Creative examples and ideas for website footers
Some great thoughts and examples of website footers. Some interesting new ideas for what content to put down there and how it should look.

Posted in Design & Development & Web
Wordpress 2.5 adds image galleries, here's how to use them
The new image gallery functionality in Wordpress 2.5 should be incredibly useful. Christina will definitely use it on our married life blog.

Posted in Blogging & Development & Web
WP-Cache 2.0
WP-Cache 2.0 is a useful looking plug-in that could really help the server load over at Bevo Sports.

Posted in Development & Web
Install multiple versions of IE on your PC
Unfortunately it worked terribly for me, tons of JavaScript errors and sites didn't display CSS remotely like they should. Hopefully it works better for you. (via)
Posted in Design & Development
CSS Float Theory: Things You Should Know
Everything you've ever wanted to know about the CSS concept of floats.

Posted in Design & Development
IE sucks... hack to fix z-index/select bugs
A CSS-only solution to the Internet Explorer bug that puts absolutely positioned elements behind select
boxes.

Posted in Design & Development & Web
Browser testing CSS and JavaScript
Some good thoughts from Roger Johansson on browser testing for CSS and JavaScript. Working at a PC-centric employer I don't test the more obscure Mac browsers and I focus on PC Firefox but otherwise my habits are very similar.

Posted in Design & Development
Gridding the 960
Helpful tool from Cameron Moll for designing for sites for 1024px resolution. The image has a background image grid, pixel ruler, and column divisions for a 960px-width layout. Could be very handy.

Posted in Design & Development
sIFR 3 beta available
Lots of needed new features (leading, kerning, and opacity) and easier to implement. I'll have to check it out soon.

Posted in Design & Development
Ajax loading gif generator
Quick, simple, and attractive way to create loading animation gifs for your site. Pick a color and pick a style and you're done.

Posted in Design & Development | 1 Comments
CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions
Great set of links and screenshots to some Web 2.0 solutions to web input forms.

Posted in Design & Development & Digg
The Ultimate getElementsByClassName
Very useful JavaScript function I've used frequently at work. Makes you wonder why this isn't a built-in function since getElementsByTagName
and getElementById
are.

Posted in Development
What's Your Link Reputation?
An analysis of the factors other than Pagerank that Google takes into account when providing search results. The importance of the right links and not just the amount of them.
Kind of confusing.

Posted in Development
Section targeting for Google AdSense
Maybe it will allow me to have a little more success with the Google Ads on this site. There's so many of them about Blogger and TypePad and those make seemingly nothing per click.

Posted in Development | 1 Comments
Refresh Dallas launches
First meeting of new local Dallas community of web designers and developers is November 10th in Plano. It's right down the road so I'll be there.

Posted in Design & Development
Search Engine Ranking Factors
A ton of well organized tips on factors that can influence a page's rank on the major search engines. Also, down near the bottom is a bunch of great information on mistakes you can make to negatively affect your rankings.

Posted in Development
Free MT photo gallery templates
Very nice looking Movable Type photo gallery templates available for download from StopDesign.

Posted in Development
Have a mint
If you use Shaun Inman's Shortstat then you'll definitely want to sign up to be notified when it's successor, Mint, is available. If you don't know, ShortStat is a very simple and useful PHP/MySQL-based web stats program.

Posted in Development
Blinksale now available
Blinksale looks like an excellent and affordable invoice management system. Looks like a simple way for me to send attractive invoices to my clients. I'll be trying out the free version for seven22.

Posted in Development
MT 3.2 Beta
New blog up from Six Apart for the new Movable Type 3.2 beta. Looks like this one is going to be a much more significant upgrade than any other recent releases. Lots of new features are on their way.
I installed the beta on Matt's site without issue, looks very promising.

Posted in Development
Six Apart responds to 500 errors
In the last few days I've suddenly been getting 500 Internal Server Errors when trying to rebuild an individual entry in my Movable Type install. It comes and goes in other situations too, but that's the main culprit. It appears to be caused by a cPanel upgrade to certain Perl modules, while other non-cPanel environments aren't having the same problems.
Right now it's something I can get around without too much frustration, but hopefully either cPanel or 6A can get a fix out ASAP.

Posted in Development
Movable Type 3.2 is coming
A new version of MT is coming and Six Apart is detailing the 32 biggest new features. Looks like this is going to be a pretty big release, as they've showcased the new admin home and the junk folder.

Posted in Development
Strategy for maximizing page views
I started posting excerpts on my homepage a couple of months ago and I just started putting just excerpts into my archives last week. The homepage I did to give a quick overview of everything going on with the site, while I switched the archives to conserve on bandwidth. Googlers were coming in and pulling 30 entries at once and getting a huge amount of images too when they were hitting my category or date-based archives. I paginated them too and I saved on bandwidth big time Friday and Saturday.

Posted in Development
How to Speed Up Publishing in Movable Type
I need to turn on background tasks and uninstall some plug-ins I don't use anymore (and a couple I've never used.)

Posted in Development
Google Opens Up Beta of AdSense for Feeds
The Weblogs, Inc. network has been running them for a while and I'm not impressed. They don't seem to be targeted very well and aren't really based on the post they're with at all. Half the ads they've run are for some anit-Bush website despite none of the sites being political at all.
(via ProBlogger)

Posted in Development
Adsense Notifier extension
Another great Firefox extension that Berg pointed me to this morning, Mincus' Adsense Notifier. It shows your Google Adsense stats down in the status bar so that those of us who are little obsessive compulsive as well as money-hungry and can always know exactly how much revenue our ads are bringing in.
There are a decent number of options available to let you configure the tool, I've already got so much stuff in my status bar that I'm having it display just my page impressions, clicks, and earnings.
Very handy.

Posted in Development
DreamHost for 77 cents per month
Enter the promotional code 777 when ordering the Crazy Domain Insane!
package.
(via DMM)

Posted in Deals & Development | 4 Comments
PHP cheat sheets
Helpful reference on PHP.
(via Dave Shea)

Posted in Development
Backpack from 37signals
I've got no idea what it is, but I'm excited about it. That's what happens when you release things as useful and polished as Basecamp and Ta-da Lists.

Posted in Development | 2 Comments
The Elements of Meaningful XHTML
Slides from Tantek Celik's SXSWi presentation I attended yesterday.

Posted in Development
Quit Your Job to Blog, Blog, Blog
Yesterday Kottke announced he had quit his job to blog full time, today Wired ran a story on it. That should help with the contributions.

Posted in Development
CMS Do's and Don'ts
Article on how to make your Content Management System work for you instead of the other way around.

Posted in Development
IE7 beta this summer
They're developing a new version of Internet Explorer finally, IE7 should be beta released this summer. Interestingly, it will only be available to people using Windows XP Service Pack 2. Hopefully it will finally have support for a transparent alpha channel in PNG's. And you know, fix everything else that makes it a POS.
In equally awesome news, MS Windows AntiSpyware will remain free. Mucho bueno.

Posted in Development & Tech
SlideShowPro

Wow. Check out the demo of the new SlideShowPro from Todd Dominey. I am really impressed. Looks and works great. Hover over the image numbers down at the bottom, the little thumbnails that pop up are infinitely cool. You can even pull in Flickr feeds!
I will definitely be purchasing SlideShowPro and implementing it here and probably over at the KUHigherEd site.
Very good work and something I'll be able to use over and over again for only $20.

Posted in Development
ESPN needs Flash developers
Damnit I want to work there!

Posted in Development & Sports
SlideShowPro available 2/14
Although I think I've officially moved to Flickr for forever, this will still be something I'm interested in using for projects.

Posted in Development
Information Aversion
Dave adds to what Matt brought up the other day. Too many bloggers are rolling their RSS feeds into one monster feed, full of links, photos, random crap, and maybe an actual post once in a while.

Posted in Development
ECMAScript Menu System
Definitely something I'll be looking at for Phase 2
of the site I'm working on now. It accomplishes the same effect, but I have to add id
's to every main menu item. Even worse, I have to put some Javascript at the top of every page, which means any changes have to be made 21,324,325 times.
(via 456)

Posted in Development
Basecamp Project Management

An amazing piece of software. I have heard people (including the creators) talking about Basecamp for a long time now, but I had never noticed there was a free version before. The free version only lets you manage one project at a time, but otherwise it's the full blown app.
Basecamp lets you track a project's major milestons, create to-do lists, send messages, share files, and pretty much everything else you could think of. You even get a unique URL where everyone related to the project can interact and work together.

Posted in Design & Development & Tech
Movable Type 'nofollow' plugin
Movable Type has officially added support for the rel="nofollow"
attribute for anchor tags through a plugin. I don't plan on implementing it here on this site, I don't mind sharing a little PageRank with others. I'm sure many of the sites I frequent will implement it though, meaning my PageRank is probably going to plummet.
Hopefully, enough of the most popular weblogs put in to place and put an end to all this damn comment spam.

Posted in Development | 2 Comments
Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist
I don't know how I didn't notice this post about MT-Blacklist sooner, I've subscribed to the RSS feed now so I won't miss new stuff again.
Great write up by Jay combining a ton of information about Blacklist that used to be scattered all over.

Posted in Development
Six Apart guide to combatting comment spam
Excellent overview to the many efforts to combat freaking comment spam. Using a ton of them in conjunction seems to be pretty successful.

Posted in Development
MovableType 3.14 released
Six Apart has reacted quickly and gotten an update out to fix the server loads caused by comment spam. MT 3.14 (what happened to 3.13?) fixes a major issue for sites out there getting hit by large and frequent comment spam attacks. Previously, if a spammer hit the site and attempted to post tons of comments, each attempt would cause a rebuild even if the comment did not get through MT-Blacklist. Looks like another new version of that is coming soon too.
The main changes in version 3.14:
- No more unnecessary rebuilds upon comment moderation.
- Generation of internal bookkeeping data for dynamic pages is not performed when using static pages.
- New weblogs default to having comment moderation enabled.
Good job guys, I'm sure we all appreciate the swift response.

Posted in Development
Referrer Spam is the New Amway
Luckily my site sucks enough that it's not an issue, though comment spam is still on the rise.

Posted in Development