Site Overview
Welcome to Techpatterns.com. All advice given here is our experience, and has been tested or suffered through first hand. Here is a brief run-down of what is in each section of the site:
Site Construction
This is a brief technical overview of the coding techniques used to build Techpatterns.com, and some of the problems that had to be dealt with to create this type of site. More in depth discussions of the subjects in 'About' will be found in 'Coding', 'Programming', 'Software', and 'OS' when those sections are completed.
Free Scripts
All scripts are being continuously updated to keep up with changes, and are released using the standard opensource numbering scheme: 1.0.3. The first number indicates a major change, the second an added feature, the 3rd a small modification, such as adding a browser or operating system to the browser detection script.
Download free scripts. You can get PHP browser detection scripts, as well as javascript browser detection and also javascript cookie scripts.
We will be adding more scripts as we develop and test them. All scripts are tested to the best of our ability, but of course bugs will appear now and then. If you find one, please post it in the web programming forum.
Web Design
The web design section will eventually be expanded, since design is a really major part of what makes web sites work well and look good. Although the role of the designer can't be undervalued, it is critically important that the designers have at least working knowledge of current web technologies such as css and javascript, otherwise they try to do it all through their WYSIWYDG (what you see is what you don't get, despite their claims to the contrary), which generally results in dead websites.
But design of course also covers the actual design of the site and page architecture, which is where most of the real work takes place. The graphical element of a website should constitute somewhere around 5% of the work of making the site, at most, including content generation.
Software
This section will be expanded to cover browsersIt will also include configuration information, with screen-shots, of popular pc and mac ftp clients, email clients, browser configuration information, a brief overview of the more popular WYSIWYDG editors, with brief comments about why some are actually useful for some things.
Also included will be some information about cd burning, and the software we've tried, with warnings, and a fairly foolproof way to generate backup data cd's.
FAQ
All the things you might want to know something about, including search engine listings, web hosters and the headaches involved with them, and so on.
Coding
Techpatterns.com has adopted the use of the word 'coding' to designate the writing of XHTML, HTML, and CSS. In other words, coding does not contain language features such as 'if' or 'loop' or whatever, although it is our experience that if you mess up, you have to spend hours if not days figuring out where the bug is, so in that sense there isn't much difference between coding and programming, which does feature these grammatical elements.
Especially of interest will be the CSS section, since that is really the biggest part of what makes a modern web page do what it does. For somebody who really knows this stuff, go to Tapio Markula's Website, this guy is amazing, he knows more about all browser specific CSS issues than almost anyone else out there, he's Finnish, so his english isn't perfect, but that's ok.
Programming
We are work with the following languages: javascript (ecma262), php, and perl. This section contains a brief overview of what you can expect from each of these languages, and what their drawbacks and limitations are.
Of course, to see a real master, check out someone like Kurt Grigg, who makes Javascript do things you couldn't even imagine were possible, this guy is really good at what he does.