Been thinking a lot about how I don’t have an iPhone lately. Then I thought…what if I wanted to keep iPhone users from visiting my site, in spite… Of course I’m not really going to do that. Only saying this because apparently you’re supposed to tell stories and have something exciting when you open for anything you write. Anyway..

Here’s how I figured out how to detect when an iPhone user is visiting your site, and how to send them to a specific page. That way, you can have a iPhone only site, or a mobile only site.

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I came across this article about The Roadmap To Becoming A Professional Freelance Web Designer. It’s a great article. I’m just not a fan of the name because the tips in the article can be used for a Web Developer, Programmer, Small Business & any type of product. Just to name a few. I think it’s weird that so many good blogs out there are geared for Web Designers and not everyone else. How unfortunate.

Regardless, it’s a great article and I hope you take down notes. The key thing you should take a way from this is “branding” because it has a powerful affect on people. If you’re branded in a good way, like Honda for instance. Honda is known for quality, right? Among other things. Now, if you were branded as “quality” then people would pay more for your service even though there are cheaper services. Like non-America for instance. Non-American labor is known for being cheaper than American labor. However, I feel strongly about this – America is the best damn country in the world – and I am so proud to be an American. Take that one to heart. My point being. America is so branded in my heart and in my soul that I will never outsource as long as I can help it. Of course I can’t guarantee any of my clients will feel the same way I do, but I try my hardest to push (& force!) my belief about America being the greatest onto other people.

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This is an oldie but a goody. In web development there comes a time when you need to force a download when someone clicks on a link, without telling them to “right click save as…” In the past this was always a problem. Now thanks to Google, you can type in keywords and find a nice, lovely blog post like this one and figure it out. And of course you’re not going to tell anyone because you want to look like a Rock Star. So you’re going to say “ain’t nothing but a thang.”

And before you do that, here’s how you’re going to save the day and prompt a “Save As” to the user so he/she can download his/her file:

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I’m always looking for economical ways of getting pretty visuals for my sites. Techradar put together a great list of sites that will help you into some nice visuals for you web sites.

There comes a time in your life when you need to admit you’re not perfect. You may be the best damn web developer in the world (me), and you may know your stuff like the curves on a pretty woman. But you don’t always remember everything you need to know – all the time – and you know it!

The people at Smashing Magazine were kind enough to remind us that we’re not perfect, and that even though we are the best at what we do – we still need some help at times.

That’s why I’m proud to share with you the 45 Incredibly Useful Web Design Checklists and Questionaires from Smashing Magazine.

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This is a little tip taken from the book Vista Performance and Tuning Guide.

They say to put your computer to Sleep instead of hibernating or turning it off each time you want to shut down your computer. I can confirm this – it works wonderfully. Back before I knew anything about computers (and when computers took a year to boot) I would turn my computer completely off. Stupid, I know. But some people actually still do this. I used to always complain because it took so long to get back into the computer. Well, then I grew up and started to use the nifty “hibernate” feature. This worked wonderfully for several years. Of course, Sleep was available at the time, but the word “hibernate” sounded so much cooler. Needless to say (even though I’m saying it), I chose to “hibernate.”

Time passed by and I bought a Vista. Now, I was scared to buy Vista. I’ve heard so many bad things about it. Mostly from gossip which has been proved wrong. I actually like Vista. I’d say go buy Vista, but Windows 7 is out, so go get Windows 7.

The moral of the story, use Sleep on Vista because “hibernate” and shut-downs are too slow.

Even though I prefer a web interface when blogging, I feel I should let you all know about a great article introducing 20 or so blogging tools. It’s really well written so I don’t feel the need to summarize. Check it out and enjoy!

I’ve FINALLY open sourced my first Drupal module. I’ve written several Drupal modules for clients in the past; however, this is the first one I’ve open sourced and given to the community. I’m very, very excited about this module.

For those of you that don’t know, I’ve been an open source developer for years. Now, I’m finally able to give back!

I’m proud to announce the arrival of Status Messages Alter to the Drupal community. This module adds hook_message_alter to Drupal 6, enabling developers to change the status messages before they are delivered to the user. This has been something I’ve been wanting for a while now, and I’m sure others have been wanting this too!

Now it’s finally here. I hope you all enjoy the module as much as I already have.