Picked this up at Barnes and Noble after reading reviews on Amazon.  I’m a few chapters in and it looks like to be exactly what I needed.  I’m now comfortable using jQuery in my sites.  This book is a step by step explination of what jQuery is, how to use it, and why it does what it does.  I’m not totally through it yet, but I’m giving this one a 4.5/5.  If you’re looking to learn jQuery, this is your winner.

Let’s get something out of the way up front: Yes, it’s going to cost you more to pay the designer to implement WordPress off the bat.  A static HTML site that requires a producer to make any changes or maintenance is going to be cheaper at first.  That will work fine if you don’t plan on updating your website very often, or adding dynamic content like polls and comment systems.  Some clients just don’t need a CMS.  Most do.

Let’s say you decide on the static HTML site.  No problem, it’s easier for me to implement and code for anyway.  Some research, content development, site development, mock ups, implementation, annnnd we’re done.  The finished product is online, your customers love it, you get compliments from your friends on your flashy new website– all is well.

But wait, you want to update the news section, or add a new press release proclaiming how great your new site is!  So you shoot me an email with a draft.  I get the email, finish what I’m working on until I get to your job, implement the page, upload it, and shoot you a bill for my time.  You see a sentence you forgot to add, or a link that wasn’t initially in the copy you sent me originally and the process repeats: you shoot me another email, I finish whatever else I’m working on, get to your request, complete it and bill you.  This process might take half an hour, or it might take days.  For some clients this is great!  They don’t have to worry about sweating to get the new content up.  They’re paying for the convenience.  Hey, thanks!  I appreciate the business, and love working with your site.

There is another way.  You could decide at 9:02am on Monday morning that you need a news item for the important company change over the weekend and have it published and live on your site by 9:05am. All by yourself.  For free.  Then when you want to edit your content, it will take you even less time– and will be free again.  The hardest part is finding the sticky note with your user name and password on it.

The same goes for content on static pages… updating your “About” section might take you minutes, or adding a new link to your sidebar, or even an entirely new content section.  It takes about as much technical know-how as sending an email or using Microsoft Word.

This is the beauty of content management systems.  You have so much control at your fingertips through the powerful backend of the CMS that you totally cut out having to pay a designer unless you want to make major site changes.  Obviously if you make updates often and don’t want to enter into a service contract or maitenance agreement, this is a much cheaper alternative.

My requirements were:

1. Easy to learn.  I don’t have six months of Sundays to look over the documentation.  The more logically it operates, the better.  I’m not a Javascript programmer, so it will have to be pretty forgiving.
2. Easy to implement.  I don’t mind having to look up calls and properties from a reference, but if I can’t remember the syntax, or if its just too damn complicated to get through– then it’s out.
3. Lightweight.  No one wants a bulky library.
4. Quality.  Can’t sacrifice this.

After reading lots and lots of documentation and downloading all three, I’ve figured out that jQuery is powerful and fits all of my criteria, while the other two… while good at prettying up a page with animations and other graphic manipulation, didn’t really serve the purpose of what I was looking for.

The other thing that impressed me was the level of documentation on the jQuery site.  The tutorials, including the Getting Started Tutorial are essential to someone who isn’t a Javascript programmer… Like me.

I’ll be posting in the future on my progression with jQuery and what I’ve learned.

This was before all the shiny warning messages came up, I guess it was when the process was new.

I clicked “DO THIS NOW MAN” or whatever it says in the control panel, checked out my site and this blog was gone.  Poof.

Now normally it wouldn’t be the end of the world.  Reinstall Wordpress, grab the latest database backup, throw it in, reinstall the custom theme, and done.  That would be easy.  If I had a database backup or a copy of the theme.  I didn’t, so I threw my hands up and forgot about it for a little while.

Today I decided to fix the site and get it back up and running.  Went into the control panel, switched back to the Dreamhost “fully hosted” plan and waited for DNS to propegate. After about an hour I checked the site and the whole blog was back!

Turns out, if you move your hosting to fully Google, everything you still had on DH’s servers is still there waiting for you.  It’s just a DNS propegation.  Now, that’s not to say that after xxx amount of time of inactivity they don’t purge your old files, maybe I just got lucky.  But I’m glad I did.

Gentium
“A typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin and Greek scripts to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode.”

Cosmetica
The website’s language appears to be greek, but this is a great, clean, easy to read font that prints well.

District Thin
“The thinnest weight from GarageFonts’ District family, by Kienan and Dylan Smith. And it’s free! Give it a try.”

Delicious
“The Delicious is a font I designed because of my admiration for typography. It got a bit out of hand and in two years it resulted in a complete font family.”

Tallys
“Tallys is a font that is one degree slanted and has large caps, a small x-height and long ascenders. It comes (see also Fontin) with hybrid numbers and a complete character set.”

Fontin
“I’ve designed Fontin Sans to be a suitable sans companion of Fontin. With a nice classical appearance it will be a perfect match. Fontin will be rereleased in OpenType format (soon) as Fontin Semi (with a Bold Italic) to match new metrics an kerning. Be sure to check back once a while.”

Scriptina
A great script font.

Qlassik
Nice rounded font with some flare.  Bold is sweet too.

FF mt
“Erik Spiekermann’s most economical typeface ever. Employing obscure but powerful techniques like vwl mmssn and cap reduction, FF Mt uses up to 50% less paper, screen, and wall space than other text faces without a single condensed letter.”

FF Unit Rounded Bold
“In a semester project under Prof. Christine Wagner, students from the University of Applied Sciences Wiesbaden, Germany, designed a series of brochures about FontFont designers and their typefaces. Just have a look at the portraits of Xavier Dupré (FF Absara, FF Megano, FF Sanuk and more) and Martin Majoor (FF Scala, FF Seria).”

For a while a secondary developer took the Firebug script and hacked it up to work on FF 3.0+, but the Firebug guys have released their own stable beta that I’ve found to work great.

Some are reporting crashes in the Web Developer toolbar, but I haven’t seen that.  Granted I work almost exclusively with Firebug so take that for what it’s worth. It is listed to work with FF 3.0+.

I’m really happy with the improvements in the 3 beta. I’m sure if I grabbed a nightly I’d see even more improvement but my version has been solid as a rock, so I’ll wait for RC1 or the official launch which is listed as, “Early 2008 (TBD): Firefox 3 released, Firefox 2.0.x.y supported for next six months” in the release wiki.  I keep hearing June.