Neil Craig
Hi, I'm Neil Craig, a web-developer from Oxfordshire in the UK. If you're interested, you can read more about me on my "About The Dot Product" page. Cheers Neil Craig
Homepage: http://www.thedotproduct.org
Posts by Neil Craig
Javascript performance: document.getElementById versus document.querySelector and document.querySelectorAll
Nov 26th
I’ve been lucky enough to be working on an internal project the last few weeks which has a known set of modern browsers as the target audience. This means i’ve been able to ignore some of the older design/development issues. I am really liking document.querySelector and document.querySelectorAll which are relatively modern (well, to me at More >
Previous sibling, the missing CSS selector?
Nov 6th
CSS 2.1 has some really handy selectors, one of which is the adjacent (next) sibling selector which has the form: el1 + el2 { color:#f0f; } The above would apply a tasty pink(ish) text colour to el2 where it directly follows el1 in HTML element order. Excellent, that can be seriously useful. The glaring omission More >
How to install a Java runtime on Apple Mac OSX Mountain Lion
Jul 28th
One of the (perhaps) understandable but more irritating aspects of Apple Mac OSX upgrades which I just experienced is the fact that my upgrade from lion to mountain lion is that the Java runtime (JRE) is uninstalled…This meant that my usual code editor/IDE Netbeans was broken – not good! So i searched around and found More >
NodeJS NPM registry add/update notifications via Twitter
Jul 13th
I have been messing with NodeJS for a little while now and contrary to my preconceptions, I quite like it. NodeJS is not the right choice for every task (as with any development paradigm/language) but it has some great use cases for i/o bound tasks and is definitely easy to use! NodeJS uses a module More >
Quick tutorial: installing Openstack as all-in-one using Stackops
Jul 11th
I’ve recently been working on lots of trial-runs of software at work and got annoyed with having to rebuild servers all the time so i decided to join the rest of the world and go virtual. Our production VI at work runs VMWare (ESXi) but my trial stack was going to be a no-budget affair More >
Quick fix: Can’t log in to Ubuntu 12.04 Gnome via RDP – failed to load session ubuntu
Jun 1st
AS I type, i’m setting up an Ubuntu server to use a virtual server host on my test rig. Slight problem though, after getting bored/frustrated with command line configuring (odd because usually command line is my preference) I got lazy and decided to install Gnome and virt-manager. All good, so I thought, I added xrdp More >
Tutorial: Setting up BackupPC on Debian (and probably Ubuntu too) Linux
May 31st
It’s been quite some time since I’ve had the pleasure of using BackupPC, a delightfully simple to use yet very effective, free, open source, cross-platform backup system. My test rig was sorely overdue some proper backups…So I decided to install BackupPC on a central server to back up the others (which are all Debian or More >
Setting or overriding PHP configuration in PHP-FPM (pool) configurations
May 11th
I’ve recently been working on some very different parallel projects on a development server i have and came across a situation where i needed to have one vhost/site for the LDAP GUI GOsa on the server with the (soon to be deprecated) PHP feature magic_quotes_gpc enabled whilst the rest of my vhosts/sites (quite rightly) mandate More >
HTML5 Youtube videos not working in Google chrome
Mar 26th
This is a really quick post as i’ve been coding for a few hours and need to call it a day… So i was working on my new website which uses a lot of HTML5, CSS3 etc. and shows Youtube videos, so naturally I wanted to use the Youtube HTML5 embed method (which i still More >
UK National Computer Archives Colossus display
Feb 13th
It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted an article here and this one will be very brief… If you feel so inclined and are able, please consider sponsoring the UK National Computer Archives Colossus display. More information can be found here: http://www.colossusonline.org/ I’ll soon be posting on my findings over the last year or More >
When to use an img tag, when to use a CSS background image
Nov 3rd
<Img> tag vs CSS background image…This has caused much confusion to many web-developers I have met – many more developers don’t care. So, when should you use an <img> and when should you use a CSS background image on your element? The answer is surprisingly simple…In nearly all cases, use <img> tags for contextually important More >
Mobile Website design & development guidelines
Nov 3rd
Like it or hate it, the Apple iPhone has ushered in the age of the “Smartphone” which in turn has delivered mobile web-browsing to the masses. The mobile browser, whilst now broadly quite capable (at least on leading platforms), has introduced a slightly different set of requirements in terms of design and development of Websites.
Many, many designers, developers and others have written articles on how to design and/or develop for the mobile browser. I am aiming to summarise what I have learnt from several sources alongside my experience an opinion in a (hopefully) relatively quick and simple way
How to reduce web page download time in 4 (fairly) simple steps
Oct 1st
Web pages have generally become much more bulky in recent years. The trends for JavaScript-based functionality enhancements and the popularisation of digital photography have led to larger amounts of data being transferred (downloaded) per page and I can’t see a reversal of this happening any time soon. If you’re using a mobile device such as More >
wget: saving a file to a custom location
Aug 19th
This will be a really quick post which will be obvious to unix sysadmin veterans but hopefully will be helpful to us mere mortals… wget is a linux/*nix command line tool which can download files (including entire websites if options are set correctly) and at first glance, from looking at the wget man page you’d More >
Mootools element.morph() example
Aug 17th
A simple example of the time-saving element.morph() Mootools method which allows you to morph HTML elements from one property set to another.
Quick “how to”: ProFTPd chroot, speed up connections and enable passive connections
Aug 16th
This post is a really quick “how to” – working with ProFTPd on Debian Linux and will explain how to chroot your FTP users, speed up connections and enable passive connections which can be very handy for those behind firewalls. You’ll first need to locate your main ProFTPd config file which on my system is More >
CSS Basics: The difference between outline and border
Jul 26th
CSS outline and border are at a glance very similar but have a few important differences: Outline is effectively overlaid over the top of the element it is applied to and therefore outline does not add to the element width whereas border does add to the element width Outline (according to the official W3C specification More >
Outlook 2007 & 2010 bug: Embedded images being cropped
Jul 2nd
I’ve just been creating the HTML for an Email to be sent out on behalf of a client and have found what appears to be a bug in Outlook 2007 & 2010 (which use the MS Word rendering engine) when using tall images in HTML Emails. My HTML Email was created from a JPEG designed More >
Email client rendering engines – useful information for testing HTML email layouts
Jun 21st
As every web-developer knows, testing your Web pages on the myriad of popular Web browsers can often be a horrible experience…and if there’s one thing which is even worse than testing web pages in different browsers, it surely has to be testing HTML Email layout in multiple Email clients!
Tutorial: VHost config from SQL Database – Lighttpd an alternative to Apache
Jun 10th
Lighttpd is an alternative to the very popular Apache web-server – I have just found out that Lighttpd can draw it’s vhost configuration from a MySQL Database which is definitely a one-up on Apache, at least as far as I know.