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When it comes time to start building a website for your client (or yourself), where do you do the build-out? On the client’s server? On your server? What if the client already has a live site, and you need to make major changes/additions but you don’t want to interfere with the site. What do you do? What do you do???

MAMP for Mac users

If you’re a Mac user, you can build the site on your own machine, for you have a built-in Apache web server as part of the Apple operating system. To be perfectly honest, I switched to the Mac world 9 years ago, and haven’t owned a Windows box since, so I have no idea what PC folks have pre-installed, but I do know you can install PWS (Personal Web Server) or IIS.

I choose not to use the built-in in server on my Macbook because it requires some tinkering with to use MySQL, something I use frequently. Instead, I choose to use a free, stand-alone application called MAMP, which is a PHP development environment that includes MySQL. It allows me to build a website on my laptop, so I can test layout and functionality without uploading anything to a live server, or running the risk of screwing up anything on a live site. The video explains it.

MAMP is a Mac-only product, but Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac users can use the equally free alternative application called XAMPP to accomplish the same goal of building and testing sites locally.

Click on the image to view the video. Flash 9 player or higher is required.

This screencast is a brief overview of the CSS box model. The model itself isn’t a very difficult concept, but understanding it is critical to diving into the world of CSS-based layout. Hopefully, this video will paint a clear picture of the box model.

Click on the image to view the video. Flash 9 player or higher is required.

CSS box model

This screencast was a question/request from a participant in a training I recently did in Yakima, WA. The question was how to create a still image with a play button that will start a video’s playback. That image is also known as a poster image. Using Flash and Actionscript 3.0, I’ll walk you through creating a poster image for a Flash video.

Files used in the video can be downloaded here: video poster files (6.11mb)

Click on the image to view the video. Flash 9 player or higher is required.

Creating a Flash video poster image

A brief video overview of creating columns in CSS with the use of the float property. This addresses just one of the things that represent the tip of the tip of the CSS iceberg, but hopefully, this will give you a bit of a jumpstart in what I hope will be a long, happy relationship between you and CSS.

Click on the image to view the video. Flash 9 player or higher is required.

Creating columns with CSS