Freelancing can take a developer in many directions that they wouldn’t get to go in a specific company role. The three years that I spent in front-end development taught me a lot about jQuery, CSS and conditional PHP but it really even touch on handling data. The terms ‘sanitize’ and ‘data object’ are still new-ish [...]
Weblogs
24Jan 11
Captcha isn’t fool-proof
There are many methods available to help fight spam, however, none offer complete protection against manual labourers.
20Jan 11
Less Framework 3
Less Framework is a cross-device css grid system based on using inline media queries. The core idea is to first create a default layout normally, and then additional layouts using inline media queries. Any browsers incompatible with media queries will simply ignore the additional layouts, and will only use the default one. The additional layouts will inherit any [...]
18Jan 11
SeaDragon Deep Zooming image AJAX
Seadragon Ajax is a Deep Zoom viewing library implemented in pure JavaScript. It supports the same single image file format that Silverlight Deep Zoom uses, but does not support Deep Zoom Collections. http://seadragon.com/developer/ajax/
21Nov 10
PHP mail script that looks good in Gmail, Outlook and iMail!
I spent a long time clumsily messing around with Php’s mail() function. After failing to figure out how to satisfy the header requirements to for HTML e-mails that looked good in Gmail, Outlook and iMail (rather… in every possible viewing scenario), I found Swiftmailer.
31Aug 10
Arcade Fire + Google Maps + HTML5
The Arcade Fire have made another entry into the history books. This time not for being the biggest Internationally recognized Canadian recording act since Celine Dion, but for making the most innovative music video since The Buggles launched MTV in 1981. Why is it so important? Because this music video is tailor-made for me.
26Aug 10
Google Voice vs. Skype
Google announces the release of a direct competition to Skype‘s web-to-phone service, Google Talk. with free calls to USA and Canada for the rest of 2010. Currently, when a call is made a charge of 10 cents appears next to your call history. My hope is that will be erased at the end of 2010, and I will no long be able to make calls until I have purchased credits to continue to make long distance calls at low rates.
24May 10
Download all the links on a page
I was migrating a website containing about 100 links to pdfs on one page. I didn’t have access to the old site’s ftp so I needed a utility to speed up the process, instead of right-clicking on each file and saving the link manually.
http://www.downthemall.net/
I found a link to this on a very handy utilities list [...]
19May 10
Google launches a free web font API
The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and served by Google servers.
17May 10
Mixed media artist Osheen Harruthoonyan
Osheen Harruthoonyan’s Nocturna Artificialia pays homage to the creative process. Each atmospheric print was created by spending up to 8 hours with a 4” x 5” exposed negative, treating them with an array of tools including paintbrushes, make-up remover pads, q-tips and dental tools. The intimacy of his fingerprints can be found in the chemical spray [...]