August 2007

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Well, after using Microsoft Expression Web for a while, I am changing my opinion somewhat… This program has a few significant bugs that need to be fixed before it will be useful at all.

1) Undo function:

Undo does not take you back one step in operations, it takes you all the way back to the state of the file when you opened the file, as if it were a ‘revert’ function, not an ‘undo’ function. Other people have seen this problem and some fixes are mentioned here, but I haven’t tried them yet:

http://blog.by-expression.com/index.php/undo-goes-to-far-in-expression-web/

2) Expression web inserts these characters: 

When EW saves a file that is PHP or CSS, it changes the encoding to  UTF-8 (BOM) from UTF-8….and there is no way to choose the encoding when you save…and this causes those 3 little characters to appear all over your website wherever the PHP pages are…

Thankfully, frontpagewebmaster.com found a solution.

I am pretty upset because I just wasted about 4 hours on these bugs, and I won’t be using Epression Web again for a while.

Snap Shots

Go to SnapShots.com right now and set up your blog to show mini snapshots of all the links mentioned in the text.

This is so cool, and it’s free, and it’s extremely easy to set up. No brainer.

Well, I finally got most of my web design software installed on my new Vista computer. The first really big compatibility issues I have noticed are with Flash, specifically versions MX2004 and version 8, and WS_FTP Professional.

When opening movie clips in older versions of Flash, the program goes into a weird slow-motion mode, wherein a dotted box slowly expands and contracts around the movie clip you are trying to open. If you have this problem, here is a link explaining the solution.

Also, I upgraded to the supposedly Vista-compatible version of Ipswitch WS_FTP Professional. Well, I was happily coding along in another program when I suddenly got an error message out of nowhere: “WS_FTP does not appear to have been installed correctly for the current user. WS_FTP will now exit.” I wasn’t even running this program!!! To fix this problem, right click on the WS_FTP icon, click on properties, and choose “run this program as administrator.” This seems to have fixed the problem for me. Even though my login IS the administrator.