MySQL character encodings

I recently noticed that many of the comments and trackbacks on this website were composed entirely of question marks. At first I thought it might be plain old spam, but it turned out to be a character encoding problem. Here’s how I fixed it. Read More »

Tooltips on disabled buttons with Dojo

Here’s how to add tooltips to disabled form controls using Dojo. The technique could be adapted for use in other frameworks or standalone JavaScript code. Read More »

Seemore is the new Less

Less, my small but perfectly formed WordPress plugin, has changed its name and is now called Seemore. A different plugin called Less has been added to the WordPress Plugin Directory, so I finally decided to change my plugin’s name to something marginally less :) confusing. Read More »

Separate WordPress core and content files

Recent WordPress versions have supposedly enabled the ability to separate the core WordPress files from the site-specific files, but I found it hard to find clear information on how to do it. Here’s the method I ended up using. Read More »

P is not for telephone

There’s a trend towards indicating contact details by a single letter. You see this on business cards, email signatures and letterheads:

T (01) 234 5678 - F (01) 234 5678 - E bob@boztangle.com

It looks quite nice and clean, especially in a vertical format on a screen as the single letters all line up in nice columns. And it’s pretty obvious what the letters stand for if they stick to the obvious words: telephone, fax, mobile, email. But too often people try to be clever and end up creating confusion. Read More »

Lotus Notes is rubbish

The Lotus Notes UI is a disaster. Examples are legion, and there are doubtless a million web pages attesting to this. So here’s the million-and-first. I thought Notes was clunky the first time I encountered it, which was back in 1996. I was dismayed in 2003 when I started a new job to find that I would have to use the Notes client, not just for email, but also for internal documentation and even for entering time sheets. It turned out that that company had started life as a Lotus Notes development shop. I managed to escape, but now my new company and the client that I am working for both use Notes for email. It’s a nightmare. Read More »

Vespa: A better MVC

Vespa is a refinement of the old MVC (Model View Controller) architectural pattern that better reflects how Web applications actually work. MVC has been around for a long time, but many implementations have some annoying inconsistencies. I have refined the basic MVC pattern in light of typical usage patterns I’ve encountered; the result makes it easier to design an MVC application in a clear, modular manner. Read More »

Die QUIETLY!

Here is a piece of JavaScript code taken from a public commercial website. I have redacted some of the code to protect the guilty, but the rest is verbatim in all its glory. See if you can spot the error. Read More »

Search Meter WordPress plugin version 2.3

I have updated Search Meter, my WordPress plugin that lets you find out what your blog visitors have been searching for. The new version includes a couple of widgets to make it easy to display recent and popular searches on your blog, as well as a few other changes. Here are the details. Read More »

How to look at a GIF (in Windows)

Windows Picture and Fax Viewer (WPFV) is a bare-bones application for viewing images, but it does the job. Except when it doesn’t; somehow my Windows installation decided that it was going to use Internet Explorer instead of WPFV by default when opening GIF files. The obvious fix for this didn’t work properly, but I found a simple way of getting back to the behaviour I wanted. Read More »

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