Apple has released Safari 3 Beta for Windows. Besides being slick and a pleasure to look at, it finally lets Windows-based web developers test their sites for the 5% that use Macs.

The other browsers that good web developers like us should test for are Opera, IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox.

Rails

dW | Turbocharge Ruby on Rails with Active Scaffold (June 2007)
dW | DB2 and Ruby on Rails, Part 3 (June 2007) [added]
dW | DB2 and Ruby on Rails, Part 2 (June 2007)
dW | DB2 and Ruby on Rails, Part 1 (May 2007)

I am using ActiveScaffold in my next mini-project.:)

“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”
- Thoreau

How users read on the web
In short:

• Neutral language is 27% easier to read than marketese
• Short text is 58% easier to read than verbose text
• Scannable bullets are 47% easier to read than blank prose
• Start with conclusion; add details after
• Voice one idea per paragraph

In addition to the PHP Performance link from yesterday, I just added four related to Javascript to the sidebar.

The Opera browser developers came up with some very good advice for making your Javascript run smoothly.

Around the same time, Internet Explorer 7 folk wrote a three part series on the same subject.

Both are rather illuminating.

FastCGI for IIS - Make PHP faster on Microsoft’s server.

Antonio Cangiano | Put DB2 Info Center in your browser search bar

JavaScript Lint

Developing PHP the AJAX way, Part 1: Getting Started

Developing PHP the AJAX way, Part 2: Back, Forward, and Reload

CNet | Google says speed is king

Sometimes I develop on Linux, sometimes on Windows. It’s mostly Windows right now. I tend towards editing with UltraEdit (or the free Crimson Editor, uploading with WinSCP, and doing command-line stuff with Cygwin. If you just want ssh (new-fangled telnet), PuTTY is easier to get working.

If I keep doing PHP stuff, I might end up switching to the Eclipse PHP IDE. Stranger things have happenned.

There’s a list of useful Windows software on my wiki.