Web development

I found a link to a new page for the really useful drip tool which looks for IE memory leaks in javascript code. There’s also been a new revision of the program by the guy who’s hosting it.

Here’s a quick link for myself for the web developer toolbars you can install for Firefox and IE6. I love them because the web developer toolbars make doing clientside work so much easier. They give you tools to find out information about the page that you’re working on without having to do a million alert [...]

I’ve finally found some Mozilla javascript docs that as good as the IE ones. One of the really nice thing about the Mozilla docs is they have lots of details about the versions that things work in and warnings about potential problems that you might have when using some of the features. For example I [...]

My good friend Tim from Melbourne is doing some design subjects at uni at the moment and he told me a rather nifty story about where the latin filler words that you sometimes see in website layouts come from: Tim says: its actually just lorem ipsum Helephant says: :) does that mean anything? Tim says: [...]

I found a very interesting article about ASP.NET data binding that talks about exactly what’s happening when you call the DataBind() method on a templated control like the repeater. It’s got some really interesting stuff on how the templates are instantiated and how the child controls are built.

I don’t know if this will be useful to anyone else but I thought this was kind of a neat trick for messing around with ASP.NET page rendering for debugging purposes. My problem was I wanted to stop the rendering of a page at a certain point so I could see how the scripts were [...]

I ran into a weird problem with dynamically created ASP.NET 2.0 user controls yesterday. I was using the user control to populate a panel of a tab control which meant I didn’t actually have a reference to the user control object anywhere on my form. The only way I could get a reference to it [...]

Does anyone have any idea why Norton’s Internet Security program would filter out your user-agent details for security reason? I guess I can see an argument for hiding the referer if it was from an external site (even though I know I’m not going to do anything email with it like spread rumours that 219.13.167.21 [...]

I just wanted to bookmark a really useful page about how to make block elements in CSS expand to contain floated elements. There are a couple of suggested ways to deal with this on the page but the one I needed today was adding an element to the end of the float that has the [...]

There’s a set of lovely free icons that are released under the creatives common license on a really pretty page called famfamfam.com. There are over 200 16×16 icons designed for people who make desktop or web apps. There are heaps of useful things like color palettes, navigation buttons and tickmarks as well as some that [...]

The kids over at Microsoft have released an IE developer toolbar. It’s got most the nice things that the Firefox toolbar has like box outlining and options to disable scripts and cookies. One of the nice features it has that isn’t included in the firefox version is a little ruler tool that lets you measure [...]

I found a lovely little multimedia site about Greek mythology called winged sandals. The site is absolutely charming, the artwork is lovely and it’s a great example of where a flash site is a good idea and where the HTML-only version isn’t absolutely rubbish. My favourite part of the site was a music video version [...]

This article says: “Ajax lets programmers reduce the cost and time to build programs, says Bret Taylor, a Google project manager.” Obviously Bret Taylor from Google has never tried debugging an AJAX app that suddenly stops working and has eaten the error message that explains why.. I’m trying not to make the judgement that using [...]

I just found a wonderful little site called Yellow chair stories that tells the story of when its owner put a yellow chair and an offer of free wireless internet outside her house in an attempt to explore electronic and physical neighbourhoods. I thought it was a lovely little site and I think it’s a [...]

Yay! I’m so happy because I just read a post on the IE blog that says IE7 is going to support attribute selectors! In fact it says that IE7 is going to aim to be CSS 2.1 compliant! They’re also *finally* fixing the problems with rendering transparent png files. I was a bit cynical when [...]

There’s a great article on A list apart today called never get involved in a land war in asia (or build a website without a purpose) about defining the objective and strategy of websites that we build. It’s got some great advice about keeping client websites focused on things that will make them successful and [...]

I’ve been having a really fun weekend playing around with FlashMX. One of the really frustrating problems I had to start with was getting the flash debugger running. When I started the debugger by choosing “debugger” from the window menu, it was giving me a “debugger is inactive” error message. To enable the debugger I [...]

I was looking for some information about how JAWS interacts with .NET apps and found this fascinating study on how people using screen readers interact with webpages.

IE has a pretty nice DOM property called currentStyle that you can use to find out the resolved style properties of a DOM object. This is neccessary because the style property will only tell you what style properties have been set, they won’t tell you what properties have been inherited from the element’s parent nodes. [...]

I found a useful little utility called Lint that checks for things in your javascript code that’s likely to introduce errors. I really like that it checks for undeclared variables because I always, always, always want to declare my variables before I use them. Considering that forgetting to declare the variable sets it global for [...]

I found a really useful page on the MSN site that explains how measuring element dimensions and locations work in javascript. There’s a great image that shows you how to measure any of the different areas using the different javsacript width, height and placement properties.

I saw an article on WASP today asking for comment from web developers on the CSS 3 standard that they’re currently working on. It’s kind of hard to tell how it’s going to be without trying to make a webpage with it, but the idea of being able to use multiple background images in the [...]

I’ve used regular expressions to do find and replace Javascript before, but I’ve never managed to do the thing where you can take part of the string that has been matched and use it in the replace string. It turns out the piece of the puzzle I needed to find was something called back references. [...]

I just saw a link to a nice site that will convert an image from various common formats into an icon. This is very nice if you don’t have access to a proper icon editor.

Scary thing that just happened to me.. I was looking at my logs and noticed someone had been to my portfolio site by searching on my full name. I put it into google because I was surprised it was near the top on such a general search (because there are heaps of other people with [...]