Custom Styles for Select Inputs
It’s long been a problem for developers that the Select (or dropdown) input doesn’t allow you many options for customising their look and feel. You shouldn’t be trying to style selects! When you search for help on this matter, you often come across people arguing that select inputs get their style from whatever browser you […]
Twitter Changes Its Terms
In March 2011 Twitter announced some upcoming changes to its Terms of Use which would affect developers. This is really an understatement as what they’ve actually done is fundamentally redefined how they would like their service to be used and what developers ought to be using it for. What’s new? The most important changes can […]
Preventing Contact Form Spam
This is a problem which comes up time and time again. Every time you add a contact form to a website, you open yourself up to spam attacks. Solving this problem involves striking the right balance between making life easy for the person filling in the form, and the person receiving the spam at the […]
Target _blank is out the window
Clients will often ask me to target external site links to open in a new window. Of course the correct answer is “No, it’s not up to a site to determine how a link should work, the user can decide that when browsing.” Not only is it bad practice but the target=”_blank” tag has been […]
YouTube Data Class
This is a class I’ve used several times and it demonstrates some of the useful data endpoints offered by YouTube. Often I will have to ask users or a web service for YouTube videos, and these may come in the form of share URLs, embed code or video URLs. This class allows you to extract […]
Captionator using JQuery
A nice effect is to have the caption for a text field within the field instead of having a separate label. However it can be frustrating for a user if they have to delete the text before they can type into it. This JavaScript class looks for texfields with a class of captionate and adds […]
Thumbnails for sharing with Facebook
Facebook’s integration which allows you to post a page to Facebook is really clever. A bit too clever in fact. The integration allows you to pass the url and title though to the sharing window. The sharing window then goes and take s a look at the page and selects the first few images it […]
Google dips its toe into font libraries
Google releases a beta version of its font directory and API
Javascript variable names in Internet Explorer
The more I work with JavaScript the more I enjoy it. One of the things I like best is that it is a front-end language where you generally don’t have to worry about cross-browser compatibility. It usually just works… Usually… This one tripped me up and it took me a while to pin down what […]