The NY Times Design Manager Khoi Vinh has been answering a variety of questions over the past week from readers. Today’s question was most interesting:

Q: Regardless of platform or browser, NYTimes.com looks the same. This is not an easy feat to accomplish because of inconsistencies between browsers and how they handle HTML and CSS. How do you do it and with which tools?

— Neil Mansilla

A: It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

But really the browser-to-browser consistency that you see (and I have to admit, it’s far from perfect) is the result of a vigilant collaboration between many different groups — the visual designers and technologists in the design team that I lead, their counterparts in our technology staff, and the many, many detail-oriented people who come together to make the site a reality every hour of every day.

You may have heard a lot of horror stories about trying to network a new Vista machine with your old XP machines, and you may have even tried it on occasion with no joy.  I know I had.

However, this time around, I was determined to get it working properly.  I, once again, Googled for articles explaining how to network the two machines.  This time, however, I was able to find a somewhat recent article on the subject (in the past, the majority of the articles I came up with were written when Vista was still in its beta stages).  I followed the steps in the article and was 95% of the way to having my two computers networked together successfully.

The last two pieces of the puzzle for me, however, were: 1) setting the correct permissions on my Vista files and folders and 2) configuring my Norton 360 firewall to allow the networking to happen.

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Macworld is reporting that Adobe has discontinued operations of the GoLive product. GoLive was a visual HTML editor that, when launched, was popular with the designer crowd. The integration with the other Adobe applications (PhotoShop, Illustrator, etc.) was pretty good and overall the application did pretty well.

It’s interesting to note that in the late 90s visual editors were all the rage. Today it seems hand coding is back in style. Those who don’t handcode seem to use tools like Wordpress where no HTML is required to get up and running.

About a week ago, my parents provided me with the recovery discs that originally came with the eMachines computer they gave my family last year.  The computer has been running dreadfully slowly since they gave it to us, and it’s been getting worse by the week.

Of course, the kids are the main users of the computer, so I’m sure it’s become chock full of all kinds of tracking cookies, spyware, adware and everything else from the various things they try to download.  Therefore, I decided to completely reconfigure the computer, starting with the recovery disc.

I backed up the handful of files that were on the computer that I needed, and then restarted with the recovery disc in the drive.

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I’m not usually one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I’m a bit peeved with Google and their Analytics utilities.

For the past year or so, I have been using Google Analytics and have been extremely impressed with the reports it provides on all of my Web sites. However, there has always been one aspect of the Analytics utility that’s driven me crazy: the tracking code always causes javascript warnings.

I was hopeful, however, when I logged into my Analytics account today and noticed that Google is providing new tracking code for Analytics users. I copied the code and promptly pasted it into the template for one of my sites. Much to my chagrin, when I loaded the page in Firefox and checked my code debugger, I found that the new code produces just as many, if not more, errors as the old.

Why is it so difficult for these large organizations, including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and so many more, to produce usable, clean, efficient, error-free code? Why do we have to continue putting up with these types of issues from organizations that probably employ more full-time coders than anyone else in the world?

UPDATE - I’ve added some screen shots of my error console after the jump.

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Browsing through your favorite library, or online store, you might say to yourself, “A book about phpMyAdmin? What’s there that I don’t know already?”.

Well I’ll tell you. Having worked with phpMyAdmin for the last seven years, I did only know about 10% of the options which are available in phpMyAdmin, if you want to use it to the fullest extent - and so promises the cover, “Increase your MySQL productivity and control by discovering the real power of phpMyAdmin.”

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The other day, our IT security guy contacted me to let me know that my computer had accessed a Web site that potentially installed some adware/spyware on my computer. He asked me to run some standard scans (virus, adware, spyware, etc.) to make sure that my computer was clean.

I went ahead and ran the scans and found that my computer appears to be clean. However, while doing research to figure out what had caused the problem in the first place, I came across a very interesting Web site.

YouGetSignal.com is a Web site that offers advanced IP related searches. You can search for the physical location of an IP address, complete with a Google map to display the results. You can use a visual traceroute tool, which is also accompanied by a Google map.

The most interesting utility I found, though, was an IP lookup that allows you to list all of the domain names associated with a particular IP address. I got some very interesting results when I searched for some of my own domains.

For instance, the IP address associated with one of my hobby sites hosted at Netfirms (dcevolution.net) came up with 164 other Web sites using the same IP address.

However, when I searched for Web sites using the same IP address as the hobby sites I have hosted at site5 (dchelp.net), the only results that came up were my other sites.

Searching for centernetworks.com brings up 760 domains using the same IP address, while htmlcenter.com brought up 48 domain names, which all appear to be offshoots of htmlcenter.com (although some of them are rather questionable, so I’m not sure if they are actually associated with htmlcenter or if it is just a weird coincidence that they came up with the same IP - or if the owners of those Web sites are using some sort of proxy to hijack htmlcenter’s IP).

Still, it’s kind of fun to search for that sort of information, and extremely interesting.

The Disability Discrimination Act says that web sites must be made accessible to disabled people. The DRC’s recent report has suddenly thrown this into the spotlight of the online community and a lot of misinformation has been thrown around. This article attempts to put a stop to this and tell you the truth behind web accessibility.

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AdaptiveBlue, maker of a variety of semantic Web products is announcing the launch of AB Meta tonight. AB Meta is simple HTML code that makes pages “smarter” by tagging them properly so that tools, including those from AdaptiveBlue, can take advantage of them.

Some examples of products that can take advantage of the AB Meta code include: books, music, movies, recipes and restaurants. I spoke with AdaptiveBlue CEO Alex Iskold who told me that his team collaborated on AB Meta with a large Web company which he can’t name currently but they will become public in the near future.

I like this type of markup because it serves an actual purpose - the classify and correctly identify a page. This will help machines better serve us the right content because the creators of the content have explained to the machine what the page is specifically for.

Check out the full AB Meta spec here.

I thought I was a geek, but I’ve got nothing on Bernie Peng.  You may have read his story on any of a number of news sites (CNN, Yahoo!, The Chicago Sun-Times, etc.).  Bernie Peng spent an entire month hacking his girlfriend’s favorite video game: Bejeweled.

Why did he do it?  So it would pop the question for him, of course.  He programmed the game to ask her to marry him once she reached a certain score.

I guess it’s a good thing they didn’t break up between the time he finished hacking the game and when she reached that score.