A step away from C# and towards the web

Today I stepped away from "classic" programming in C#/.NET and moved into the world of web design.

A friend asked me to create a web page from a mock-up. A simple task, yet for me a good challenge. Web page design is quite a different mode of thought than the programming on my current assignment. (That programming is object-oriented programming with immutable objects. A step into functional programming, but still quite different from HTML.)

I used several tools for this project: Chrome; Rekonq, the Kubuntu browser; Bluefish, an HTML editor; and Heel, the Ruby-based web server for static pages. They all served well.

I was pleased with the Bluefish editor. It's quite like the old Homesite program (made by Allaire, which was bought by Macromedia) in its simplicity and hands-on approach to web page design. It understands CSS and can edit more than HTML.

I was also pleasantly surprised, and impressed, with Chrome's inspection capabilities.

The 'heel' project made viewing web pages easy. I could avoid the effort of configuring a full web server (Apache) and focus my efforts on the web page.

My success was also due to the information resources available. The web with its forums (and Google's search engine) was important, but also important were the O'Reilly books on my shelf. Web Design in a Nutshell, HTML and XHTML: The Definitive Guide, and "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide" were all helpful.