This tool is awesome! Well, for me anyway!

As anyone who is familiar with the Hines57 sites will realize, we recently made a massive change to not only the look and feel, but also the underlying engine(s) and hosting. Part of this change was moving to WordPress for this blog.

I enjoy writing, and blogging comes somewhat natural to me, but the niceties of MS Office have ruined me. That is, I like cut and paste, I want images in my content and I want them in a certain place, the whitespace needs to make me happy.

Typically, this is somewhat difficult to do given a web interface, a text box, the need to upload images separately – yada, yada, yada. Enter Windows Live Writer.

First, I Googled “offline blog editor” and quickly realized that there were two major players, BlogDesk and Windows LiveWriter. Then I thought, “Hey, I need this to work with WordPress!” I went back and threw WordPress into the search, and was surprised to see that Windows Live Writer continued to come up! Having read about Windows Live Writer earlier this summer, I decided I’d go check it out.
(more…)

JQuery is a relatively powerful Javascript library that can be incorporated into webpages and used to extend them in some exciting and creative ways. Not only does it provide AJAX functionality out of the box, there are literally hundreds of ways to manipulate your page in the browser. A friend of mine (Joseph Szobody – Signature Tech Studio) has been encouraging me to learn to leverage this library and suggested this book as a method of diving in.

I found the book itself to be quite well written. It begins by making no assumptions regarding your knowledge of JQuery (although it does assume you grok JScript) and starts with the most basic steps all the time pushing toward more powerful usages of the library.

With numerous real-world client-side issues addressed, you are bound to find a solution to 90% of your questions in the first few chapters. JQuery is also extensible, and many people out there are continually writing libraries on top of it.

This book dedicates the last few chapters to a review of some of the more common\popular libraries and assists you in understanding where you might leverage it in your projects.

All together, if you have never touched JQuery and are interested in learning something about it, this is a great book for you. If you already know a bit about the language, you are probably looking for something else though.

ISBN-13 #: 978-1-847192-50-9

Recommended?: Yes