The HTML “accesskey” attribute allows web authors to specify hotkeys for links within a page...
Creating HTTP 301 Permanent Redirects with .htaccess
Aug 10 2005
If a company owns multiple domains its website, its Google PageRank can be split up among those domains. As you may be aware, Google establishes relevancy in part through links which point to a page. Here’s a made-up example using Chiquita Banana…
Suppose that someone owned both “chiquita.com” and “chiquita-banana.com” and that half the incoming links pointed to the former domain while half the incoming links pointed to the latter domain (all hypothetically using the link text “banana”)...
New Design on The Way
Jul 20 2005
A new design for our blog is underway and our boss has given us the green light to develop it live. So, we’ll be making the XHTML/CSS changes right on this server and you’ll be able to see the coding progress in realtime. Stay tuned.
Update, later that day: We’ve been taking screenschots as we’ve been implementing the new design and you can see a time-lapse view of the process through this compound animated gif:
Regular Expression for Missing Alt Attributes
Jul 11 2005
We were working on a project recently that required us to refine some 3rd-party code. Among other things, we needed to add missing alt attributes to any images which were missing them. (Missing alt attributes are one bane to screen readers, which then resort to reading an image’s filename instead — just imagine hearing “graphic shim dot gif graphic shim dot gif graphic shim dot gif graphic shim dot gif …”.) I have an editor which supports extended file searches with regular expressions, so a regular expression seemed like a sensible path to take...
Adding Version Numbers to the Titlebars of IE
Apr 11 2005
If you’re a front-end developer, you’re probably testing your sites with multiple versions of IE...
Practical Use of Longdesc as a Footnote
Apr 4 2005
As you may be aware, longdesc is an attribute of image tags which can be used to provide a description more lengthy than its alt attribute (as a rule of thumb, images with alt text > 150 characters would benefit from a separate longdesc)...
XHTML and the application/xhtml+xml MIME type
Feb 11 2005
Web servers send a “MIME type” with each file which tells the browser what kind of file it is. For instance, HTML files are “text/html” and CSS files are “text/css”. “Well,” you may be asking, “why not just use the file extension to determine the file type?” While file extensions commonly indicate an author’s intentions, that’s not always the case. For instance, a dynamically generated image might have a filename such as “example.com/gimmiephoto.cgi?resource=kd73jkldi674k”. And, without an accompanying MIME type, a browser might not know what to do with the file...
Snacks!
Jan 27 2005
Oreo Double Stuf cookies: $2.63 Pringles Sour Cream & Onion potato crisps: $1.39 Snyder Honey Mustard & Onion Pretzels: $2.50 Combos, Pizzeria flavor: $1.79 Kit Kat White Chocolate / Milk Chocolate / Dark Chocolate variety bag: $2.33 Reese’s FastBreak fun-size bag: $1.69
Eating junk food while working on a tight deadline: priceless.