Quick Links Archive

This page contains an archive of Quick Links. The latest ten are not included as they are always available in the sidebar on every page of the site.

2nd February 2008

Netscape Windows 3.1 :: Firefox Add-ons Why, oh, why would you want to use this?
John Resig - Sub-Pixel Problems in CSS An interesting post which explains how each browser handles the problem.
John Resig - HTML5 Shiv A JavaScript hack to make IE recognise and allow you to style unknown tags.
PHP Speedy Another script for merging and compressing CSS and JavaScript files.

Django Chop Text Filter A Django version of the text chopping function I described in my latest post.
Comet works, and it’s easier than you think Simon gave a talk to day at our offices in London about Comet (a term used to encompass a set of techniques for allowing a web server to "push" events to a browser.

Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6 Drew talks one through the problems of using PNGs in IE 6.

PHP or Python? Stuart poses the question. This could shape up to be an interesting discussion.

UserTesting.com A site which gives you access to user testing for only $19 per test. For the price you get a video of someone interacting with your site and a short written review. This looks like a useful service but I do have one or two concerns about how representative of your user base, or the particular audience you want to target, their users are.

DreamHost offers dedicated CPU and memory options for their shared hosting plans This looks like a very tempting solution to a common problem on shared hosting - maintaining performance and reliability. This pilot service, it's invite only at the moment, will allow you to purchase a dedicated slice of CPU and memory, configurable from your DreamHost control panel.
Some examples of using UNIX find command A handy guide to using the UNIX find command - for some reason the syntax of the find command just doesn't seem to stay in my head for any length of time. I can't imagine why.

Running a Safari 2 Standalone Alongside Safari 3 An interesting post about creating a standalone version of Safari 2 to use following the Mac OS X 1.4.11 system update which upgrades the system to Safari 3. Good stuff Stuart.

Read/Write Splitting with MySQL-Proxy MySQL-Proxy is a binary application that sits between your MySQL client and server, and supports the embedded scripting language Lua. The proxy can be used to analyze, monitor and transform communication.
Endless Pageless: No More Next Page I'm not sure what I feel about this. It doesn't play nice with the scrollbar and I've seen it got horribly wrong in other situations. Is paging really that awful?
aideRSS Possibly useful. Aims to help you identify the most interesting posts in RSS feeds. Assigns a PostRank score to each post based on popularity in sites such as del.icio.us and Technorati.
Disabling Deprecated HTML Using CSS An interesting concept but not terribly practical and IE expressions are seriously inefficient.

Web app form design Ryan Singer delivers a presentation on creating web forms that delight your users.

Creating a Visual Language One of the more subtly powerful things we can do as designers is create a consistent and flexible visual language. Buttons are a common place where this type of activity manifests itself, and Amazon has traditionally done a very good job of this.
FirePHP Firebug for PHP?
Using microformats in Firefox 3 Firefox 3 provides a JavaScript API for querying microformats.
Free WiFi spots in London A nice mashup with Google maps.
Misunderstood CSS Clip A nice explantation of the CSS clip property.
WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage WebKit now supports storing and accessing data in a client side sqlite database via JavaScript.
CouchDb An document based database. It stores arbritrary objects represented as JSON data. Qeury it via a simple REST interface.

Quantization error for em values in Opera 7–9.2 Opera 7–9.2 shows a rough “quantization” error when a margin or a padding is expressed in em units and the value of the property is greater than (about) 20.47em. In these conditions the decimals are simply ignored.
Introducing YUI - The Rising Giant A nice overview of YUI.

RefactorMyCode Solved a problem but got that niggling feeling that there's a better way to implement it? Post your code to this site and other users will provide suggestions for how to improve your implementation.
A Visual Guide to Version Control A nice introduction to the concepts behind version control systems.
Extension Writing - Introduction to PHP and Zend An introduction to writing extensions for PHP.