I recently tried Google Sitemaps, and found it to be a great way to see your website through Google’s eyes. The core purpose of Google Sitemaps is for website owners to feed Googlebot an XML sitemap listing URLs for all pages on their site (including those that may be otherwise inaccessible to robots), but there are many other features that web developers will appreciate.

I recently stumbled upon an archive of podcasts from the 2006 South by Southwest web design conference. There are like a gazillion of them, and they’re a lot cheaper than an international airfare and a conference ticket. In fact they’re free. Enjoy.

If you’re a web developer who is using Beta 1 or Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7 for testing purposes, I recommend taking the time to upgrade to IE7 Beta3.

I was listening to a recent episode of one of my favourite podcasts, Boagworld, when Paul Boag asked a question that made me pause for thought: Now that Microsoft have dropped support for Windows 98, is it time to stop testing websites in IE5?

It strikes me as odd that the uptake of PHP5 has been so slow. The snail’s pace at which web hosts are migrating to PHP5 has been hampered not by lack of user interest, but because a few popular PHP applications (OSCommerce, for one) break under PHP5. In this respect, I suppose the web host’s hands are tied.

Recently I was discussing with my studio-mates what sort of contingency plan we have in place to prevent data loss. We all work as professional designers, and almost 100% of our work for clients is stored in digital format. A hard drive failure, fire, or theft of our computers could be catastrophic, setting us back days - possibly even weeks.

If you’ve not already done so, it’s time to ditch pixels as a unit for sizing fonts. Sizing fonts for the web using ems and relative dimensions is easy and accurate. No really, it is.

Adobe Flash Player 9 is available to download now from the Adobe website. The big news about this version of the player is it’s support for Actionscript 3, the new version of the Flash programming language.

Since adopting a standards based approach to web design, I have wasted numerous development hours struggling with inconsistencies in the way web browsers implement the CSS spec. Sure, you can use CSS hacks to serve different CSS rules to different browsers, based on their own quirky interpretation of CSS, but that is a dangerous path to tread.