Surreal CMS Adds Change Notifications

A lot of designers have been asking for this lately, so we decided to launch Change Notifications over at Surreal CMS today.  This new feature allows Pro users to receive emails whenever their editors publish changes to any of their websites.
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Tips for Supporting UTF-8 in Your PHP5 Applications

Here are some great tips that will help any PHP5 developer support UTF-8 in their applications.  This list isn’t comprehensive, but it will allow you to do most basic operations while avoiding troublesome character encoding issues. Continue reading

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Why Adobe InContext Editing Will Never Be the Same

Adobe’s recent announcement to discontinue their free InContext Editing service has surprised and outraged many web designers.  However, the service isn’t really being discontinued.  Instead, it is getting integrated with Adobe’s Business Catalyst service.  As a result, come 2011, designers who wish to continue using InContext Editing’s functionality for their clients will have to do so with a paid subscription to Business Catalyst (BC). Continue reading

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Adobe InContext Editing Users Speak Out

First and foremost, I am not targeting Adobe as a company, but rather their decision to abruptly end the InContext Editing content management service.  It is evident by the recent uproar in their own forum that many people feel misled, deceived, or otherwise disenchanted by this announcement — an announcement that will ultimately leave thousands of designers without a reasonably-priced content management solution for their clients. Continue reading

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Sending Plain-text + HTML Emails in PHP

You can easily add some basic headers and send HTML emails using the PHP mail() function, but sometimes the resulting messages don’t seem to display correctly in certain email clients — especially those that don’t support HTML emails.  The best thing to do is send both a plain-text version and an HTML version of your message in the same email. Continue reading

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Adobe Discontinues InContext Editing Service

Adobe has announced that, effective May 5th, 2010, their InContext Editing service will be discontinued.  The company has announced that they will cease development of the online content management service and disallow new users and website registrations at that time.  Existing users will be able to continue using it through early to mid-2011.  After that, Adobe InContext Editing will shutdown indefinitely as a standalone service. Continue reading

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Surreal CMS Gets Google Analytics, Syntax Highlighting

Last week we launched a couple of new features over at Surreal CMS.  The first one, and probably the most exciting, is Google Analytics Integration.  Using OAuth, pro users can safely and securely give their clients access to their website’s analytics information — and it’s just as easy to use as everything else in Surreal CMS: Continue reading

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A Fresh, Free Sans-serif Typeface called ”Maven”

Our friends over at Vissol have just released a beautiful new typeface into the wild.  If you’re into typography and you like free fonts, you definitely want to check out Maven. Continue reading

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Office 2007 Files Downloading as ZIP Files in Internet Explorer

Today I learned that Microsoft Office 2007 files (you know, the new ones that end in DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX) don’t always download properly in Internet Explorer. In fact, IE tends to see them as ZIP files and forces their extension to change to .zip when you select download. This is because IE is checking for the MIME type instead of blindly going by file extensions. Ironically, since it doesn’t recognize the new Office 2007 files for what they are, IE renames their extensions to .zip upon downloading. Continue reading

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Use HTML5 and CSS3 Today with 52Framework

There’s a lot of talk about HTML5 and CSS3 these days, especially since Safari/Chrome, Firefox, and Opera have begun supporting some of the most anticipated features of both specifications.  If you’ve ever used border-radius or box-shadow then you’ve already touched on CSS3 a bit.  However, the chances are that, at least at the time of this writing, you haven’t done much with HTML5.  And, chances are, it’s probably because you’ve heard about the lack of browser support for HTML5 thus far (which is to be expected, considering that the specification is still just a draft). Continue reading

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