Looking at Web developer jobs in Austin, trying to figure out the dominant technologies in demand, I encountered the following listing:

.NET Entry Level Developer

Required Experience/Qualifications:

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science (or related)
2 to 4 years experience as a Software Engineer using the .NET Framework
1 to 2 years experience doing development for the web using ASP.NET WebForms

Two to four years experience is "entry level" now?

Dang.

I had hopes of being able to bootstrap myself into a real job, but if this is entry level, it doesn't sound like much of a chance.

Websense says Potentially Damaging Content - help!

As I wrote a few days ago, I've been having issues with Websense marking this BlogEngine.NET blog as Potentially Damaging Content. This kept me from accessing the blog from my day job, and made me wonder who else might be unable to read it. In particular, I worried that potential clients would encounter a Websense warning and reject me from consideration.

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Today is the sixth installment of my Design Inspiration Countdown, wherein I take a closer look at nine sites featured in Mashable.com's 9 Outstanding Websites for Design Inspiration. Today's site, #4 in the Countdown, is Analog, a co-op of web designers and developers from the US and UK.

Inspiration #4: Analog

Analog's site is an attractive one. The Analog logo and the illustration of five workers tugging on hawsers remind me of designs from the Art Deco period. Drop below the "fold" and the pictures of the five co-op members (designers Alan Colville and Jon Tan, and developers Andrei Zmievski, Chris Shiflett, and Jon Gibbins), and you'll see a thoroughly modern color wheel repurposed as a mission statement.

There are a number of "Easter Eggs" built into the site. For example, CSS3 transitions allow you to play with the mugshots of the designers, from this:

to this:

The footer - "placeholder frippery" as Analog describe it - notes the use of GeoIP to enhance the visitor's experience, and the site mines the five members' Twitter feeds to further personalize the site. If you've used layout grids like the 960 Grid System or Yahoo UI Grids, you may want to press the "G" key to see how Analog's own hashgrid alternative looks.

Analog's site is a great showcase of their work, both as designers (able to blend historical and modern elements) and developers (applying advanced technology with humor). It's a great example for a wannabe web designer/developer like me.

We're halfway through the Design Inspiration Countdown. Today's site is Guide to the App Galaxy, Google's business guide for mobile app developers.

Inspiration #5: Guide to the App Galaxy

Do you love rocketships and retro science fiction?

Do you love mobile app design?

Do you love web sites that use scrolling in an innovative way?

Do you love Javascript?

Then you'll love Google's Guide to the App Galaxy!

The first thing you'll notice about the Guide is a mostly-blank browser window and a long load time. The HTML alone is 6300 lines and 462 KB. Even on wi-fi and broadband, the delay is noticeable. And as to viewing it on a mobile browser, forget about it. Even after the page finished loading, I was unable to scroll to view more than a corner of the page.

After the page has finished loading, the picture switches to a view of a retro-looking rocketship on a launch pad. A Big Red Button marked "Launch" (but without a molly guard) invites you to start your journey into mobile app design.

If you try to scroll down instead, you'll find that the site is already scrolled down as far as it will go. Instead, it scrolls up, befitting the spaceship blastoff metaphor.

The first stop in the journey (whether you pressed the Launch button or scrolled up manually) is Promote - ways to promote your newly-written app. The next stops are Earn, Measure, and Evaluate.

At each stop, the "engineering plans" are divided into sections on different aspects of the mobile app business. Also at each stop, a drop-down tab marked Choose Journey gives you access to the stories behind Angry Birds, Ant Smasher, and the Weather Channel's app. You can also take the Grand Tour or Create Your Own Journey. This last option allows you to create and share your own story and tips on mobile app development. Google gives you a unique URL that you can share on your own web site.

The site links to around 20 Javascript files to work its magic, and also uses jQuery.

If you want to learn about the mobile app business in a fun way, take a trip with the Guide to the App Galaxy (but don't forget your towel!)

When you're learning HTML and CSS, how do you try out examples? Do you use a less-advanced freeware tool, or do you set up a full-blown Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like Eclipse or Visual Web Designer Express?

Sometimes, it's just not convenient to use a "real" tool - maybe you're away from your development computer, or you just want to check out a couple of CSS commands and would rather not have to load up the full IDE.

And what if you're looking at a web page and are curious about the back-end technology used - is it a Wordpress site in disguise? What back-end server are they using - Apache, Microsoft IIS, or something more obscure? Are they using jQuery, or a lesser-known Javascript library?

Today, Smashing Magazine linked to a couple of articles with tools for Evolving Code Monkeys.

Helpful Tips & Tools for Web Design Experiments

Helpful Tips and Tools For Web Design Experiments, from Design Shack, pitched readers on the Benefits of Experimentation, offered Tips for Experimenting, then got down to business with Tools for Experimenting. There were two free web tools for HTML / CSS and Javascript experimentation.

CSSDesk is an online tool that allows you to work with HTML and CSS, making changes in two windows on the left side of the screen, and watching the results of your changes live in the right hand side of the screen. It's much easier and quicker than opening up a "real" IDE to experiment with a few lines of code.

jsFiddle is more elaborate than CSSDesk, but besides windows to enter HTML and CSS, jsFiddle adds another window to allow you to use Javascript and Javascript libraries like jQuery, Dojo, or YUI. However, the idea is the same - it's a good quick tool to enter a few lines of code and see the result right away.

Under The Site

UnderTheSite.com is a clever online tool that analyzes the technologies used by a website you supply. Just enter the website address, and UnderTheSite connects to the site and detects things like jQuery and other Javascript libraries, Google Analytics, and (sometimes, for some web sites) the type of host server, and the site scripting language or programming framework.

Under The Site is not perfect - for example, analyzing Stack Overflow (the popular techie community answer site) told me that the site is using jQuery, Backbone.js, Google Analytics, and the Google Libraries API. However, I wasn't able to find out whether Stack Overflow is using  Microsoft's C# language or an Open Source language like PHP or Ruby. I even got a "500 Server Error" page when I queried Under The Site for my employer's home page. However, when Under The Site does work, it's a quick, easy way to peek behind the curtain.

BlogEngine.Net 2.5 released June 29, 2011

As I noted in my previous post about Wordpress, I currently use BlogEngine.Net on my site. I like the power of Microsoft's ASP.NET Web environment, and BlogEngine.Net is a great open source implementation of that power, IMO.

Recently, BlogEngine 2.5 was released. I'm looking forward to setting up a new blog using 2.5, and ideally upgrading this blog (the one you're reading now) from 2.0 to 2.5.

The biggest change from BlogEngine 2.0 to 2.5 is the ability to run multiple blogs from a single installation of BE. A similar multi-blog capability was added to Wordpress 3.0 last year. Running multiple blogs from a single installation means easier data backups, and makes things easier when it's time to update the BlogEngine (or Wordpress) software itself.

Besides the new multi-blog capability, BlogEngine 2.5 adds a direct interface to the blogengine.net online Gallery. This will make it a bit easier to add new themes and/or extensions from the gallery to a BE installation. Of course, it's not all that hard to add new features or themes even without the Gallery integration, which is fortunate, since the integration is new and somewhat experimental.

edited to add: read more about the BlogEngine 2.5 features here and here. Besides the multi-blog capability and Gallery integration, BlogEngine 2.5 has been upgraded to .NET 4.0 and supports Razor themes. It comes with one Razor theme, Garland-Revisited, which can be seen on Ben Amada's blog.

Get a free BlogEngine.Net 2.5 blog at Bloglobe.com

Most people start their first blog on Blogger, a free blog hosting service provided by Google. Others start on Wordpress.com, which offers free blogs using Wordpress software with a choice of some standard Wordpress themes. Now, there's a free blog service based on BlogEngine.Net 2.5 - Bloglobe.com. If you want to set up a quick blog just to get your feet wet in blogging, or if the name you wanted was already taken on blogspot.com (Blogger) or Wordpress.com, you have another alternative.

For years, Web developers have dealt with Microsoft Internet Explorer's many, many quirks by various tricks and hacks. The most consistent way to deal with IE's issues has been to use Internet Explorer conditional comments - a feature of IE since the "browser wars" between Netscape and Microsoft, back in the late 1990s.

To use them, designers would create two or more CSS files - one or more stylesheets for each version of Internet Explorer, plus another stylesheet for more standards-compliant browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. The Web page would load the standards-compliant stylesheet by default, but would load stylesheet(s) for IE based on link statements wrapped in conditional comments:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="standard.css" />
<!--[if IE]>
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="funkyIE.css" />
<![endif]-->

"Wrapping" the second link statement in <!--[if IE]> and <![endif]--> caused it to be invisible to non-IE browsers. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari would use the standard.css stylesheet, while Internet Explorer would use the funkyIE.css stylesheet.

Although Internet Explorer has grown more standards-compliant with versions 7, 8, and this year's IE 9, Microsoft has retained the conditional comment facility - but according to the IE Blog on MSDN, conditional comments are going away to make IE 10 truly HTML5-compatible. Sites that use conditional comments to target older versions of IE will still work exactly as designed - for example, a site that targets IE 6 and older versions using [if lte IE 6] will still work fine, and IE 10 won't choke on the conditional comment. IE 10 will just ignore it, exactly as Firefox, Chrome, and Safari do now.

The IE Blog also notes "If you need to distinguish between more recent browsers, use feature detection instead." The linked article lists DOs and DON'Ts - DO use feature detection, DON'T use browser detection, DO use behavior detection, DON'T assume unrelated features.

Along with conditional comments, IE 10 is doing away with a couple of more obscure IE-only features: XML Data Islands, and Element Behaviors. I've never heard of anyone using XML Data Islands - indeed, I'd never encountered the term before. However, I have read about Element Behaviors used to add features found in standards-compliant browsers to IE 5.5 and 6. Since Microsoft is working to make IE more standards-compliant, it's time to lose these ancient hacks.

And speaking of Chris Coyier (of CSS-Tricks)...

I've used Wordpress for several blogs, but I still like BlogEngine.NET. For those who want to get deeper into WP, I just discovered a site and book by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr: Digging Into Wordpress. At $75 for print or $27 for PDF, it's more expensive than other books about Wordpress - but at 400+ pages, this is one pipe-hitting tome. Also, the print edition includes a lifetime subscription to all updated copies of the PDF version - so, buy the paper version, get the most current version of the ebook immediately, and get updated versions of the ebook sent right to your email. Basically, it sounds like a must-buy for anyone who's serious about Wordpress.

From CSS-Tricks: Techniques for Context Specific Images

From the article:

One of the shortfalls of using CSS media queries as the only ingredient of a mobile solution is that the same content gets served to both desktop browsers and mobile devices (which theoretically are slower and have less network speed).

Serving the same HTML to both... not as big of a deal. Serving up images that are many times bigger than they need to be on mobile, that's more of a problem.

In many countries, mobile Internet use is much more common than desktop use. Even in the U.S. and Europe, mobile browsers (with limited bandwidth and smaller screens) are catching on more and more. After reading this article a couple of days ago, I began to think that sites optimized for mobile Web browsing could be a very good thing to specialize in as a designer/developer.

The CSS-Tricks article linked to another article by one Keith Clark titled Responsive images using cookies. One of the ideas I've been playing with is having a site that serves the desktop page on www.somedomainname.sometld, serves the mobile page on m.somedomainname.sometld - and serves the mobile page by default (!) on the naked domain name somedomainname.sometld. Naturally, you'd use cookies to store the last format used (desktop/mobile).