Some blurred text

Some blurred text

Example:

HTML:

<h1 class="blurred">Blurred text</h1>

CSS:

h1.blurred {
	color: #FFF;
}
h1.blurred:hover {
	cursor: pointer;
	color: #666!important;
	text-shadow: 0 0 5px #444;
}

The colours need to be selected carefully, as the shadows are often a bit lighter than the foreground text colour. Shadow size also plays a role. 5px seems to be effective, but 10px can wash the colour out.

To apply the effect to a block element, you'll need to use the box-shadow property instead of the text-shadow property, but otherwise it's the the same.

For more effects, you could apply opacity to make the text a little see through and see how that works out!

If you find this useful, please check out my portfolio site.

<?php
setcookie('name', 'value', time()+3600);
?>

The above would set a cookie for one hour into the future.

<?php
setcookie('name', 'value', time()-3600);
?>

The above should set a cookie for one hour into the past, making it expire and effectively deleting it. Today, this wasn't the case, but adding a path did the trick.

<?php
setcookie('name', 'value', time()+3600, '/');
?>

The above sets it for an hour and for the whole domain. Adding the '/' to both the setting and expiring did the trick!

As we speak only photos I could Bluetooth to my phone have been added, will upload some more from my More photos added from my minimo later!

(Toshiba Camileo H20)

After a bit more research, the P30 wasn't far behind, but the quality difference is enough to make me stump up the extra cash:

(Toshiba Camileo P30)

Not sure when I'll be getting either as I have to sort some finances out, but hopefully I'll be posting some test footage soon!

If you need to round a number to the nearest whole one:

Math.round(0.5)

This would equal 1.

Math.round(0.4)

This would equal 0.

If you need to round down:

Math.floor(0.5)

This would equal 0.

Math.floor(0.4)

This would also equal 0.

If you need to round up:

Math.ceil(0.5)

This would equal 1.

Math.ceil(0.4)

This would also equal 1.

Dark Knight

Excellent film and the detail is just amazing. Batman Begins also looks great, but Dark Knight has a few IMAX scenes that just blow you away when they go full screen.

Wall-e

I'm sure all Pixar films look stunning in HD, especially Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc, but this is the only one I've seen and again the detail is just amazing. The scenery, the characters, everything!

Planet Earth

Seeing exotic animals this close up and in this much detail is just amazing. I have yet to finish the box set, but a third in and I am truly blown away.

I am looking to get the HD basics Blu-ray to make sure I get the most out of my TV, but from what I've seen so far, these are 3 stunning examples of what HD content is all about!

direct link to video

You can also catch of glimps of me singing it here:



The match got under way once we had observed a minutes silence for Remembrance Day. It was impeccably observed by both sets of fans. West Brom certainly had the better possession for the first 5 minutes, but Riera and Benayoun were soon making their way forward. Aurelio was also very adventurous.

I was so glad that Robbie Keane scored and I got to see both goals close up. He looks a very good player, a lot faster than he looks on TV and as with the rest of the side, they all look like they work very hard.

I was a little disappointed that Xabi Alonso was on the bench, but I enjoyed contributing to the reception that Robbie Keane received as he left and rapturous applause that Fernando Torres got as he arrived on to the field.

Xabi's introduction was also well received and welcomed by myself.

Arbeloa's goal looked very good from where I was and even better once I saw it on TV.

I can't wait to go again and hopefully sit in the Kop.

The drive home was far harsher than the drive up. Firstly, we didn't get back until 2am. We left at 7pm. The weather in the North West was just foul too. Not only was it wet, it was just non stop and I wasn't able to bring myself to do more than 40 or 50mph on the motorway. Once we were out of Manchester (detour to drop my friend off), the weather calmed progressively until it was pretty clear near Birmingham. We did make a few stops and I shared the drive with my Dad but I would certainly try to avoid driving in the future.

I definitely fulfilled a dream of mine and coming so close to my birthday, I couldn't really have asked for a better day!

(I just shared a Flickr slideshow of my Anfield set, which I could have done the day I posted this instead of messing around with the usually wonderful Slide Show Pro!)

(Videos of the goals added, available at the end of the feed)

Check out all the photos we took at Anfield on Flickr

<?php
function __autoload($class_name) {
    require_once $class_name . '.php';
}

$obj  = new MyClass1();
$obj2 = new MyClass2(); 
?>

The function launches when ever a class is initiated, from what I can tell. Not sure how it would work with files held in multiple folders, as I like to do, but certainly a beautiful piece of kit... Also, not sure if the piece of code has to be written into each file or if you (ironically) have to include it! I'll be giving it a go and will report back.

Some great user examples on the PHP.net page too.

You can see all the details in this flash file and checkout my ass and crotch in these photos!

• September 2008
• Internet Explorer 7 26.3%
• Internet Explorer 6 22.3%
• Google Chrome 3.1%
• Firefox 42.6%
• Mozilla 0.5%
• Safari 2.7%
• Opera 2.0%

Apple and Opera must be wondering what they have to do to get their market share to grow. Safari renders fonts beautifully, even on a PC, but they have been leapfrogged by Chrome which is still in beta and in it's first month!

I still use Firefox at work, but half of the team I work with use Chrome. I can't wait for the Mac version because it is a nice piece of software.

• Fernando Torres 29
• Patrik Berger 28
• Sami Hyypia 21
• John Arne Riise 21
• Milan Baros 19
• Luis Garcia 18
• Dirk Kuyt 15
• Djibril Cisse 13
• Harry Kewell 12
• Xabi Alonso 11
• Karlheinz Riedle 11
• Vladimir Smicer 10

An impressive list of players to have in your side I think, but hopefulyl Torres continues to push his way past record after record while helping us to get to the holy land!

Titles

Often in Firefox, I find myself with quite a few tags but some of them just show 'Untitled' which just isn't very useful. Some sort of identification is always welcome by the user, whether they've minimized or tabbed your page.

Background color

This is a trivial issue and probably less than 0.1% of people will ever even notice it, but I will and it's a commonly forgotten bit of CSS or HTML when white backgrounds are used.

Most, if not all, modern browsers have a white background set as the default, but if you change the settings to show a light grey background instead, you soon realize the number of developers who just simply forget an attribute when really, the case should be the opposite. This is something I picked up from a colleague of mine from my days at Monkeehouse, Zoe Blade.

Alt tags

Whatever your feelings about accessibility, I think it's something that should always be considered. Whether client's require it or not, it often leads to code that's valid. Alt tags should be used wherever possible.

Alt tags shouldn't be blank, but if there's nothing to say, don't say it. If you can't apply an alt tag, maybe consider making the image a background as this will keep it out of the page and hopefully increase load time for those not using visual browsers.

At the moment, my BBCode doesn't support this, so I am guilty of not following this rule on some occasions, but I plan to make the necessary changes very soon.

&

Ampersand's do not validate, so when called dynamically through a database or AJAX, make sure you call ampersands correctly! not & but an & followed by amp;

This should apply everywhere, be it content, links, titles or even meta data.

Summary

That's all I've got for now, but hopefully I can part with some more words of wisdom in the future. The tips I've posted above should help to make your code validate first time, rather than having to go back and tidy up little things at the end.

The band are one of my favourites and I can't wait to get my hands on the promised EP. If you haven't heard them, please check them out. Fuck 'n' Spend is an awesome, upbeat, track and their album is just perfect in my eyes.

As a result of reading the announcement, I've been listening to, and become a fan of, We Are Scientists. Check them out too!

• iPod Mini (1st gen)
• Mac Mini (2nd gen)
• MacBook (2008)
• Airport Express (2008)
• iPod Touch (2nd gen)

I think the iPod Mini will quickly be relegated to a workout mp3 player and general storage device, despite the Touch's built in Nike+ app and functionality. Considering I own an armband and a Nike+ SportBand, it doesn't make too much sense to break in my Touch in this way.

Oh and I will have picks of the Touch upon it's arrival.

It doesn't look like it will be too taxing, but an interesting take on the Batman franchise. It could even be my first purchase since, well, last year!

I know what all the tags it suggest are, except for the 'del' and 'ins' tags. Turns out that they are indeed very useful and overcome a redundant and annoying bit of BBCode script I had to write myself.

The del tag signals that the text it contains has been deleted, while the ins tag signifies that new text has been inserted.

I am currently doing something similar with BBCode, which wraps text in a span and adds a strike through attribute. I think I'll be replacing this to just display a del tag instead, although I am not 100% sure if this purely presentational and should be left as is, or if the del tag provides more important information for bots/spiders.

If the movie doesn't load, see the video on Flickr.



Photo found in [url=http://flickr.com/photos/29222703@N08/]kierhardie[/url]'s Flickr feed, through Digg.

A quote from Paul Tomkins in his latest column on the official Liverpool website.

The game against Villa was quite poor and the injury to Torres a pure nightmare, but sitting second, only on goal difference is some achievement so far.

Two weeks off and then we're off to Old Trafford for what will hopefully be a match where we have everyone fit. If we have Torres, Gerrard, Babel and Agger(?) back, I'll be in a far more confident mood about our chances of snatching some points!

function truncate(content, append, len) {
  // get the length that should be truncated
  if(!len) {
    var len = 255;
  }
  var p = content;
  // If nothing's been specified to be appended to the end of the truncation
  if(!append) {
    append = '';
  }
  if (p) {
    var trunc = p;
    // if the post is longer than the max length
    if (trunc.length >= len) {
    // remove images
    trunc = trunc.replace(/<\img[^>]*>/g,'');
    // remove flash videos
    trunc = trunc.replace(/<object(?:.|\s)*?<\/object>/g,'');
    // truncate the text left over
    trunc = trunc.substring(0, len);
    // find the last whole word
    trunc = trunc.replace(/\w+$/, '');
  } else {
    // remove images
    trunc = trunc.replace(/<\img[^>]*>/g,'');
    // remove flash videos
    trunc = trunc.replace(/<object(?:.|\s)*?<\/object>/g,'');
  }
  return p;
}

The above function will strip out image and flash video tags and then truncate the text to a specified maximum length (255 default). Once it's been truncated, it will go back to the last full word. The code isn't actually that long, I just left the comments I wrote in for convenience.

It would be easy to add more tags, striping out formatting or script tags. My regular expressions, especially in JavaScript, are not my strong point so I'm sure there would be any easier way to do the striping out. I'm thinking something similar to the str_replace function in PHP where you can pass an array of terms to replace.

Lots of the functionality was learnt on the WebDevTips website and especially using their Regular Expressions Tester.

• Case £???
• Motherboard & CPU £???
• 2Gb RAM (4Gb RAM) £???
• DVD RW £???
• Blu-Ray/HD-DVD ROM (RW if possible and only one bundled with playback software) £???
• Graphics card (HDMi output (DVi woud be OK too)) £???
• Sound card (5.1) £???
• Wireless network card £???
• Front mounted memory card reader and USB slot(s) £???

The following would be nice to have too:

• Firewire card (may already have one) £???
• Bluetooth (own a dongle already, but integrated would be better) £???
• TV input for basic DVR (and to accept the Wii?!) £???

I will most definitely post up photos of my progress if it's viable and I go ahead. And just to see how far out of touch I am with building a PC, I estimate the things I deem to be essential to amount to around £450 and everything £475. Hmmm, maybe a PS3 wouldn't be such a bad idea!

I wonder if it would cook food faster if it was plugged into a Bugatti Veyron rather than something like one of those Austin Metros?!

element:first-child {
  background-color: red;
}

For IE6, you can simply use the following to check for a previous sibling:

element {
  background-color: expression(this.previousSibling==null?'red':'green');
}

The above checks for a previous sibling and where there are none, the background color is red, where there are previous siblings (every other item), the background color is green. Similarly, you can just use the following to re-create the :last-child pseudo-class:

element {
  background-color: expression(this.nextSibling==null?'red':'green');
}

So there you are, a simple fix for some of your pseudo-class woes!

I did have some trouble, but as you can see from the comments on the page, I got there in the end.

Please remember, that this fix relies on JavaScript to work, and if the end user does not have JavaScript enabled, the style will be ignored. To make sure standards compliant browsers see this, just make sure you keep the pseudo-class anyway!

Thankfully, Sky One will be airing the new Futurama episodes in the UK this autumn, so the wait is almost over. With 13 episodes to wet our apetites, I'm hoping this, long overdue, new series will lead to even more.

The editing is so good and if you have any memories of Sesame Street you shouldn't be able to hold in a smile! Read on more video gold!

Unnecassary censorship:

Dave Chappell on Sesame Street:

Beatboxing flute Sesame Street theme tune

The count censored:

the Count f**ks coockies:

Ernie censored:

• Name
• job title
• email
• website
• skills

I also wanted a double sided design. After playing with some options, I settled on having my portfolio site's URL as a centre piece. It may only be something that other programmers appreciate from some of the responses I've had, but it's something I really like and am proud to have.



My first attempt really got me thinking creatively. I wanted to hide my details with in small snippets of code, but coming back to make some changes a few days later made it clear that it was just too much.

I thought it was clever and highly relevant to my field of work, but I hope to be giving the majority of cards out to potential clients, rather than fellow developers, so it made sense to keep it normal and sensible. After all, if no one can decipher what the symbols and letters mean, I won't be getting much business from them!

My first amendment was to centre my name/URL horizontally, but I kept it close to the top rather than completely centre it. My second amendment was to move the key information to the back. With my previous attempt, I had struggled with what I should add to the back so this new approach gave me the opportunity to add more info and to present it in a clearer way than before. My name, position and contact info becoming more prominent.

Despite wanting to make things less cluttered, there was plenty of space on offer. I decided to add my key skill set to the bottom of the card. I could clearly show what they were and what I am good at. This was one thing I wasn't really sure about, because to a potential client, this may mean nothing. On the other hand, if they recognised a few words, or did some research, I would hope that they would impressed the range of languages I could work with. For networking opportunities, this would be an easy way of letting other's know what I had to offer.

After a couple of weeks, I finally got my hands on them so here are some pictures of the final piece, I hope you like them.





You can download a digital version of my card, email me for a hard copy or for a vcard that should be Address Book (Mac) and Outlook compatible.

I would like to hear some opinions on what you think of my cards! Please feel free to leave a link to your own business cards.

Are you serious? For a duo that have been featured on what must be over 300 songs as the writers or co-writers and producers, this is not what you expect. Having to pay for the album, this is most definitely not what you deserve to hear.

Pharrell's involvement with the BBC clothing line has obviously detracted him from what he's best at, and that's been evident for at least 3 years now when the Neptunes almost completely disappeared from the airwaves just as quickly as they took them.

My favourite review for Seeing Sounds is by Alexis Petridis of the Guardian who raises valid points and I guess makes a similar point to the one I'm trying to make. I don't agree that Timbaland's efforts as I think he was far more successfull with his fusion. The following quote from his review had me in stitches though!

If you're a fan of N*E*R*D, you won't be disappointed as it's typical N*E*R*D, but almost 7 years from the release of their first album, countless hits, product and writing credits and a big enough fan base to work for, I just feel that they haven't delivered.

element.setAttribute('onclick','event();')

IE needs the following:

element.onclick = eventCaller;

function eventCaller() {
  event();
}

Once I had the above working, I was confident that I could work around this so that the eventCaller function wasn't necessary, but it seems that it is.

For other attributes, such as the class name, you'll need the following:

element.className = 'class-name';

Styles work in a different way and it makes sense not to use the setAttribute method, but it would be nice to have the option to apply all your styles just once, rather than creating a new reference for every single one.

Microsoft promises that IE8 will be the most compliant version, but I sincerely hope that their claims don't just apply to CSS and the DOM, but to the JavaScript API and JavaScript methods too.

• Charanj.it is now the URL for my personal portfolio
• Blog.Charanj.it is now the URL for this blog
• hello [at] charanj.it is now the email address I'll be handing out to potential clients and to fellow professionals but will actually forward to...
• chaz [at] cchana.co.uk, which will remain my main email address

Please feel free to share your own URLs that are personal to you, for whatever reason.

height: 1%

Adding the above to a floated element somehow fixes some issues, while in other instances it does nothing at all. This is the fix I've come across most in my travels, but it has only worked in maybe 25% of instances that I've needed to use it.

The fix I've come across has worked in the few instances I've given it a go in. I've even left the original styles on the element and just added my fix to an IE6 specific stylesheet.

display: inline;

That's it. Well, almost. This fixes a few issues but in some ways creates others. With a float, other items will adapt around it by filling the space that's left. When using the above fix, any other elements that should be on the same line will tend to wrap round. The fix for this is to apply the same fix. If you put these all into a containing div, that doesn't need to have any of it's own styles, or may even exist, it will wrap around perfectly, from top to bottom.

The first issue this creates is that all the elements with the inline attribute will all be vertically aligned to the bottom of the tallest one. This can be fixed with the following applied to all affected elements:

vertical-align: top;

One of the issues this inline fix fixes is that margins will no longer double in IE6 as they can when you float an element. The biggest plus for this 'hack' is that it completely avoids the 3pixel bug and will hopefully that will just mean fewer IE6 specific styles.

Please remember that the fixes should be IE specific, whether you hack that or use a conditional comment to create an IE6 stylesheet, Firefox will completely ignore a whole bunch of any styles you set (width most importantly) if you use the inline attribute.

I mainly posted this for my own reference, but please do leave a comment and let me know if it works for you!

• Portugal vs Germany
• Croatia vs Turkey
• Holland vs Russia
• Spain vs Italy

I think the favourites for each match should find their way through, but the Portageus and the Spanish will need to be careful not to slip up. After Holland's wonderful and dominant start, they should probably be a llittle cautious too!

The final Group D match between Greece vs Spain match was a good one, not the best, but lots of talking points and plenty of chances. It also gave Xabi Alonso the chance to show exactly why Liverpool should keep him for another season at the very least. His vision, passing (short and long) and shooting ability from ridiculous distances are an asset to any team. As much as I like Gareth Barry as a player, and as well as he plays alongside Gerrard for England, can he really offer as much as Alonso?

I for one really hope Alonso stays, because we missed his experience and vision through much of last season. When he made his second comeback, he was looking like he was getting back to his best.

Rubén de la Red's goal was another highlight from the game. An shot struck with real venom.

Antonis Nikopolidis didn't have his best game, but it was a nice touch that he was able to wear the armband during his final game. 90 caps is an impressive total for anyone, but I wonder how Greece will cope without him.

As for John Arne Riise.

Liverpool and Roma are my two favourite teams, so I have mixed feelings about Riise's transfer from Merseyside to Rome. Liverpool have finally moved on a player who's best days were probably two seasons ago, but he's gone to a club that I support and I am not really sure if he has what it takes to succeed. He'll probably have more freedom, more time on the ball and a change of scenery could make this a good move for him and I wish him all the best... I just hope it's a good move for Roma.

div {
  float: left;
  margin: 0 0 0 100px;
}

A problem with floats is that IE6 doubles margins ([among other things!), and it's a pain to get right when you have values that don't divide equally into two!

div {
  float: left;
  margin: 0 0 0 100px;
  _margin: 0 0 0 50px;
}

This would half the margin in IE6, which then doubles it giving you the correct value. The problem with this is that IE7 still reads this hack. Annoying. However, there are two ways to reset what you've just done. One way requires a new block of code, which just bloats things even more. The other, the one illustrated bellow actually mimics the IE6 hack, but only IE7 can read it!

div {
  float: left;
  margin: 0 0 0 100px;
  _margin: 0 0 0 50px;
  *margin: 0 0 0 100px;
}

The first margin is for all browsers, IE6 and 7 both read the second margin value, but then we make sure IE7 gets the value it really needs with the third one. This is three times the code we SHOULD need, but with the conditional comments, we'd be creating more files and more code because we'd have to re-define the selectors, so for the odd hack it's not so bad when it comes to development.

If you're finding that you've got more than 10 or 20 lines of hacks, it's probably better to organize them into a file on their own. The only drawback to this method is that your CSS won't validate, but as I suggested, keeping it either separate or after your real CSS, you won't run into any problems!

If you know of any other hacks, please feel free to comment.

Text editors

Among the most important tools you'll need for web development, unless of course you plump for using Dreamweaver. Personally, I find Bare Bones' selection of software to be the best. Text Wrangler is an awesome, free, tool and is now compatible with another piece of software that was previously only compatible with BBEdit, Bare Bones' flagship product.

If you can afford BBEdit, there are plenty more features, but I've found Text Wrangler to be good enough. Having usedBBEdit previously, I do miss the odd feature, but if you haven't used it before, you'll find it to be a very reliable bit of software.

It's worth checking out this video podcast from MacBreak for a quick look at some alternatives and how they stack up against Text Wrangler and BBEdit.

FTP

When it comes to FTP, getting your files online is all you really need and there are plenty of free tools around. I've personally used Fugu and found it to be very good at what it does.

I personally use VicomSoft's FTP client, which previously catered for BBEdit users and allowed them to edit live files right of the server. It is now compatible with Text Wrangler and a selection of other text editors, so it's well worth a look. The interface is also really nice and straightforward.

Fugu is a great free alternative, but you don't get the almost priceless integration of your favourite text editor with your FTP client!

Graphics

For photo editing, look no further than Pixelmator. For the very basics, it does it's job fast, efficiently and very well. There are no vector capabilities and the results from using non-photo editing aspects are not always that great, but for chopping, resizing and manipulating photos quickly and easily, you can't go wrong with this!

For something like Flash, unfortunately, Adobe's offering is the only one that works. For website layouts, you could give VectorDesigner a go, but there are hardly any tutorials and very little help around right now. If you've used Illustrator in the past, you shouldn't have many problems with it. Both of these programs make use of Leopard's core features andVectorDesigner has the added bonus of Flickr integration! For raster based design, Photoshop will probably be your best bet.

Stats

Google Analytics is probably one of the best web stat tools around. Woopra is currently in beta and showing some real promise. They were featured on GeekBrief.tv and seemed to be very impressive. Be Unequaled has too many monthly page impressions to be considered for the testing, but if you give it a go, let me know how you find it... I might actually enroll this blog into it, just to see how it works.

You can't go wrong with Analytics though. Documentation, presentation and ease of use are the best from what I've seen when compared to similar services and especially in comparison with the standard web stats you normally get through your host!

Server

As you may know, Mac OS X ships with Apache and PHP installed, but it's not the easiest thing to setup. MAMP solves that problem with ridiculous ease. As well as MySQL,PHPMyAdmin and various other features come standard. Oh and it's free! There is a paid version, but I haven't had the need for it just yet. It allows you to share local development work outside of your desktop or laptop. A very nice feature indeed.

Resources

There are so many resources out there, and you can generally find what you need from a simple Google search. For specific results, try some of these bad boys:

PSDtutes
Good-Tutorials
PHP.net
Sitepoint
Alistappart
Flashkit

Check back as I intend to update the list with any suggestions I recieve or with any sites I might come across on my travels!

From the beginning

After spending some time planning my database structure, I wanted to make a decision early on about how content would be entered. I've got some experience in working with the TinyMCE WYSIWYG, but I'm not a big fan of the tools in general. TinyMCE can actually be very simple with the most basic options, or it can be scaled up to include a large number of features. The basic version appealed to me, but I prefer to write in code so that I have complete control over how the content I produce is formatted.

I decided that the first build of the CMS would feature a text area with some custom BBCode functionality, but for others that may take up my 'system', I'd give them the option for using the WYSIWYG, which should be a fairly painless changeover. Ultimately, I'd like that to be configurable as it is in Wordpress' admin area, but that's something for the future.

The BBCode functionality was something that required a lot more work than I'd hoped because I wanted to be able to control the HTML wherever possible, while also having a code view. This meant abandoning the usual str_replace() function that replaces greater and less than symbols in the markup for most of the content. After quite a few hours, I stumbled across the answer and it's made BBCode even better! I'll be posting my version of BBCode in the future, so keep an eye out for it!

Admin

The look of the admin section was a very important aspect of the blog. Wordpress has set a high standard in my eyes and although I wanted to replicate their ease of use, I didn't want to copy what had already been done. It was important because I intended for it to be the only piece that was guaranteed to be copied again and again, whereas the front end could be built in a million different ways. I also wanted my future use of the system to be as easy as possible. I have websites that are updated purely through PHPMyAdmin, but this isn't an option for something I want to take seriously.

Once I had the public end of the site being fed the way I wanted it to be, I began building the admin area as just very simple pages. I wanted to give the user some continuity between the front and back end, so I've tried to use the same styles wherever possible. Once I had everything working, I went back into the display class and mixed it up a bit!

Off course, only those that use the blog for their own sites will know how it looks and how well it works!

Client side

The visitors end of the site was also something I wanted to make a really show piece on my personal blog. I wanted it to be feature rich, but simple and intuitive. Hopefully I've achieved that, but if I haven't, please do tell me where I've gone wrong! I've kept the overall theme as minimal as possible, with graphics and icons only added to make certain things stand out more.

Getting features like the tag clouds, categories and the pagination working wasn't as painful as it has been in the past. I guess practice has made it easier for me to get things done. Tag clouds were new to me, on the build front, but with a bit of thought and planning it went very well. I'd even suggest it went a LOT better than I had expected, considering it worked first time!

I decided to put in features that be useful for the user but also for future products, the pick of which were the tag cloud, categorisation, tagging, related topics (by tag relevance). The related topics feature was among the most difficult, but I managed to minimize the processing by getting a MySQL query do most of the work.

Being a fan of the open source community, but wanting to cover my own intellectual property, I decided to put mark my posts as being part of the Creative Commons license (see bottom of this page). I have a comment listing a few details with links to the correct documentation that applies to the license I would enforce.

JavaScript & Ajax

I REALLY wanted to showcase my JavaScript skills, but I like to build degradable features. With that in mind, I found it difficult to come up with something that would really benefit the site enough to be included. I decided against using any frameworks so that I could get stuck in. I know for sure that what I have isn't coded as elegantly or as simply as it possibly could be, but it's built to the best of my ability and at the time of writing, the JavaScript file is just 4kb!

The first bit of JS that made it in was a simple image re-sizer. In the event that I link to external images, or am just too lazy to re-size an image in the first place, all images are dynamically given a CSS style the changes their width to match the width of the main content. I've used this on the Be Unequaled blog and it was a feature that I first, inadvertently, installed on the Billionaire-Boys-Club.co.uk forum. It's a very useful tool that keeps content nicely formatted. This off course doesn't really degrade as such, BUT it doesn't add anything that will be missed if you haven't got JavaScript enabled.

The second feature was the ability to click on these re-sized images and view them in a light-box. Again, a simple feature, just not one that is available to those without JavaScript. I ended up making a custom script that just works so nicely. If an image is a link, regardless of size, it stays a link and doesn't show a light-box. Also, any images that would popup in a window larger than the available screen space would actually cause a few scrolling problems. I over came this by disabling the light-box feature, but making this image open in a new window. Not as elegant as a light-box, but certainly better than having a window that doesn't go anywhere. The light-box was completely custom made and I'm really proud of it and I've tried to make it as flexible as possible.

The first Ajax feature was allowing dynamic commenting. This was just a piece of work I had to re-think and re-hash some code from a similar feature on a previous project. This had to be degradable, so it works with and without JavaScript, but with it, it's just so much more fancy!

Accessibility and SEO

I find that many of the issues raised through trying to make an accessible website apply to SEO. Correctly ordered tags, good markup and descriptive meta data, link text and well structured content usually end up ticking both boxes. SEO isn't my favourite thing because many people seem to be under the impression it can (read should!) be improved (read cheated).]

I always go by the mantra that good content will get you where you deserve to be. Not that I'm an expert at writing good content, but I hope to be descriptive and interesting enough to command a place I deserve. Whether that's first, last or anywhere in between, that's purely up to Google to decide!

W3

For many years I've followed the W3 specs and coded to a XMHTL strict standard. I have continued to for this blogging platform and I've tried to make the content delivered dynamically adhere to this specification too. If you find any pages that don't, please let me know!

Search

I have made a lot of effort in recent years to get my head around search engine friendly URLs and getting my markup into shape, so when it came to search, I initially went down a very basic tag and category only filter. After some thought and plenty of use of the blog during development, I decided a search feature might not be so bad. Specifically for finding articles I may have written to help myself! Not much use if I can't find them with ease!

For this blog, I am using the URL to send the necessary information. I have, on a personal level, normally stuck to using PHP's $_POST request over the $_GET request, but for some SEO, but mainly pagination, reasons, I decided to mix it up and get stuck in with the $_GET request.

The query is quite simple. I have filtered common words like 'and', 'the', 'it' and so on and so on. This was purely to stop results getting skewed when they were returned. Upon testing my queries, I found that some posts had 'the' up to 33 times, whereas others had just one or two instances. Couple this the more important terms in a search string often not reaching the dizzy heights of occurrences like the words 'the', 'and' or 'it' and it was an easy decision to make.

The results that are displayed are actually gathered by finding out how common the search terms are within the content for that post. I played with the idea of searching the content, title and description, but I had to keep in mind that I knew it would double, if not triple, the SQL execution time.

In the end, I thought it would be smart to search through this for the time being, as the title and meta description may be the reason someone finds my post through a search engine, so why not give them the same opportunity here? This could be something I review in a few months after looking over all the data I collect. If I personally find the server side load to be too much, I can always review it sooner.

Comments

I really wanted to push commenting in this project. I've always wanted to allow commenting and always been a fan of it, I just never knew how to approach it. I think it adds a whole other dimension to a site, so I decided to bring it to the blog!

I've shied away from using it on my own personal sites because of the threat of spam, but my curiosity won through and it's now a part of the blog! I originally planned for a password based system, but it got too complicated for a simple blog and didn't really make sense. I had too many rules and requirements that would turn me off, let alone any casual visitors that might stroll through. Hopefully what I have is enough without being too basic, as I have allowed some custom BBCode. I've also introduced Gravatars, which I think will be a nice little touch and make the comments a far more appealing part of each post.

Update: After having come across a threaded comment feature on jakeandamir.com, which uses Disqus (I just got that), I decided to see if I could replicate it. Initially, only available to those with JavaScript, I intend to make it available to those without too.

Update 2: I got comments working without JavaScript too, which meant more work in certain areas than I thought, but wasn't too bad overall. You can now reply to comments down to a third level.

Launch

So, here we are after a few months of continuous development. As you may be able to tell, I was blogging during this development time. At first the admin area was little more than a single page, but it's grown to cover every aspect of the blog that needed to be managed and I'm really really happy with how it's turned out.

The future

I really do hope that my blogging platform comes in handy for others. Be it a personal or a professional project. I feel it's simple enough for me to use and expand on in the future and could well make up the foundations of future projects.

Right now, I think it's doing it's job quite nicely!