If you do most of your editing in a plain text environment, you don’t get to take advantage of time-saving features like easily replacing text with hyperlinks—but a quick AutoHotkey script can make it much easier.
Opening a browser and loading a website you built yourself is a great moment. If you or someone you know needs some help getting to that point, The Web Book is a free, roughly 300-page PDF resource of DIY web building.
Though you can make a strong argument for hand coding your web site the appeal of a What You See Is What You Get approach is undeniable. This week we take a look at the five most popular tools for WYSIWYG HTML editing.
Firefox and Safari partially support it, Google’s Wave and Chrome projects are banking on it, and most web developers are ecstatic about what it means. It’s HTML5, and if you’re not exactly sure what it is, here’s an explainer.
Google’s search results have long included a “View as HTML” option tacked next to PDF files it indexed. Now it’s increasingly just “View”, as the native viewer app used in Google Docs is available for quick document scans.
Firefox: If you’ve ever sighed and said “Oh Firebug, if only you were wide screen!”, today is your lucky day. Widerbug is a version of the popular web development tool tweaked for wide screens.
All platforms with Firefox: The WiseStamp beta Firefox add-on edits, saves, and applies rich HTML signatures to your web-based email accounts, including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL mail. With WiseStamp installed, you get a rich HTML editor that lets you create signatures with links, colours, images, and formatting, plus links to your favourite social network profiles. You can make more than one signature, too—like personal and business. Once you’re in your webmail account, WiseStamp adds a signature drop-down so you can choose which sig to use with the current email, or it can insert it automatically. Take a look at some screenshots of WiseStamp in action.
Planning to spend some time during one of those mythical “free” weekends whipping your web site into shape? Open Web Design, a free and frequently-updated collection of site templates handed out without copyright, is a great place to start looking. We’ve posted similar collections before, but Open Web Design trumps our archives for up-to-date designs and breadth of material—images, CSS templates, and standard HTML are all available. The site is free to use, and registration lets you submit ideas and post to a forum. Open Web Design [via Web Worker Daily]
When you want to turn that giant spreadsheet into an HTML table without wrangling too many TD’s and TR’s by hand, you can use a formula to generate the HTML tags for you. The Design Intellection blog describes how to use the =CONCATENATE("text", cell, "text") spreadsheet formula to turn a row of data into an HTML table row. On Friday, Kevin pointed out a web-based HTML table generator that’s a simple, fast solution for small tables; but if your data’s already in a spreadsheet and the word “concatenate” doesn’t make you want to run screaming, this may be a better way to go. Using Spreadsheets to Easily Create HTML Tables and Forms [Design Intellection]
If you’re one of those folks who handwrites HTML, you know how laborious it can be to type out all the tags and descriptors for a simple but highly-efficient table. Kotatsu, a free AJAX utility, generates clean code for however many rows and columns you need, with optional class options thrown on the cells. The code is blog, personal site, and start page-friendly, and that’s all there is to it (thankfully). Kotatsu [via MakeUseOf]
