I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently in small business startups, especially those started by young people. A lot of these entrepreneurs, when launching their businesses, are jumping on the social networking bandwagon and using a Facebook or MySpace page instead of a traditional website. It could be because it’s a natural extension from the tools…
We’re used to using browser sniffing to work around incompatibilities, to serve different stylesheets or scripts to different User-Agents with different capabilities. Of course, that approach has fallen by the wayside in recent times, with best practice now dictating that we test for capabilities rather than browser/OS combinations in our rich UIs. However, browser sniffing…
A designer by the name of Matt Earnshaw thought he could get away with ripping off the work of David Airey, one of the most respected identity designers in the business. Here’s what happened… Continue reading…
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I thought I’d jot down a couple of ways Apache and mod_rewrite can save your life. Not literally of course, unless your website’s been linked to your life-support system by a crazed psychopath – but it should make your readers’ lives easier. Isn’t that what we’re supposed…
Does that title confuse you? You’re not alone. Acronyms are everywhere, especially on the Web where technical terms (XHTML, CSS, PHP) rub shoulders with shorthand figures of speech (IMHO). In fact, the profusion of acronyms has given rise to a self-referencing acronym of its own – TLA. So what can we do? We obviously can’t…
mail() fail I was recently called upon to troubleshoot the mail script powering a website’s contact form, which for some reason unbeknownst to anyone was failing silently. It should’ve been an easy fix, but the more I dug into it, the more confused I became, and resorted to dumping variables to see if I could…
During the course of my career, I’ve had to deal with some quite bizarre things jumping out at me from the source of pages. One developer I know, from a well-respected firm (to spare your blushes I won’t link to it, Kev) is in the habit of using <div id=”mchammer”> “because it’s a wrapper”) but…
Like many IT professionals, I’m still heavily involved in deploying and supporting Windows XP. While most of the compatibility and performance problems with Vista have been addressed in SP1, there is still a clear case for a lot of businesses to run XP for a variety of reasons, mainly revolving around compatibility with third-party applications.…
So, here endeth my hacking of Wordpress. For now.
With any luck I should have news of Magellan Sitemap here shortly. Meanwhile I’ll finally be fixing the layout and putting together the final (rev. umpteen) graphics. Some content would probably help too…