OMGG! (oh my golly gosh) I have had the most tremendously hard week. I’ve had 2 different web sites to produce, an hour long power point presentation for a shop display. Make a barcode program that can create a barcode from a product name, build 2 systems that can talk to each other but still be protected against outside intrusion and finally, design and print a variety of business cards for clients.

I couldn’t have done half of the coding and designing if it wasn’t for the wonderfulness of the internet!

Some sites that were instrumental to me learning new things were:

ErracticWisdom where I (finally) learned how to create a layout from scratch using css (no tables!). I used to make websites with photoshop, slice them up and save for web which would make some ugly table based pages that for lack of any other way of creating the site, had to do. The problem with table based layouts is that they are ugly, it all takes a long time to load and they don’t always behave nicely when you want to add extra content.

That problem is now solved, I took what I learned from Tom Fadial and experimented like crazy and now I am super stoked that I can create some pretty snazzy looking websites that load in a split second and are xhtml compliant. yey! thanks Tom!

Trevor Davis.net had an excellent tutorial on how to make an AJAX contact form which was absorbed, modified and implemented into my new .css based site and it turned out to be shockingly good. Enough to get me another project! Nice one Trevor!

There’s also jquery which I have been using for some experimentation lately, it’s a fantastic AJAX library which takes an awful lot of the pain out of coding AJAX pages. It’s so fantastic that you can create really simple effects and AJAX loadings in seconds.

I’ve even managed to sell a few iMaingo speakers direct from this site via Google Checkout!

Everything else has been put on hold while all these projects get completed so apologies to those wanting to see part 6 of the AJAX tutorial series, it’ll be here soon and it’ll be worth the wait!

uVme has now launched, it’s been a wait but hopefully all the kinks have been worked out and we’ll all be ready to make some money with it soon (although the site was performing poorly today). Come on VWD! get your act together, you’ve had over a year to get this right and I still can’t edit my profile. pah!