Saturday, 17th August 2002
Why Scott doesn’t read your blog
Scott: Why I’m Not Reading Your Blog and Why Others May Not Be Also. Scott likes text he can resize and a decent update frequency. Tony Bowden responds that update frequency is no longer an issue for him ever since he switched to using a blog roll that shows him when the blogs listed were last updated. The same is true for me—my blo.gs powered blog roll has slashed the amount of time I spend keeping up with other people’s blogs as I only visit them when there’s something new to read.
Tips for working from home
Another cracking article from Scott: 12 Tips for Working from Home But Keeping it Under Control. I worked from home for a while last year and these tips make a lot of sense (I know because I wasn’t doing any of them and I suffered as a result).
PHP immune to SQL injection attacks
An interesting thread on SitePoint about SQL injection attacks. One of the points brought up is that PHP is by default virtually immune to injection attacks thanks to magic quotes (discussed here yesterday).
Working on my blog
If I don’t post much today it’s because I’m hard at work on the new database driven version of this blog. I’m hoping to open souce it so I’m trying to design it to be as easy to customise and modify as possible, which means plugin support, themes and an extensible API. At the moment it will only work with mySQL but I’m trying to keep the data access routines abstracted away so they can be easily replaced with code for other databases or even a flat file or XML storage system.
CSS image rollovers
CSS Image Rollovers describes a brilliantly simple technique for creating the effect of an image rollover using only one image and no javascript. The effect works by creating a gif with a transparent background, then using a :hover pseudo class to change the background colour of the the containing area. Pretty straight forward so far, but the clever part is that by making the transparent part of the gif an interesting shape (placing it around the outline of a shape in the image for example) you can give the impression of displaying a different image entirely.
Today’s pleasant surprise
Today’s pleasant surprise—while surfing around the Wireplay forums I came across a link to alliedassault.co.uk, a community site for Medal of Honour: Allied Assault. Imagine my surprise when I realised the news section was coded by me! It uses a news script I wrote over a year ago and never got around to finishing—I released it to a few people and it seems Reality ended up using it on the site. It’s great to see code you’ve written being used after you’ve all but forgotten about it—the site also uses my ssLinks link management script, the sequel to which I am working on now.
Netscape Google?
Sam Buchanan: The Netscape Google mystery. A user complains of a non functional web appli ation, and when asked what browser they are using replies “Netscape Google”. Sam suspects that this is because Google is their home page and they type URLs straight in to the Google search box. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was right—I have seen several people (including an Aunt of mine) do this in the past. Sam’s summary rings particularly true:
[... 127 words]