General Web-Development
Anything which doesn’t fit in a more specific category
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 >
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 >
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 >
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.
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.
Flushing your DNS cache on Mac OSX 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6
Jun 8th
If like me, you have to transfer websites between servers from time to time and you use an Apple Mac, you’ll probably need to know how to flush your DNS on Mac OSX (flushing is the term used for removing of all records to force an update). For all versions of OSX, the simplest way More >
A simple example of CSS sprites
May 25th
CSS Sprites can help to reduce web page download times and delays caused by downloading of hover/rollover background images. This article walks through the basics with an example of how you can use CSS sprites in a graphical HTML menu.
An example of @font-face web-fonts from CSS3
May 5th
Web-fonts, for those who don’t know, are a method of using a custom font in your web page(s). Unlike the more traditional method of specifying the font using the CSS “font-family” (or the shorthand “font”) which relies on the user having the relevant font installed on their computer, web-fonts allow the developer to use fonts More >
A simple example of navigator.geolocation.watchPosition()
Apr 27th
As I mentioned in my previous post about the new/upcoming navigator.geolocation standard, I have been experimenting with Geo location on my IPhone so I thought I’d share some of that with you in case it helps anyone out. My example is very simple and is intended to show how you can use the JavaScript navigator.geolocation.watchPosition() More >
How to get an accurate Geo location from Apple IPhone using navigator.geolocation.watchPosition
Apr 27th
Anyone who’s tried using navigator.geolocation on a fixed-line (i.e. not mobile) device will know that it’s not too useful, usually at home my location is given as New York, USA when in fact I am in Oxfordshire in the UK! So, I turned to my IPhone and had a bit of a hard time at first trying to get an accurate position reading from navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(). My findings here refer to using JavaScript in Safari on Apple IPhone (IPhone 3G with OS 3.1.3 on O2′s GSM network in the UK).
UPDATED: A simple method of transferring MySQL Database(s)/Tables between servers
Apr 15th
We’ve recently been working on a Web-Server migration for a regular client at work, part of which involved transferring the MySQL Databases (or strictly the schemas) for each of their websites from their old Web-Server to the shiny new replacement. In doing this, I rediscovered a really handy method which really simplifies transferring MySQL data More >
HTML5 input elements and their data formats
Mar 31st
As a follow-up to my article on js5hf – an unobtrusive javascript method for converting text type inputs to HTML5 input types, I wanted to put together a simple example of the new HTML5 inputs to demonstrate the formats in which they output data. So…you can see my example of HTML5 input element data formats More >