It's been almost two years since I released my last TF2 map called "Mercy" which was a small, experimental CTF map.  I've decided to go at it again and create something new: a Payload map.  I never really got into the game mode back when it was released and thus never mapped for it... until now.

Vesper's first beta is rather polished.  It's fully optimized, detailed (mostly), clipped and the layout is pretty close to what I think it'll be in the final versions.

I've been looking for ways to simplify my CSS development constantly.  I recently made the switch to using Compass/SASS full time in all of my projects due to its simplicity and more importantly the fact that you can create a base template for all of the wild CSS3 effects that require 5 different lines for each browser.

Something I recently noticed in Google Analytics is that they show "(not provided)" for many search keywords these days.  They have recently started blocking search keyword tracking for individuals that are logged in to Google for "security reasons".  This block severely limits the usefulness of Analytics for search, as webmasters have no idea what 20% or more of their visitors are finding their site with.

PayPal is a great convenience for me and a lot of others.  Unfortunately, their website user experience sucks.  Why do I need to search Google to find the pages I need on PayPal.com?

If you're selling online and have PayPal buttons created, you better bookmark the "My Saved Buttons" page, otherwise you're going to need to go five pages deep and find this small link when you want to get back to the list:

EDIT 2/2/2012: Google likes to randomly change the CSS/page structure of the Realtime Analytics page.  You can always get the updated version at the demo page I have set up (since I use it for the TV display at work and fix it when it breaks).  It has changed twice so far since this post.

I recently upgraded my Android dev kit to check out the Icecream Sandwich update.  It's important that app developers check that their existing apps work under 4.0 since it'll be coming to devices eventually.

I recently discovered the greatness that is adapt.js, or Adaptive CSS.  In a nutshell, it's a javascript tool that allows your website to activate different CSS files based on the user's current browser window size.  

I try to subscribe to security and release announcement RSS feeds in Google Reader since it's bad practice to let software become out of date, especially on a web server.  At the very least you'll know of a vulnerability and be able to patch it.  Here are some important ones I use:

Having recently started development with Android, I noticed that the emulator takes ages to load up initially.  My original thought was that testing a change would take a very long time.  However, this is not the case.  If you launch an emulator from the Eclipse SDK, you must remember not to close the emulator window.  When you make changes and relaunch the application your changes will automatically be installed on the existing emulator.  This is something that wasn't completely obvious to me when I started.

I feel starting out as a person who makes websites today is different than it was 12 years ago when I started.  Back then I had literally no guide and I was a middle school student.  Somehow, I pulled through and that experience is an interesting thing to look at now that I'm a little older.  Compared to some I am still a beginning web developer, but I now do it professionally and make a living with it.

Here is a list of things I'd recommend to anyone starting out on the path of web development.