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

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/

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.

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

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_pages#Exclude_Pages_from_List

Example here : http://greystonbakery.com/

div#landing-wrapper {
margin-left:-324px;
margin-top: -222px;
position:absolute;
top: 50%;
left: 50%;
width:648px;
height:444px;
}

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.

But what if I could prevent them from registering in the first place? We already use validation to make sure a valid email address is entered. But this is just checking the pattern of the string. Making sure there’s an ‘@’ surrounded by text, with a domain name on one side. While this is a good start, it doesn’t check to see if the domain name entered exists.

We can use PHP’s checkdnsrr function to lookup the DNS records for the entered domain. This is great because now can’t register and make more work for me. However they’re smarter than we think! They use the domain name of the site itself for their fake address. Oy. So now we need to take it to the next level and verify that the mailbox name they entered actually exists…

Update, now seeing activity on the “tell a friend” form : reading..uk, admin..uk, sales..uk – all invalid addresses. Online tool to validate mailboxes here : http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/email-validator/verify_email.php

Here’s a mod for phpBB that does what I need : http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=280755 I’ll have to dig in and see if I can adapt for my usage.

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" />