Useful articles and links 4

• Build custom templates for your data-driven Web sites
  Most developers dread dealing with HTML tables and cells to build their Web sites. For one thing, tables make it difficult to modify the site later or to change its appearance. Discover some basic techniques for writing Web sites that you can later re-skin by using templates during the site's initial creation. Also, learn why you should use data-driven techniques for your own Web sites.
• 30 Exceptional CSS Techniques and Examples
  In this article, I’ve pieced together 30 excellent CSS techniques and examples that showcases the capabilities and robustness of CSS. You’ll see a variety of techniques such as image galleries, drop shadows, scalable buttons, menus, and more - all using only CSS and HTML.
• Interview with Donald Knuth
  Andrew Binstock and Donald Knuth converse on the success of open source, the problem with multicore architecture, the disappointing lack of interest in literate programming, the menace of reusable code, and that urban legend about winning a programming contest with a single compilation.
• So long TextMate?... Hello NetBeans? Really? Yeah, really.
  I'll admit it, I'm one of many folks that used to treat NetBeans as a whipping boy. Questioning why Sun would bother dumping money into the horse that so obviously lost the race to Eclipse and IntelliJ to win the hearts and minds of Java developers around the world.
• Build a customizable RSS feed aggregator in PHP
  You'll appreciate this article's fully functional PHP code snippets, demonstrating the use of PHP-based server-side functions to develop a customizable RSS feed aggregator. In addition, you'll reap instant benefits from using the fully functional RSS feed aggregator code, which you can download from this article.
• Website Screenshots capture services
  Here’s the list of some websites that are offering website screenshots services which you can use if you are planing to start a web gallery for example.
• jQuery Thumbs: A JQuery plugin to easily create thumbnails
  jThumb dynamically wraps images and/or link images with a div. You can add them an specific size (width and height) inside the css file. And optionally it can automatically center the image inside the frame.
• SQL Injection Attacks on IIS Web Servers
  You may have seen recent reports that have surfaced stating that web sites running on Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 have been compromised. These reports allude to a possible vulnerability in IIS or issues related to Security Advisory 951306 which was released last week.
• How to install RESTful Authentication on a Ruby on Rails 2.0 application
  It’s time to upgrade your Rails 2.0 application with user authentication, and we hear that RESTful Authentication is the way to go, but all the instructions out there (even on the plugin repository sites) are out of date or don’t completely work or only work on Rails 1.2.x. In this tutorial, however, we’ll go step-by-step to install a complete RESTful authentication suite with all the trimmings your advanced Rails 2.0 application requires. Best of all, we’ll maintain complete control of our user administration code instead of relying on 3rd party and/or outdated software.