2009 was a year I’ll never forget.
I married, honeymoon’d, moved to the south coast and even bought a Volvo estate. And I already know that 2010 will be another record breaking year for me.

Wishing all my readers a happy and prosperous year ahead. I am looking for bigger and more challenging projects in 2010 and am available now! So if you are (or know of someone) looking for a creative with a decade of experience please do me the favour and pass my details on.

I’ve mentioned the quality of Web Designers Toolbox before. But I’m always asked what a web safe area is and what are the variations between browsers and platforms.

There’s a whole host of tools and templates  at this site – including platforms and browsers templates at Web Designers Toolbox.

Do you ever get annoyed that your music in your iTunes library has an old broken link? Well this little AppleScript will search your iTunes library and delete any of the alias’ that don’t have a music file attached to it. Simple.

Simply download, unzip, double click to open in AppleScript and click “Run”

After testing this on another Mac, you need to copy and paste the script into a new document and then SAVE.

tell application "iTunes"
set thePlaylist to library playlist 1
set musicFiles to the file tracks of thePlaylist

repeat with mf in musicFiles
--the name of mf as string
set hasLoc to ""
if (the location of mf as string ¬
is equal to "missing value") then
try
set comment of mf to the comment of mf & ""
on error number errNum
delete mf
end try

end if
end repeat
end tell

Have you ever wanted to create a local testing server on your mac that supports PHP and MySQL? It’s now very simple using the application MAMP. (Mac/Apache/MySQL/PHP)

1) Download MAMP from their website to your Mac.

Download the 127mb DMG from here. You’ll notice there’s two options MAMP Free and MAMP Pro. Drag the MAMP Free application to your Applications folder. Now it’s installed, you can un-mount the disk image.

2) Startup MAMP from your Application folder

When you startup MAMP a window in your browser is automatically opened. This gives you all the information you need (should you want it) to access MAMP databases UNIX, and phpMyAdmin. You’ll notice the browser web address is http://localhost:8888/MAMP/

3) The MAMP application & preferences

This window shows you what’s running on your mac. Apache and PHP should have green lights by now. There are some important options in the preferences tab. 

First off, uncheck “Check for MAMP Pro” and also “Stop servers when quitting MAMP” if you want to test your sites when MAMP is closed. 

Secondly, you have the option to set the Apache and MySQL ports of to either the local value of your mac or if you are running other testing servers on your mac leave at MAMP default of 8888 and 8889. I chose to set mine to the mac default of 80 and 3306.

Finally, you can change the location of your sites folder rather than the default location of the application folder. Close preferences and MAMP will reconfigure itself. The browser address required for your sites is now simply http://localhost/

4) Widget installation

One more useful note is the inclusion of the OSX widget located in the applications folder. Double click to install. Now you can effortlessly open the start page as well as easily start and stop the local servers.

Designers Toolbox – a wonderful resource of template and website tools. I found the form resource particularly useful which provides examples of form elements as they appear in the main browsers on different platforms.