J. Cornelius

So there you are, admiring your hard work. Your pixel precise, artfully crafted design with it’s clever use of 24bit alpha-transparent PNG images to create the perfect effect you wanted. Bravo! Well, that is until you look at it in IE6. So you hack the CSS or add special Javascripts to force things to playing nice. How about this? Instead of using one of the many Javascript or CSS... continue »

“Life’s like a play; it’s not the length but the excellence of the performance that matters” Those words were spoken by a Roman philosopher in the mid-1st century AD, and they ring true today as evidenced by the speakers and attendees in the 2 short days of the 2008 Webmaster Jam Session . This was easily the best Jam Session yet. The speakers were awesome... continue »

Jeff Croft started a fire. A fire that needed to be set. I've watched luminaries within the Web community jump on and off the standards soapbox. There is so much fragmentation on this topic, no wonder the proposed finalization date for HTML 5 is 13 years away . I think the value of the firestorm that came from all of this is it brings attention to the fact that somewhere,... continue »

Yesterday Google announced that they enhanced Gmail for IE 6 users. Really? Google updated the Gmail core almost a year ago. According to the post “IE6 wasn’t able to handle the complexity of the new code in a way that met our performance and stability goals”. So now, 10 months later they release new code saying “we’ve been working with the IE engineers at... continue »

So it seems IE8 is petting the cat backwards already. Hakon Lie’s article bashes IE for its use of a broken page icon to denote standards compliant pages. This is a epic misapplication of an icon — but, is it truly a sign of Microsoft denouncing the use of Web Standards? No. As Hakon says in his post, and others have pointed out the default is to render Intranet pages in... continue »

“Two turkey wraps, no cheese, with lettuce, tomato, banana peppers, black olives and a little bit of mustard. No chips, no drink, just the wraps please” I say this nearly everyday around 11am. I say it to the same girl at the same Subway on the lobby level of our building. I eat one immediately upon returning to my desk, and the other around 2pm (I generally eat 5-6 small... continue »

TV networks slowly are shifting roles. As Seth said a few days ago , NBC (and others soon to follow) has made a decision that will ultimately impact their ability to leverage their market position in the new media world. In the old days the 'Big 3' networks were the distribution point for anything that wanted to be seen on the air. Now that the balance of power in distribution is leaning more... continue »

As common or rare as it may be for someone to need the ability to select and deselect checkboxes in a form, here is a way to do it using the Prototype JavaScript Library . I recently needed a way to do this for the Private Message functionality of a Web Application I'm working on. The example code below is taken from this Application. First make the Event observers: ... continue »

A few guys I work with and I have been mulling over the idea of creating a new organization for software authors for a while now. The existing predominant group is hopelessly submerged in internal politics and bickering, and is providing little if any value to it's members. One of the many issues with the that organization was the lack of a decent website. We knew if we started a new group, we... continue »

I recently had someone ask me how I did the Polaroid-ish photos on the company 'About Us' page . The technique is quite simple so I thought I would outline it here for other curious minds. For the About Us page we wanted the polaroids to be about 170 x 140 so I'll use those dimensions in this example. Create the Polaroid image First open Photoshop (or your favorite graphics... continue »

Contest winners are supposed to be random, pulled from a hat so to speak. The process of doing that is a little less obvious when that hat is a MySQL database with 500,000 people in it. You can't just stick your hand in and grab the first peice of paper you feel. Wait.... actually you can. So I needed to select a random group of people from this MySQL table. It's super easy to... continue »

During a session at SXSW on Web Standards and SEO ( transcribed here ), the conversation revolved around how search engines treat semantically correct, valid pages versus the spaghetti mess of code that makes up the bulk of the web. Tim Mayer from Yahoo! said that they do look at valid markup as a 'signal of quality', but can't give extra weight to pages using web standards yet because there... continue »

PHP and Smarty Search Bookmarklets Do you ever want a quick way to search PHP or Smarty Documentation for a function? Here it is! Just drag this link to your browsers bookmarks (or links) toolbar and voila! Search PHP.net Search Smarty Docs Modifiers to Make Life Easier These simple Smarty modifiers have made life easier for me. The use them just save the... continue »

siteWatcher is an easy way to check if your Websites and MySQL databases are up and running. It runs on a schedule you set and simply checks your websites for content you specify and notifies you by email if that content is not found. You can also use it to check connectivity to MySQL databases. To setup siteWatcher all you need to do is download the PHP file, put it on your server... continue »

Everyone wants to display friendly error pages for visitors to thier website. This is easy to do using a variety of methods, but are the common methods always the best decision? There are an abundance of pages that discuss how to make custom 404 error pages. While this practice is an excellent way to help direct misguided visitors to the correct area of your website, it can have some... continue »

If you've ever had to create a bunch of zone files for a bunch of domains you know it can be a pain. Should you ever find yourself in that dark hole again use this. It is a quick and simple DNS Zone File creator for BIND. It takes an array of domain names, creates zone files and adds the zones to your master BIND configuration. All you need to do is put the domains in the array and restart... continue »

The more traffic your Website gets, the more important efficient handling of that traffic becomes. First you want to be sure that your visitors get a fast response, but you also want to make sure that bogus traffic doesn't suck all your bandwidth. Here is a simple way to keep bogus traffic off your Website. Bogus Traffic? O yea... those pesky offline browsers (or site stealers, who... continue »

Recently while writing some billing functions I came across the need to show customers the credit card number on file for their account. Since most people would freak out if I showed them the entire number I had to make a quick function to obfuscate the number and let them know what type of card they previously used. Here is a quick way to do just that. This function is super easy to use... continue »

Using classic FIR or similar Image replacement techniques is fabulous except that IE doesn't follow the rules on image caching and CSS. Here's how to configure your server to force IE to behave.Thanks to Dean Edwards and Ryan Carver for figuring this out. It took me a while to find the two pages linked above so I've included this here for fast reference. Here's a lightweight overview: ... continue »

When specifying colors in HTML or CSS it's best to use the hex code which is something that browsers understand and convert into colors. Choose a color from the list below and look to its right to get the hex code. If you wanted a nice blue for example, you could use "#0000cc". You can print this chart if you like, just make sure that "Print background colors and images" option is on in... continue »