bobber205

Welcome! May the design gods bless you with many fruits! Enjoy yourself!

I love to use BlueJ. Since I rarely have "big" projects in mind, BlueJ is a great program. While it's not horribly hard to code with a text editor and the command line, the syntax highlighting is what I find very valuable. It's in my dock and may never leave!

Nice link! *adds to library of helpful bookmarks*

The convenience of a laptop is just too good to pass up. And since I'm a starving college student, I need a laptop for my software classes of course. I love my macbook and I don't know what I would do w/o it.

What kind of computer are you using? A Pc maybe? Windows XP tends to get bloated with spyware and other bad stuff, which can tend to slow down your connection.

Many people may or may not find this interesting, but when you use the "http" protocol in the XMLHttpRequest method, Safari allows you to override security permissions, while Firefox does not. Using the "GET" method, both browsers work. Maybe this will help someone?

Well. You're wanting to do something very complicated and time consuming. If you want the states to align next to each other like they do on real maps, you might want to conisder do an image map. http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_image_maps.asp If that doesn't' sound like fun (personally, I don't like it either), you could make the states into big groups, then position the group-of-states blocks with CSS. Two other options. You could ImageReady or maybe flash to link the states. If you have those programs, that's probably the fastest/easiest way.

I tend to plan it out in my head first. Because I'm not much of a designer, I like to get the basic functionality of the site going first. I then design the site according to its functions, not the other way around. Just a personal preference.