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 →
For the article I wrote recently on web design galleries, I compiled a table of the galleries in a MySQL database. To be able to display the table and the associated charts and other statistics that went with it, I needed to be able to connect to this external database from within Wordpress.
More on Connecting to an external database from within a Wordpress post →
Recently I had to add basic shopping cart functionality to a site that had been built with ExpressionEngine (my CMS of choice). “No problem,” I thought; I can use the Simple Commerce Module (SCM), which as the names suggests, is ideally suited to simple ecommerce requirements, and which I had used before on other EE sites.
Recently I made some changes to the typography of subheadings on this site: I made them all uppercase and for the h2s I used the first-letter pseudo class to give the first letter a larger font-size (150%). I didn't notice at first however that Firefox does something weird to elements with first-letter applied if that element is wrapped around an anchor.
For a while now I've been using some sort of 'reset' for my stylesheets. At first it was the global reset which involves zeroing out padding and margins on all elements by with the universal selector, e.g., * { margin: 0; padding: 0 }. Later I read about the problems this can cause for form elements and so have been using Eric Meyer's Reset CSS.
I just encountered a problem installing the TinyMCE editor on an install of ExpressionEngine – all the files were uploaded correctly and the extension to get it working in ExpressionEngine was uploaded and properly activated, but the editor wouldn't appear in Firefox 2 (other browsers were fine).
I found the solution to the problem at Tis How I Code. There's also some further discussion of the issue on the Moxiecode forum.
Theres' been a bit of news recently about the 'semantic web' (or data web) with Yahoo! announcing that their new Search Open Ecosystem will support semantic web standards, thereby providing a far richer and more useful search experience. Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Internet, even believes that the rise of the semantic web could see the wane of Google.
More on Will the ‘semantic web’ see XHTML finally supercede HTML? →
When I wrote the original article on how to achieve cross-browser consistency when styling form legends, I noted that there was a bug in the way Firefox handled legends which required an additional div to be wrapped around the fieldset with positioning and other styling applied to the div rather than the fieldset. The bug appears to still have not been resolved, but as Thierry Koblenz pointed out in the comments on the original article, there is a way to achieve the same effect across browsers that doesn't require the additional div.
After spending a while on web development forums, you start to see the same questions being asked regularly. So here I'm going to answer some of these common beginner questions and hopefully save me typing answers out repeatedly in the future because I can just refer the poster to here or copy it myself. 😉
I recently had one of the articles from this site copied and posted on someone else's site (a practice sometimes also known as site scraping). But thanks to a couple of Wordpress' in-built features and also a handy plugin, I soon found about it.