What the C*lor!

When doing web design you have to figure out the best color, e.g. for the page background. Using a WYSIWYG editor this would be no problem. But I personally don’t like them. So I have to either first design the page in another app like InkScape and then use the same color, or I have to commit myself to trial and error — this is painful!

This is where ”What the C*lor!” jumps in.

“What the C*lor” let’s you adjust the text, background and border color of any element, specified by a CSS selector. It uses jQuery and Farbtastic.

How to use:

Since “What the C*lor” is a bookmarklet, you only need to bookmark the following link — simply drag it into your bookmarks bar:

What the C*lor!

Type the selector for the element you want to style into the selector box (It uses jQuery to find the element, so you can also use selectors like :odd. Then you can use the color wheel to adjust the colors of the element. When you found the right color, copy the color from the text field below the color wheel. I hope you can find it useful.

Browsershots

About a month ago, I told about a free web service that will render a webpage in multiple browsers and test the functionality. I couldn't believe that there is no service like this on the web, still I couldn't find it (looks like I haven't event searched for it).

Now I found it: Browsershots

Example: Sreenshots for Inazawa-Church.com

Of course, you can't check the functionality (I think that's impossible), but it makes nice screenshots.

A web service that would help so many web developers

Yesterday, someone wrote an Japanese email to our church using the form on the church homepage. But, we couldn't read anything, because of encoding problems – all characters were like complex traditional chinese kanji you would only use in names.

I was surprised with this, as I had tested the system in various browsers on my mac with no problems at all. (Yes I should have tested it on Windows, but you know…) I even have IEv6 running on Wine - the problem is, it doesn't have support for Japanese characters (or maybe it just needs a Japanese font). Therefore I didn't test it with that.
The person who wrote the email, was apparently using IE 6 on Windows – I already told you the result.

Wouldn't it be nice, if there was a web service or a browser that would show your web page rendered in all major browsers and you could test the functionality in all browsers? I haven't found such service yet. It would save so much work.

Please someone, make this for all web developers including me.