The Hickensian

10.11.08

Adding Books to Coda

Here’s a feature introduced in Coda 1.5 that might be new to you (after all the big focus of that release was SVN integration and global find/replace). The new books feature allows you to add new online reference and even reset the defaults if you wish.

Let’s take Sitepoint’s excellent CSS reference as the example:

First, Command-6 to go to the books view, and click the add icon bottom left. In the sheet that appears, enter the title and URL (e.g http://reference.sitepoint.com/css). You can also drag in an image to represent it (which looks rather sexy).
Next, in the ‘use for mode’, select the language it references if it’s available. In this example, ‘CSS’, which will override the default choice.
Finally, add the search URL. You can easily discover this by searching for * on the site in question and copying the resulting URL.

Now if there is a CSS property I want more information on, I can either search within the books view in Coda, or select the property in code view and choose ‘Look up in Reference Books’ from the context menu. This is something I do a lot, mainly to check the support for the property in other browsers.

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No.1

Chris said 236 days ago:

Nice tip—thanks!

No.2

David van Wert said 236 days ago:

Jon Hicks: The new books feature allows you to add snew online reference and even reset the defaults if you wish.

Me: Hey Jon, what’s snew?

Jon Hicks: Oh, just working at Opera— what’s snew with you?

sorry…

No.3

Ben Poole said 236 days ago:

I hadn’t noticed this! Great tip, thank you.

No.4

Mike Robinson said 236 days ago:

I have a couple of books added already, but completely forgot to add the sitepoint references. Thanks for the reminder!

No.5

Matthew Magain said 234 days ago:

Thanks for recommending our references be added to Coda, Jon. We do the same thing here in the SitePoint office and found it to be very useful. I’m actually about to ask the Coda guys if they’ll include them by default (just working on some prettier versions of the covers—as you’ve no doubt experienced, there’s an art to producing an image so that it doesn’t look distorted once the Coda drop shadows etc get overlaid).

One other comment worth making is that the URL structure of our reference sites is very keyword-friendly, meaning that you don’t need to limit yourself to visiting the search results page. If you use the following URL, you can go straight to the element or property that you’ve highlighted, and save yourself a click:

CSS Ref: http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/*
HTML Ref: http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/*

Hope that helps!

Cheers
Matt