Category: TopStyle

Standards Savings

Published on by Nick Bradbury4 Comments

Eric Meyer has an interesting post about how using standards-oriented designs provides a faster web site.

That’s certainly true in my experience, but what I really benefit from is the ease of maintaining and updating my site since I switched to standards-based design. In the bad old days, I relied on bloated, table-based, font-laden HTML for my site design. My finished site would look decent enough, but a few months down the road when I wanted to update it, I’d be faced with a mess of nested tags, stacked like tinkertoys and just waiting to fall apart. After I caught on to the benefits of CSS and redesigned my site (using TopStyle, of course!), maintaining my site became much less of a chore.

So. even if you have a small site and don’t think you’d really benefit from the bandwidth reduction of standards-based design, chances are you’ll still benefit overall from giving up outdated HTML and relying on CSS/XHTML.

(thanks to Jack Brewster for the link)

The curse of anonymity

Published on by Nick Bradbury34 Comments

As much as I love the web and am incredibly thankful for the opportunities it has provided for me, days like today make me loathe its anonymity. The day started off with a nasty bout of comment spam, followed at midday by dealing with someone posting FeedDemon serial numbers (since disabled) to a warez site, then ended with a bizarre series of threats from a disgruntled Dreamweaver user. Before I continue, take a look at this Google Groups search for some background information.

As you can see, someone has made several posts to various Macromedia newsgroups claiming that TopStyle has hijacked Dreamweaver. His complaint is that every time he tries to open a CSS file in Dreamweaver, it opens in TopStyle instead. And since he installed the trial version of TopStyle, it’s asking him to register it. Now, the reason TopStyle keeps being opened is actually due to a bug in Dreamweaver. Every time you start Dreamweaver, it automatically detects TopStyle and sets it as the default CSS editor – even if you’ve removed it from the “File Types / Editors” list in Dreamweaver’s preferences. So no matter what you do, if you have TopStyle installed, Dreamweaver uses it as the external CSS editor.

Here’s the kicker: this same person has emailed me several times and threatened to start a class action lawsuit against my company unless I pay him $1,000.00 by September 9. Here’s a quote:

“I have an attorney on the staff of my company and we are going to be moving aggressively against companies using unscrupulous marketing practices such as yours. The time we lost today cost us about $1,000. That is the amount that will make us go away. Otherwise we are going to seek a class action lawsuit against you. We will start by finding others who have been damaged by your practices. This will be done with a Google Adwords ad that comes up each time someone enters topstyle or bradsoft into Google. Send the check for $1,000 to: [address removed]”

Now, obviously this guy has a loose wire, and his threat is laughable – if he ever tried to file suit, he would be in hot water for extortion. But being a one-man-show, it’s incredibly hard for me to spend time dealing with people like this – yet I have to, because their posts to public newsgroups show up in Google searches for my software.

Does anyone else have to deal with this kind of garbage, and if so, how do you handle it?

TopStyle, FeedDemon Tips

Published on by Nick Bradbury

I’ve mentioned them before, but for the benefit of new users I wanted to point out the TopStyle Tips and FeedDemon Tips blogs. These blogs are authored by power-users, and are regularly updated with time-saving tips and tweaks.

Recent highlights include a tip for getting help for any CSS1 property in TopStyle, and a registry tweak which adds “favicons” to FeedDemon’s the channel bar.

Of course, the best way to keep up with these blogs is to subscribe to their feeds:

TopStyle Tips RSS feed | FeedDemon Tips RSS feed

TopStyle Pro 3.11 BETA 2

Published on by Nick Bradbury

The second beta of TopStyle Pro 3.11 is now available to registered customers. For details, stop by:

http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/beta/

Before installing beta 2, I recommend reading the release notes to find out what’s new:

http://www.bradsoft.com/download/readme/readme311b2.asp

As with previous betas, beta 2 should be installed directly on top of your existing version. Your settings will be retained, with the exception that your current layout will revert to the default.

CSE HTML Validator LITE

Published on by Nick Bradbury4 Comments

Just got an email from Albert Wiersch letting me know that he’s released a free LITE version of his excellent CSE HTML Validator.

This new LITE version works great inside TopStyle, enabling you to validate the current HTML document with a single click. Of course, if you’re serious about finding errors, I recommend using the PRO version of CSE, since it includes more advanced features such as accessibility checking when used inside TopStyle.

SitePoint on TopStyle

Published on by Nick Bradbury5 Comments

SitePoint has some very kind words for TopStyle today. TopStyle LITE gets most of the attention since the article is about free Windows web design tools, but they also give kudos to TopStyle PRO:

“TopStyle Pro is the complete package, capable of high-level editing on much more than just CSS. At around $US80, it represents real value for anyone who spends a significant part of their day working with CSS. The browser profiles alone are worth the entry price.”