So I occasionally visit the Surfin Safari blog, which is the Webkit developers blog (which is the nightly build version of the Apple Safari browser). The past few months, they have been making huge strides in pushing this browser forward. No doubt the iPhone which is powered by a flavor of Safari has been the motivation behind it.

The first beta version of Drupal 6.0 has been released! Drupal is an extremely powerful, flexible, and moderately easy to use content management system for developing websites and web applications.

Version 6 offers a slew of new features including:

• A slicker installer
• Improved language support (as in languages people speak, not computer languages!)
• OpenID support
• Actions and triggers

Lynda.com, one of the most useful software video training resources on the net, have added a course on building a content management system with PHP and MySQL. While there are a ton of great online resources available to learn how to use these technologies to interact with each other, I haven't come across a complete guide on how to create a CMS from scratch, aimed at those with only html experience.

With the recent explosion of mobile devices on the web, and the way people consume content on websites, it's become increasingly more important to have pages written in valid xhtml, with a clear separation of content and design (css). The trick for designers is to create a page that displays well both on the screen, in different browsers, on mobile devices, and in print as well. Additionally, so long as the structure is written well without unnecessary div wrappers or *gasp* tables, a well coded page will display just fine on a text only browser.

I'm helping someone pick up CSS, and they asked for a book to help them out with it. So based on a few recommendations, I suggested CSS: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland. I decided to pickup a copy myself, and brush up on my CSS, and the 100 pages of hands on tutorials is what specifically appealed to me. I'm 40 pages in, and have to say this is the CSS to english translation I wish I had when I started getting into this stuff.