who are the people behind Google Maps?  PHP and JavaScript and AJAX?  My daily work involves just putting their creation to use, what does their day look like?  There are some very smart people out there, and I want to take a moment to think about them, to think about their forward-thinking in coming up with technologies like CSS.  I can't imagine doing web design now without it, and I wonder about the genius mind that thought up the concept.

Through this jQuery-related forum thread I learned a small but valuable tip: You gain a slight performance edge by referencing absolute URLs instead of relative ones.

This came from sources certified by Google and Yahoo! for SEO/SEM.

 Maybe at some point I'll try FileHamster.  It looks promising, and it's geared toward web designers and developers.

It's finally time to start doing things right.  I just started using SVN through the TortoiseSVN Windows client.

Most of the tutorials and blog posts I found on running it locally presume that you're starting from scratch, i.e., you're embarking on a new project with zero files right now.  I, on the other hand, would like to be able to version control existing projects.  Secondly, they presume that you only have one project going at a time, which is probably not true for most developers.

Thankfully, the procedure is pretty much the same with existing multiple projects.  What you need to do differently is create subfolders inside the main repository folder, and import the existing files from their current location into their corresponding repository subfolders.  From there it's business as usual: checkout > edit > commit.

I still have to read about the more advanced features like merge, switch, and branch.  The software comes with great documentation, along with a link to the free online book on Subversion as a system and concept.

It's not new news that cross-browser compatibility is one of the biggest pains in developing for the web.  I've experienced it for myself, yet again.

For my recent New Mexico trip, I wanted to kill two birds with one stone:

1. Develop an interactive photo gallery, and
2. Explore the Simile Exhibit and Timeline widgets

Out of 500+ photos I chose 195 that I considered the best.  To display them, here's the process I undertook:

1. Extracted EXIF data using ExifTool GUI to a text file
2. Compiled a list of the files in Excel with the following data: filename, URL on server, when it was taken, where it was taken (latitude, longitude, using http://www.getlatlon.com), location (for the ones with a definite location), categories the photos belong to, and the lens I used
3. Converted the Excel file to JSON format using Simile's Babel service.  The JSON file needed some minor fixes with quotation marks, but that didn't take long.
4. From there I followed the documentation for Exhibit and ended up with this page.

Right now the Exhibit gallery works best in Opera, and even there the 'coordinator' feature of Exhibit doesn't work.  In IE and Firefox the Timeline loads without the customization script in the html file.  The odd thing is that to get the page to load at all in IE and Firefox, I had to purposely leave out a comma in the customization script.  Since it has that syntactical error, IE and Firefox ignore it altogether and (apparently) Opera overlooks it.

It would be nice to get the coordinator feature working, because then the photo selected in the timeline will show up on the map also, and vice versa.  For now I've created a separate version, without the timeline, here.

The nice thing is that Exhibit allows for Thickbox functionality.  The not-so-nice part, at least right now, is that it doesn't work well in IE.  For some reason when you scroll farther down a page and click on a thumbnail, the thickbox full-image opens at the top of the page, out of sight.  Firefox and Opera don't have this problem.