You are a website developer, use Mac and have not switched to Intel based one. Probably you are having a hard time to check how your websites look on Internet Explorer on Windows.

Every web developer knows that IE has not been too much a follower of the web standards, so any site that looks good in every other browser may not be the same on IE. So how to test this with your machine limitation?

If installing VirtuaPC software is not an option, here is another good alternative: NetRenderer. It is a web based IE previewer for IE 6 & 7. All you need is inputting your site’s address and click ‘Render’, then it will give you the result as if it is seen from IE.

This site really helps me a lot and quite fast doing its job. So, kudos for the developers!

Flash does not give native support for connecting to database (DB). There are many variations of how to do this, especially to MySQL. The most simple is by using XML and PHP. I always prefer to use the most easy one (as I’m not a real programmer) even it would add the server requirements.

Amfphp is the answer for me. It is a remoting service, a term which I did not understand at all at first. To make it simple, it translates all the hard coding into very short lines in your ActionScript and PHP files.

This is all what you need to know/have to start learning:

• Intermediate knowledge in Flash ActionScript
• Basic knowledge in PHP (know the syntax and how to initialize connection to MySQL)
• Can set up MySQL DB (I use PHPMyAdmin)
• Know basic SQL queries

Then go download the files on their site. They also provide nice to tutorials on how to install and set it up for the first time.

Tips: You might also want to google around to look for some example of using it. Here’s one site that I remember: www.flash-db.com.

For all of you who ever use other than Safari as your primary browser, you might notice that Safari is lacking the feature to disable/enable CSS on a page/site. So it is always enabled.

We can use something called Safari bookmarklets to solve this. Here’s how:

1. From Safari, CMD+right click then choose ‘Copy Link’ this link.
2. Add the previously copied link as one of your bookmark, you may name it ‘Toggle Linked CSS’ or anything.
3. Now, everytime you browse just click on that bookmark during a visit of a page and you can see it with its CSS disabled.
4. Confused? Just try to test it by clicking on the link above or the added bookmark on this site first then.

Note that this trick does not work 100% on every site, but more than enough as an alternative.

Designing and developing websites needs a lot of knowledge in browser compatibilities. Knowing a list of most popular browsers is mandatory, so you you can know which browsers you have to do the testing on and make sure everything goes well.

Here is the link I used to monitor the ‘competition of popularity’ of different kinds of browsers: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Creating a website that can work flawlessly on every type of browser is very hard (sometimes impossible), but make sure it works on major browsers and at least 90% of overall browsers available.

After spending years of layouting using tables in HTML, I decided to start working on my coming web projects using full XHTML/CSS. This would be a big step to keep up with the dynamics of WWW. I know it’s old news and kind of a bit late, but better than never.

For the others who are also interested with this new web standard, I recommend Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design as a reference book. Of all the books I’ve read about XHTML and CSS, this one gave me the best view and understanding as the writers give real life example with very detailed descriptions for implementing them. Even for non-experienced web designers or people who just started learning about web design, I would still recommend it as the first chapter explains all the basics to create a web project.

The other problem that has been holding me back to start was the supporting application. As powerful as Macromedia/Adobe Dreamweaver can be for a WYSIWYG HTML editor, it still lacks the support for full XHTML/CSS layouting. Finally, after months of searching and trying, I found West Civ’s Style Master (available for both Win and Mac). I have only tried it for a few hours, but already find almost all of the required features for the transition. Hope this is the app I’ve been looking for, or hopefully Adobe make a new breakthrough when they release the next version of Dreamweaver.