Articles archive

It may only be a very small amendment, but I’ve just updated the HTML of this site to bring it in line with the new Microformats Value Class Pattern which has just been released as an alpha draft.

More on Site updated to Microformats Value Class Pattern

If you use TinyMCE in your Content Management System (CMS) projects, you no doubt also give clients the ability to add images and links to their content with TinyMCE’s Link and Image buttons. But by default, these popup windows come with a variety of fields into which unsuspecting clients can input values which will translate into unwanted code when delivered to the page.

More on Removing unwanted fields from TinyMCE’s image and link popup windows

Recently I was asked by a client to do some customisation of a Wordpress site to enable a site visitor to load posts from a certain category into the same part of the page via AJAX. This could have been done in a couple of different ways – using AJAX as requested; or all the posts could’ve been printed to the page, with javascript then used to hide all but one and also used to navigate between them in some sort of hide/show, fading/sliding effect. I’ve done similar things like this before using jQuery, but there were two reasons why I didn’t go that route on this occasion:

1. With javascript turned off, all the posts from the selected category would’ve been displayed on the page and as the design called for three short columns of text on the page, having one column much, much longer than the other two would really have looked wrong.
2. The client specifically asked for AJAX to be used.

More on Fetching posts in Wordpress and ExpressionEngine with jQuery and AJAX

I don’t normally write about current news topics on this site, but I thought the implications behind the Australian Federal government’s Cyber-saftey plan are serious enough to warrant a comment.

More on Save the Net in Australia

Which is better in links from the search engines’ point of view: plain text or images with an alt attribute that says the same thing? For example, is this:

<a href="">This is a link</a>

better than this?

<a href=""><img src="" alt="This is a link"/></a>

More on Which is better for search engines: plain text or alt attributes?

I’ve come across a few little solutions/fixes recently to various problems I’ve encountered when building sites with ExpressionEngine (EE) that I thought it would be worth sharing. A couple of these were tips I picked up from other posters on the EE forums and the third was one I came up with myself to solve a particular problem I had. More on Custom ExpressionEngine template solutions

Dave Shea recently published an article on A List Apart (ALA), CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time’, about how to use jQuery to create the effect of animated rollovers on navigation items.

The technique he outlines makes use of the same image replacement method as outlined in ALA’s original Sprites article. The problem with this method however is that it uses a large negative text-indent to remove the default text from screen, and with images turned off in the browser, you don’t see anything. This has accessibility implications not only from the perspective of those with disabilities, but also for those who deliberately turn images off, i.e. people on slower connections or those using handheld devices who are trying to limit the amount of information downloaded to their phone.

More on Animated navigation items using jQuery

If you’re using ExpressionEngine (EE) with a WYSIWYG editor, chances are you’re using either TinyMCE or FCKEditor. I myself use TinyMCE and it seems like a lot of people prefer it to FCKEditor, but for one thing – it doesn’t have good image and file management capabilties built in by default.

More on File and image management plugins for TinyMCE

Recently I wanted to create a page that would list the backlinks to certain sites that I had chosen. Yahoo always seems to have the most comprehensive list of backlinks and luckily they also make available a series of APIs that enables you to access their data. Using the Site Explorer Inbound Links API, and an example of a script towards the bottom of that page, I was able to put together a script that closely mirrors the sort of results you would get if you entered a site’s URL into Yahoo’s Site Explorer.

More on Checking backlinks with Yahoo’s Site Explorer Inbound Links API

A while ago I wrote about some of the extensions I use with Firefox which make the job of web development easier. I’ve since added some new ones to Firefox that I use on a fairly regular basis, so thought I should update the list.

More on More useful extensions for developing with Firefox