Archives for “Creating websites”

…if I’ve got this working right, this email should update Twitter, Posterous and WordPress. Posted via email from Phill’s posterous blog

Debugging JavaScript on IE is frustrating – this lite version of Firebug helps ease the pain

from theGoogleCache “The process of making the decision about flash web sites for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes is actually quite difficult, so I took the time to create a flow chart on whether or not you should create an all flash web site.” Tags: web

The reincarnation of JotSpot lets people create a wiki-style group workspace, where they can post text, videos, calendars, and various attachments for their group or department to view and edit. According to the official blog it is “designed to allow you to easily create a network of sites and share them with whomever you choose. [...]

from Yahoo Senior Designer, Luke Wroblewski | View | Upload your own

“Freemium” What’s free: Web software and services, some content. Free to whom: users of the basic version. Advertising What’s free: content, services, software, and more. Free to whom: everyone. Cross-subsidies What’s free: any product that entices you to pay for something else. Free to whom: everyone willing to pay eventually, one way or another. Zero [...]

I think its the series of excellent diagram’s, that make me feel I’ve never really understood the world of EIA until I read Enterprise Information Architecture in Context by James Melzer. For anyone involved in web content management, knowledge management or system developments, I recommend reading this.

Just put a site together for Year of the dog films a great film production company based in Nottingham.

Its a tough question, and I like this answer: “You can’t design for 1024×768, or 800×600. You have to design for the web.” from drewm

________________________________ Results for Phill Howson ColdFusion MX Date Taken: 10-Jul-2007 Test Event ID: ZC11812-KF7NFLGL Overall Score: 3.92 Weights: 100% ColdFusion MX Elapsed time: 25 min 17 sec ________________________________ Percentile: Scored higher than 74% of previous examinees Proficiency Level: Advanced (Master) Demonstrates a clear understanding of many advanced concepts within this topic. Appears capable of mentoring [...]

For use in the ColdFusion Chr() function http://www.phillhowson.com/projects/coldfusion/chr.cfm

I was looking for a simple way to compress web pages to reduce bandwidth and speed up the site .There's probably some good reasons why IIS and Apache don't include compression utilities by default, but the reasons for that are beyond my comprehension at the moment. There's some commercial products you can purchase for IIS [...]

Just completed my wife’s website, promoting her new work for the Riches of Stitches exhibition. Check it out : Becky Howson textile artist and designer

This is a tip for SQL server – if you have a database where dates are stored as text and want to convert them all to date values. 1. Create a new column for the date value – columnName_asDate 2. Run the following script UPDATE table_name SET columnName_asDate = CONVERT(DATETIME, RIGHT(columnName, 4) + SUBSTRING(columnName, 3, [...]

I suppose this is a common problem but I was stuck on this for a while, until I found a helpful article (which I've now lost!) proposing a solution if you're using SQL Server 2000. Needing to get a single row of data from tables with a one-to-many relationship. tbl_users     tbl_results     [...]

Some notes and principles… Categorise based on for whom the Audience the Content the Context Set Access levels Public Practitioner Authorised users Internal Users Levels of information (pyramid) Edited (3%) KnowledgeBase (7%) Data (25%) Programme records (65%)

Thought I’d post my experience of invoking a complex web service written in .NET using ColdFusion. If you’re just starting a similar piece of work you have my sympathy – prepare yourself for some serious head scratching and mental anguish Prior to this project I had played around with the BabelFish service and checked out [...]

I really like the new-style Application.cfc – a big improvement over Application.cfm and OnRequestEnd.cfm in my opinion. At first it seems a little daunting but with help from Ray Camden and Strikefish things became clearer. I found that setting up an ApplicationProxy.cfc template in the {webroot} enables you to set up some server-wide globals (such [...]

I have used fValidate for a while, but the developers site has gone, so gives me cause for finding a new library. Recently getting into prototype and tried Andrew Tetlaw’s Really easy field validation with Prototype Andrew explains “I wanted a robust javascript validation library that was simple to implement and didn’t require me do [...]

Using a load balanced environment If you are on a load-balanced environment and have not configured CF servers to share sessions, you have a couple of options hard-code the server into your URLs (ie: www1.mydomain.com) use client variables instead. Using Client Variables These should be stored in a database, never the registry Set up the [...]

I came across this code when I was looking for a way to render text with CSS at the same size across a range of browsers. This is more difficult than it sounds with CSS so I was relieved when I found this site which goes to the n-th degree, including 250 screen shots demonstrating [...]

Useful hint for writing popup links yet maintaining an accessible site. When delving into the world of accessibility, you cannot presume JavaScript is enabled, so, write a link as follows: <a onclick="window.open(this,”casestudy”,”status=no”); return false" href="file.htm" target="_blank">File</a> The “_blank” in the target attribute handles no JavaScript  and the ”window.open” function in the onClick event-handler works with [...]