Archive for February, 2007

I have been doing Ajax in minute proportions over the months but haven't really got down to mastering the art. I don't consider myself an Ajax expert but I get dis-heartened with often seeing the spaghetti code of supposedly AJAX professionals, making it virtually impossible to update their code without breaking something.At the moment I'm reading Ajax in Action by Dave Crane et al. I'd recommend it to all spiring Ajaxians as it demonstrates how to code in a non-spaghetti style by employing Design Patterns. I'm only on Chapter 3 but it's looking good so far.

See more progress on: master Ajax

I'm sure this is probably very old school news but I've only recently come across this free Favicon generator tool by DynamicDrive. It allows you to convert any image in either Gif, Jpeg and PNG formats, with transparency if required, into a proper icon.http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon

There are two more I haven't tried yet but look good too:

http://www.dagondesign.com/tools/favicon-generator-tool
http://www.graphicsguru.com/favicon.php

Now there is no more excuse not to create a Favicon for your site!

Favicon away my friends!

If you are running PHP as a module on a Win2k server remember to set the upload_tmp_dir in your php.ini to a folder that allows the Anonymous Internet User read/write permissions. Otherwise you'd end up with 0.0 byte files when performing PHP uploads...By default the upload_tmp_dir is set to %windir%\temp if no value is given. This system folder is normally restricted to known Admin and User accounts only, hence files that are uploaded via PHP are not saved to the filesystem. You may notice stat failed warnings if you try performing file operations on uploaded files.

To resolve this problem you should either give Anonymous users access to the %windir%\temp folder (not recommended) or create a folder in D:\uploads, if you have a D drive that is, and point your upload_tmp_dir to it, then give Anonymous users access to the new folder.

@font-face is W3C's answer to font embedding. It was introduced as a CSS2 standard but later dropped in CSS2.1. You might remember the font embedding hype 2 or 3 years ago that just died off silently. The problem with @font-face at the time was the inconsistency of implementation across browsers, even the font type could not be agreed upon. It's an ingenious idea none-the-less hence its new and improved self is back in force for CSS3!**Nowadays it's trendier, or should I say sexier, to show whose daddy by being most compliant rather than inventing propriety extensions to kill off the competition. A prime example is the launch of IE7, a great improvement from IE6 by the way. We’re seeing a new twist in Microsoft's approach to browser development. No longer is it the Microsoft way that all should follow but they're finally kneeling to the W3C god and listening to what we want! So this time round I'm adamant. When browsers do finally support @font-face again, which would probably be many years from now, it would be much closer to standard and more importantly - work! Finally could we bin the alternatives like FIR, sIFR and dynamic text replacement techniques.

**Web fonts are still in W3C Working Draft so there's no guarantee that @font-face will definately be back in force!

After having so much fun with my drop down menus I did a search on the Web to see what others had to offer. I came across Infinite Menus by OpenCube. They have an impressive offering; 100% pure CSS driven and accessible with JavaScript used only for spicing things up, a visual interface for customizations and re-skinning, tonnes of transition effects and menu types. The only snag is it comes with a price tag, but who wouldn't with what they have!Now, there's a long and arduous road ahead for my humble drop downs.