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Code

A collection of 40 posts

Stop Supporting IE6

As a community, as a whole, web designers and developers need to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6. Now. Completely. I’ve been thinking a lot about browser compatibility as I’ve been working on Today’s Meet [http://todaysmeet.com/]. My CSS is valid, but it doesn’t work quite

Responsible SQL: How to Authenticate Users

Most SQL-injection articles set a horrible example for young programmers. Here is a very typical “bad example” of why you need to escape user data before it goes into SQL queries: (ed. The symbol « is a line break that’s not in the real code.) 1. $username = $_POST[‘username’]; // username=

Connecting PHP, IIS 6, and SQL Server 2005

I know I will be accosted for this, but at work we needed to run PHP on IIS 6 ( fairly simple [http://www.peterguy.com/php/install_IIS6.html]) and connect it to a remote database server running SQL Server 2005 (not terrible, once I gave up the Microsoft way)

User Interface: Be Nice!

A short post for a busy week. I just downloaded the Spore Creature Creator [http://www.spore.com/trial], and this file showed up on my desktop: 792248d6ad421d577132c2b648bbed45_scc_trial_na.exe. Why not “Spore Creature Creator Trial Install.exe”, or, if spaces aren’t your thing, “SporeCreatureCreatorTrialInstall.exe”? Either

Organizing CSS

Looking at WordPress themes usually makes me cringe. It’s as if there was a memo on semantic markup and the community of WP developers didn’t get it. Some themes [http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/2-columns/2991/autumn-concept-10/] waste kilobytes of HTML source on something that could be achieved

Help Me Scale

I’ve been reading Eran Hammer-Lahav’s intelligent [http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/04/scaling-a-micro.html] posts on [http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/scaling-a-micro.html] microblog scalability [http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/on-scaling-a-mi.html], and now I’m concerned about my own “microblog” site, Picofiction

Do You "Designed By"?

A debate has cropped up over “designed by” links, those (hopefully) little links a designer puts on a page to take credit and get themselves some traffic and customers. On the one side, Pat Dryburgh argues [http://www.atrickdesign.com/blog/you-will-never-see-designed-by-atrick-design/] word-of-mouth is superior to self-advertising: “If the design

Work Pattern: Designing Web Sites

The premise of Design Patterns [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_(computer_science)] is that similar problems have similar solutions. In the same vein, I propose this Work Pattern a set of common steps I use when I create a web site, and maybe you can use, too. Elements

The W3C Sucks

“If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.” If you want to remain the standard-setting body for the web, promise new recommendations, never deliver. ![CSS 2.1 is not even a published recommendation. Off with their (the W3C) heads.](http://coffeeonthekeyboard.com/wp-content/uploads/

Better Living through Memcached

I wanted to put something specific in the title, like “Speed up your service” or “Reduce server load” or “Limit database calls” or… You see why I chose “Better Living.” Memcached [http://danga.com/memcached/] is a memory caching system with an obvious name. It allows you to store basically

System.out.println("Hello World!")

So I’ve been getting used to a couple new languages lately, mostly Ruby and Java but also Python and C++ for comparison. Coming from PHP, VBScript and JavaScript has confused the hell out of me. The hardest part so far is not strict types, which I expected would mess

WordPress Plugin: Insert Ad Code

I wanted a way to generate more revenue off my WordPress blog [http://gameindependent.com/]. A lot of sites use square ads embedded after the first couple of paragraphs of their articles, and I thought this would be perfect for my post pages, which don’t show the WordPress sidebar.

MySQL Subqueries

I often find it difficult to find tips and advice for doing relatively simple things in things like MySQL, Ruby, Python, etc. So, starting with this post, I will help fill that niche. Today’s topic is Using Subqueries to Simplify your SQL Queries. For this article, I’m using

CSS: Good; Everything Else: Bad

Images, flash, frames. These are the “traditional” methods for making a web site “more interesting” or “better looking.” But these hold-overs from the AOL era are the bane of bandwidth, text-only browsers, and non-visual users. HTML, of course, was originally written to define the structure of a web page, never