October 12th, 2009
I am falling head over heels for Cufon.
Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set:
1. No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
2. Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
3. Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
4. Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text
http://wiki.github.com/sorccu/cufon
October 12th, 2009
The premise is simple: Internet Explorer 6 is antiquated, doesn’t support key web standards, and should be phased out. This isn’t about being anti-Microsoft, it’s about making sure that we encourage people to move to modern browsers such as IE8, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. IE6 accounts for up to 20% of web usage, primarily via business users. Clients pressure designers to ’force’ sites to work in IE6, and designers, not wanting to lose business, comply, using hacks and workarounds. This wastes time and money. While Microsoft is encouraging companies and developers to move on from IE6, designers need to unite, and we all need to move on.
Visit: http://www.bringdownie6.com/
February 11th, 2009
I discovered this looking for an easy way to keep DNN alive on a low volume site. Since Dot Net Nuke (DNN) uses ASP, if no one visits the site for 30 minutes it will unload and take an ungodly amount of time to load for the next visitor. One more reason to avoid it…
Here’s a handy script (called “sPing”) to monitor any number of sites and ensure that they return a pleasant status code (200 or 304). The script will silently access each of the URLs in the array. Any that return something nasty like a 403, 404, 500, or 503 will be output to the console along with the particular status code.
http://jamescoletti.com/php-website-monitoring-script
Since my hosting arrangement sends me a notification every time a cron job executes, I entered a non-existent address (for cron notification) to avoid getting notifications every 15 minutes and then added my own SMTP mailer logic to send me a notice if any of the sites are down.
July 12th, 2007
Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting
From the book’s description:
… we got together ten of the world’s most talented web designers to share their secrets with you. Web Standards Creativity is jam-packed with fresh, innovative design ideas. The topics range from essential CSS typography and grid design, effective styling for CMS-driven sites, and astonishing PNG transparency techniques, to DOM scripting magic for creating layouts that change depending on browser resolution and user preference, and better print layouts for web pages…
What’s with all the dead trees? Sometimes you can’t beat the feel of a book in your hand, or gracing your coffee table – as this gorgeous full color softcover is well equipped to do. Real world examples provide insight, instruction and most of all inspiration. The articles are well written and illustrated. If you need something to inspire you to start innovating with XHTML, CSS and DOM Scripting – this is the book! Highly recommended.
Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting
July 7th, 2007
I recently added a new page in WordPress to contain Google search results within the site. I did not want this page to appear in my top menu however which is automatically generated by the template. This page in the WordPress Codex shows how to work with the template tag “wp_list_pages” to exclude certain pages from being listed by id.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_pages#Exclude_Pages_from_List
July 7th, 2007
Use absolute positioning and negative margins to get that box centered vertically! You must declare the height of the DIV you are centering, as your negative top margin will be half of this value.
Example here : http://greystonbakery.com/
div#landing-wrapper {
margin-left:-324px;
margin-top: -222px;
position:absolute;
top: 50%;
left: 50%;
width:648px;
height:444px;
}
July 6th, 2007
Needed to pull rows from a MySQL database, selecting by month, using the MONTH() and YEAR() functions to extract from the datetime stamp. Following returns all records for the month of January, 2007.
SELECT * FROM table WHERE MONTH(datetimefield) = '1' AND YEAR(datetimefield) = '2007'
Or for more detailed date range control, use the DATE() function to extract the date. Returns all records between two dates.
SELECT * FROM table WHERE DATE(datetimefield) BETWEEN 'YYYY-MM-DD' AND 'YYYY-MM-DD'
MySQL manual documentation of date and time functions here http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/date-and-time-functions.html.
June 7th, 2007
So a client has a great new video site. And as it attracts users, it attracts unsavory script kiddies from across the globe – probing the system for weaknesses and always it seems trying to send nonsensical spam. The first thing they do is create a user account to get into the members area. We always get a heads up because inevitably they use a bogus email address, and in turn the registration notice bounces back to info@. The client then forwards to me and I delete the bogus users from the DB. I always notice in succession they try and stuff additional mail headers into the database. The input gets truncated because of the length and thus far appears to be a fairly harmless nuisance.
Read the rest of this entry »
May 15th, 2007
A favicon.ico graphic
What is this strange ‘.ico’ file format? Truth be known, it’s nothing other than a lowly 8-bit BMP file, renamed with the ‘.ico’ extension. You can create your own easily using Fireworks or Photoshop. Start with a 16×16 pixel canvas in RGB color space at 72dpi. Once it’s to your liking export the image to the root level of your site as ‘favicon.bmp’, using BMP8 as your export format. Then re-name the file with the ‘.ico’ extension and upload.
The final step is linking to the shortcut icon in the source of the page. By adding this code to the head:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico" type="image/ico" />