For some reason this morning I awoke with the thought of centralising my local websites floating about my head. Problem is I have multiple home and work computers, all of which I use to develop personal projects from time-to-time. But I’d ideally like to have one copy of these sites (which isn’t a downloaded version of the remote copy – if there even is one), which I can run within my local Apache setup.

It struck me during my daily Shredded Wheat ritual, that I could host everything on Dropbox and reference locally via a symbolic link. Then I can run the website in the same state across all my computers! And I even get the benefit of Dropbox’s lovely inbuilt versioning. Perfection.

If you want a solid run through on how to do it, read through this convenient Dropbox Wiki page on symbolic linking across local machines and Dropbox accounts. If you’re a bit more Terminal savvy, all you’ll need to do is enter the following into Terminal:

ln -s /path/to/original/directory /path/to/symbolic/link

I’m soon to start a new contract that’s going to be very HTML5 & CSS3 themed. I decided to pull together a couple of resource posts and realised it might be useful to more than just me.

Specifications

W3C HTML5 Draft
It’s still only in working draft phase, but offers a comprehensive 900 pages of detail into the future of the web.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/

Articles & Reference

Dive Into HTML5 (by Mark Pilgrim)
Excellent insight into a number of features from the new specification. Well explained and professionally written (not surprising as it’s going to be turned into an O’Reilly book.)
http://diveintohtml5.org/

HTML5 For Web Designers (by Jeremy Keith)
Get your mitts on this one from the A Book Apart team. It’s got some top reviews already and is by educational wonderkids of A List Apart.
http://books.alistapart.com/

An Introduction to HTML5 (by Robert Nyman)
A great overview of basic markup changes in HTML5 (over HTML4) and the relevant pros and cons.
http://robertnyman.com/2009/10/14/an-introduction-to-html5/

Is HTML5 Ready Yet? (by J. Cornelius)
Ok, so it doesn’t have that much practical use but I threw it in there anyway. The site is counting down until the official launch of HTML5 in 2022(!!!) Hopefully we might get there a little earlier than that.

Future Web Accessibility: HTML5 Semantic Elements (by Aaron Andersen)
Interesting review of the new specification from an accessibility perspective. Worth a good read, as the new semantic elements really work for the accessible web – so there’s less excuses now.
http://webaim.org/blog/future-web-accessibility-html5-semantic-tags/

Google APIs + HTML5 = A New Era of Mobile Apps (by Adrian Graham)
Interesting look into mobile app development, and how the new APIs (particularly the geo-location aspect) will effect mobile technologies, within the context of Google’s APIs.
http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-apis-html5-new-era-of-mobile.html

A Brief History of Markup (by Jeremy Keith)
It’s always worth knowing a bit of background, and this is an excellent (short) article from A List Apart on the development of markup as a communication language on the web.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-markup/

Resources

HTML5 Javascript Shiv
In keeping with Internet Explorer tradition, all currently released versions of IE don’t support HTML5, nor custom markup (IE 9 apparently will.) Luckily a hack for IE has been developed and it’s pretty simple. All you need is this pre-written script to do the job.
http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/

The original concept for this fix is from John Resig (of jQuery fame)
http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-shiv/

Validator.nu
You always need a good validator. The W3C validator has some support but validator.nu seems to be at the head of the field at the moment.
http://html5.validator.nu/

HTML5 Revision Tracker
Displays a descriptive review of all versions updates made to the W3C HTML5 specification.
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker

HTML5 Doctor
Useful resource to help you diagnose development issues.
http://html5doctor.com/

Visual Cheat Sheet
Quick reference guide for the markup elements.
http://woorkup.com/2009/12/16/html5-visual-cheat-sheet-reloaded/

Canvas Cheat Sheet
With Canvas now a standardised vector drawing element, this cheat sheet helps out with the list of attributes and methods needed for 2D drawing in the browser.
http://blog.nihilogic.dk/2009/02/html5-canvas-cheat-sheet.html

I always get a shiver down my spine when someone asks if we can use a content management system to deliver a website. I always feel it’s an over used, misaligned technology, that’s more often than not requested for via concept of economy. Rather than by an understanding of the technology and requirements.

The other day I came across a new type of CMS I hadn’t seen before. Stacey (http://staceyapp.com/) a file managed, templated CMS, that uses a standard local file structure rather than a database. It’s a concept that I’ve played with for a while in the form of a personal framework, but not seen delivered in a simple, easy to-use-and-install package.

I’ve yet to use it in a project, but I’ll be intrigued to see how it scrubs up.

Stacey CMS: http://staceyapp.com/