John Hesch

Ajax Magazine has a link to a very cool Ajax based spell check application called GoogieSpell. This is a slick solution for adding a spell check feature to any application that requires users to enter text like a blog comment section or a contact form.

A List Apart has an informative article on protecting your code from cross-site scripting. What I liked about this article is that they weren’t platform or programming language specific. Fundamentals were taught leaving the user to apply the techniques to the users specific environment.

This is part one of a two part artcile.

There should be an IE patch delivered today that will change the way ActiveX controls content like audio and video. Websites that have their content set to auto-play in the IE browser should be prepared to make necessary changes as users will now need to take some sort of action before the content will play. This all stems from a lawsuit Microsoft lost with the University of California and Eolas Technologies over the way rich content is automatically embedded into the IE browser.

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

I’ve written so much about Mozilla that I thought I’d give MS a little love. This may be old news to some of you but MS has a web developer toolbar similar to the web developer extension for Firefox. Here’s what you get:

The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides several features for exploring and understanding Web pages. These features enable you to:

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS Web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.

The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately.

I'm not sure if anyone is still reading this blog but if so, what would you consider to be the best way to use IE hacks in your stylesheets? IE allows the use of conditional statements like

This allows you to load an IE specific stylesheet. You can learn more here

Or incremental overrides, like so

Or using hacks like this or any other type

The most frustrating thing about coding websites using stylesheets is trying to get the same look in the different browsers.

Digg dug up a cool link to some free computer books including O'Reilly's PHP Programming. Can't beat free.

You can find titles for the following:

• ADA 95
• AppleScript
• Assembly Language
• Awk
• BASIC
• C
• C++
• COBOL
• C#
• Delphi
• Forth
• Fortran
• SQL
• PHP
• Java
• Visual Basic
• Perl
• Python

This is a great list of the 21 Best Firefox Extensions for Web Development.

Good article from Digital Web Magazine on The Principles of Design by Joshua David McClurg-Genevese. This article is the first in a series called Design in Theory and Practice.

"Design in Theory and Practice" is all about visual communication design for the web. This column will explore topics ranging from the fundamentals of design, to typography and motion, to some of the more advanced theoretical concepts surrounding the practice. Joshua David McClurg-Genevese will guide you through the core tenets of the profession using examples from a wide variety of sources including classical art and architecture, business, media and movies, the environment and, of course, the web. “Design in Theory and Practice” will provide a solid foundation for any web design endeavors, with insight and resources to enhance your daily design activities.

I'm developing a website for a client and I needed some fill text. A lot of web developers use the Lorem Ipsum nonsense text to use in place of live content. While searching for filler text I found two
Lipsum generators. One here and the other here.

Who would of thought there was such a thing as a Lipsum generator?

This is mainly for customers I host websites for but may be of interest to others who use cPanel.

The Unofficial cPanel Tutorial.

Digital Web Magazine's Introduction to Databases. Good stuff.

Gerry McGovern's top 10 predictions for 2005 concerning web content management.

1. The editor—the person who knows the difference between good and bad content—will get increasing authority for the website.
2. Websites will get smaller, as editors begin to get rid of the large quantities of out-of-date content that have built up over the years.
3. Websites will get simpler as complexity is hidden, and a set of straightforward choices are presented to the impatient scan reader.
4. Senior management will get more involved in developing web strategy.
5. Some hard questions will be asked as to the value websites are delivering in relation to the money that is being spent on them.
6. The importance of writing quality web content will be recognized, but the people who write quality web content will still not get due reward.
7. As the attention span shortens, so too will content. It will become more and more difficult to get anyone to read anything over 500 words.
8. As the need to get people to the right content as quickly as possible increases, the importance of writing quality metadata will grow.
9. Website design will continue to standardize. As websites focus more on navigation, the principle of reducing uncertainty and increasing familiarity will become more important.
10. Things won't change dramatically in 2005. The Web has begun to mature, and certainly when it comes to text-based content, it will be about getting the basics right.

I've always been told since I began developing on the web that content is king. I still see many websites trying to dazzle the visitor instead of providing the information users are looking for in a quick and easy to find manner. I especially like prediction number 7, this is where RSS content syndication comes in. If your company's business is to provide information in a timely manner you better find a way to feed it to your customers quickly.

Don't even think about delivering information via email. With the amount of spam people receive everyday you will be lucky to get your legitimate newsletter delivered and read by your customers. I'm not saying that email is a thing of the past but progressive companies are finding new ways to deliver content and information.

Robert Scoble often asks bloggers to be more descriptive in their article titles and headlines. Users are overloaded with information so writing compelling content will draw in the user and not so much fancy design.

The new year looks to be an exciting year in web development with many new technologies emerging but don't forget that content is king.

There is a very simple hack that you can add to an input tag to auto-erase the text in the form field. For example, on my BloggingPro website I have a search box

Rather then adding the text "Search" either above or below the box I added "Search" inside the search box using the following code

When a user clicks inside the box the word "Search" auto-erases. This is really handy when used with contact forms as many times users fail to remove whatever instructions you have placed in the form field.

If you don't want the text to erase but rather be selected when a user clicks in the form field you can use this code instead.

The advantage to this latter code is that if the user clicks back in the form field after they have typed in text, it doesn't get auto-erased, just selected. For other fields besides a search box this is probably the better approach.

Gigablast released a new tool giving web sites the ability to add a topic specific search engine to their website. Let's say you have a website about the TV show Alias. Gigablast gives you the ability to add a search tool that will search your website as well as up to 200 other websites that you designate. This provides an additional reason for visitors to return to your website.

I may add this tool to Planet Search, giving visitors the ability to search the websites that Planet Search aggregates.

Sometimes I want to do something so simple in PHP and the code escapes me and I can't figure it out. One of the purposes of my website is to house code snippets that I can refer back to.

Here is the code to get the unique number of entries in a table.

Found via codegrrl.com.