WDC2011 is approaching

October is defiantly conference season for me, with the PHPNW conference at the start of the month and now WDC towards the end.

The Web Developers Conference is aimed at both professionals and students, and focuses on the front end side of web development.

The schedule has now been released, and the speakers have been known for a while, there are a couple of well-known speakers that will be there so I’m really looking forward to this and hopefully learning a few things front end related , as a PHP developer that’s where my skills aren’t so strong.

Tickets are still available at a very reasonable £50 for the days festivities, and will be entering a Late Bird stage at the start of October, so get your tickets now to avoid disappointment if they sell out or go past your budget! Various discount codes are floating around on Twitter if you need one, or just ask one of the speakers if you’re struggling.

You can find out more information on the conference website http://webdevconf.com/

HTML Toolkit Add-on

I found a very useful add-on this weekend for use with the open source editor Komodo (both IDE and Edit).
Its built by a chap called Stan Angeloff and is called HTML ToolKit.

What is it?
A growing collection of tools to help you edit & author HTML/XML documents.

What does it do?

  • Auto-complete HTML/XML tags. Knows all about HTML 4/5 and won’t auto-complete invalid tags. Recognises block (<div>, <blockquote>, etc.) and empty elements (<hr />, <embed />, etc.) and completes accordingly
  • Quickly convert word under cursor to a tag by pressing Ctrl+>
  • Default snippets for most common HTML that don’t get in the way
  • Insert &nbsp; entities by pressing Shift+Space
  • Create new list items, table rows, columns, etc. just by pressing ENTER
  • Wrap selection/current line in a tag by pressing Ctrl+Alt+W
  • Navigate around closing tags by pressing TAB/Shift+TAB to go back
  • Preview images in CSS files by holding down Ctrl and moving the mouse pointer over a ‘url(…)’

Why should I install it?
Because it will save you time.. I only installed it this weekend and have found it to become a very useful addition to my development tools.

How can I get it?
Visit the Activestate Community website and search through the available add-ons, alternatively you can clicky here to download