Category: Web development

How not to import your site styles from previous versions of NOF

If you want to import entire sites from previous versions of NetObjects Fusion to the newest NOF 9.1, just follow these migration instructions. However, what if you only want import site styles?

Add Site StylesWell, here’s how you should NOT do it for versions prior to NOF 8 (unless you don’t want to work with your older version of NOF anymore). I have been using NOF 7 and now wanted to use some of my site styles for NOF 9 too. I didn’t want to import (migrate) entire existing sites at that time. So, I simply used the Style > Add Site Styles Source command to point NOF 9 to the NOF 7 site styles directory.

NOF7 broken site styleBad idea. Using this procedure, NOF 9 leaves the site styles where they are, but transforms them into its new format. This means NOF 7 couldn’t read them anymore and my existing sites looked broken in NOF 7. Unfortunately, when I realized this several days had passed since I had used the Add Site Styles Source command. Therefore, it took me some time to figure out what had happened (first, I wrongly assumed NOF 7 and NOF 9 had problems running on the same machine, which is not the case).

After discovering that NOF 7 couldn’t use the site styles anymore because of the modifications NOF 9 had made, I simply removed the site styles location from NOF 9 and restored the files from my backups. To use them in NOF 9, I made a copy outside the NOF 7 directory tree and included them again in NOF 9. As expected, everything looked fine again in NOF 7.

Netobjects Fusion now produces code that validates

Latest Release! NetObjects Fusion 9One of the things I’ve been doing while not updating this blog was looking for a web editor to replace the ancient NetObjects Fusion 7.0 still used (together with heavy “post-processing”) for some of my most important websites.The programs I had planned to have a closer look at were NetObjects Fusion 9, Nvu and Dreamweaver.

Concerning the first candidate, I had the impression that many features I didn’t really need had been added while no improvements had been made to the code quality, so I heavy-heartedly discarded NOF 9 and started to learn how to use Nvu.

Standing for “new view” and supposedly pronounced “n-view” (not “envy you”), open source Nvu claims to be “a complete Web Authoring System […] to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver”. As I eventually found out, this statement is only true if you compare Nvu to the very first versions of these programs. Not only does Nvu have severe limitations when it comes to using server side script languages like PHP, it is also a very buggy piece of software, making it useless for simple tasks, too. With no bug fixes released since version 1.0, Nvu is dead by now. However, there’s an unofficial bug-fix release called KompoZer, which I didn’t have a closer look at because I’d already wasted too much time.

In fact, at that point I had to stop my “research project” to continue working on my company’s web shops and back office systems. I didn’t even have the time to write a rant about Nvu on this blog. 😉

The next step would’ve been Dreamweaver and indeed I got as far as installing the MX 2004 version which came with a 1&1 webhosting account. That’s when I decided to have another look at the NetObject’s homepage and the NOF 9 newsgroups. I was pleased to find out that a significant update for NOF 9 had been released and even more pleased when I read that all code generated by NOF 9 now meets W3C HTML 4.01 transitional standards. At that point, I couldn’t resist to buy the upgrade. I’ll try to post an in-depth review in a few weeks, but the first impression I had was very good. It seems that the makers of NOF listened to what the users had to say and that NOF is still very much alive.

Web Developer and other Firefox extensions

Imagine you’re sent to a remote island and you’re only allowed to take one Firefox extension: which one would it be?

For web developers, it can only be the aptly named web developer extension: whether you’re using it to test your own pages or to find out how someone else designed his website, this extension is extremely useful. The only thing I miss is the ability to disable frame support, but this feature is already on the to-do list (if you need it badly, Opera has an option to disable frames).

Not a web developer? Use Foxclocks to display the time in different cities around the world or Crash Recovery to automatically restores all opened pages after a crash happened (useful if you behave like me and always open new tabs instead of bookmarking interesting websites right away).