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 »
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 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 »
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 »
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 »
28 August 2007
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By Bennett
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Topics: WordPress
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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 »
24 August 2007
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By Bennett
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Topics: Windows
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Code Markup, my WordPress plugin that makes it easy to include program code samples in your posts, has been updated to version 1.2. Code Markup lets you include HTML markup in the code sample; it magically knows which characters should be displayed as code and which should be rendered as HTML. Version 1.2 has a few tweaks that will make it more useful and usable. Read More »
16 August 2007
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By Bennett
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Topics: WordPress
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I have written a simple but useful jQuery plugin. elementReady calls a function during page load as soon as a specific element is available — even before the full DOM is loaded. It’s useful if you have unobtrusive JavaScript that you want to apply to particular page elements immediately, without having to wait for the whole DOM to load in a large page. Read More »
I have made a useful modification to Alex King’s excellent Share This WordPress plugin. Share This adds a nice popup to your posts allowing readers to easily submit the post to any number of social networking and news sites. The original version relies on the large Prototype JavaScript library, which adds to the download size for the page. Share This only uses a sprinkling of its features, so I wanted to replace it with something smaller. Read More »
Make sure you declare all your JavaScript variables exactly once. Otherwise it’s easy to introduce bugs that are hard to diagnose, especially if you’re used to programming in a C-like language such as Java, C++ or C#. Read More »