Web Development

CSS, HTML and other webby stuff.

Rules of Web Redirects

Posted on 9 February 2009 in Web Development

One of the legacies of a long lasting site is that you end up moving things around a bit. There are common themes why this can happen - and that means there are sometimes ways to avoid potential problems

It’s too wide! Or, the problems of not actually knowing how your users actually use web browsers

Posted on 7 March 2008 in Web Development

Now I must say I do like the visual look and feel of the new BBC homepage, but it gives me yet again, another infuriating problem. It’s the browser window size. I just don’t want my browser window set that wide.

Tales of Merging Three Copies of Movable Type Into One

Posted on 2 February 2008 in Web Development

Of course the sensible thing would have been not to have three different copies of Movable Type for one site in the first place. But then, there’s a lot that can be said for hindsight…

No more free CustomFields for Movable Type users.

Posted on 24 January 2008 in Web Development

Oh poop. It appears that, with the release of Movable Type 4.1, one of the most useful plugins I’ve ever found for Movable Type - CustomFields - has become part of the MT “Professional Pack”, which means buying a licence then. Especially annoying given in its pre-Six Apart ownership, it was essentially donation-ware for personal users.

Movable Type 4: are your entry screen text boxes greyed out?

Posted on 9 November 2007 in Web Development

Two versions of this post. I’ll start with the executive summary. If you’ve moved to Movable Type 4 and find that when you get to edit an entry, the body and Extended fields are all greyed out, then I might have a cure for you!

Your granny won’t ever use ‘Second Life’

Posted on 18 January 2007 in BBC, Web Development

The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles

Changing minds - using Yahoo’s JavaScript event library in anger

Posted on 7 December 2006 in Web Development

Over the last few weeks, I’ve slowly been migrating some of my JavaScript to use the Yahoo! JavaScript event library after discovering that my own attempts at event handling, weren’t working quite as well as I’d planned.

The battle of the Spam

Posted on 12 August 2006 in Planet Bods, Web Development

Over the last few weeks my humble email form has been getting a slowly increasing amount of spam emails sent through is - usually with Japanese email addresses for some reason. Now as the web form just gets sent to me and doesn’t go near the web site so I just sighed and put it with the rest of my spam.

myCommute

Posted on 22 December 2005 in Web Development

Some time ago, I released myCommute out into the wild - a personalised way to view public transport travel updates from your PC, using the BBC’s Travel feeds.

No Spam Attacks Today

Posted on 27 November 2005 in Web Development

So the new web forms survived their first email injection attack. Should really get the new script rolled out on the rest of the site now I suppose.

New Email Form

Posted on 19 November 2005 in Planet Bods, Web Development

It’s with a sense of trepidation that I today reactivated the first of my PHP built webforms since the email injection attack on my site nearly three weeks ago. Ever since then, I’ve had an ever increasing number attempts on the Hitoplive based forms which remained. None successful of course, but it’s meant that I’ve been a little cautious about unleashing my new script on the world.

Moving The Type

Posted on 20 October 2005 in Web Development

For well over a year or so, I’ve been working, in my spare time, on a content management project for the erstwhile Transdiffusion - a project which has, ultimately, resulted in the neglect of this blog, the upload of my photos and goodness knows what else.

myCommute Prototype

Posted on 5 July 2005 in Web Development

Some time ago I mentioned backstage.bbc.co.uk and a couple of ideas I’d had around travel feeds. Well I’ve been messing around and I’m happy to announce that myCommute now has a working prototype.

backstage.bbc.co.uk has arrived

Posted on 11 May 2005 in BBC, Web Development

Well you didn’t have to wait long. Backstage.bbc.co.uk went into public beta today. Pretty much everything I said about opening up the News and Sport feeds to do cool things with, applies also for the plethora of feeds listed on backstage.bbc.co.uk - be it the extensive travel information available, or the Doctor Who RSS feed.

Go… Do Things with RSS

Posted on 10 May 2005 in BBC, Web Development

A press release about RSS feeds isn’t going to set the world alight. One that starts off telling you to go off and reuse the feed in exciting ways might just.

Code Buzz

Posted on 10 April 2005 in Web Development

I spent most of the day messing with PHP, XML and Yahoo’s APIs to knock together a simple, pretty basic website search script for use on Catherine’s website. It’s not hugely complicated but it was all new stuff.

Bods Central v3 and Conditional Comments

Posted on 22 January 2005 in Planet Bods, Web Development

Well here it is, Bods Central v3.0. It’s only really a re-skin of the content but the old design had been in use since November 2002, and I’ve been itching for a change for a while.

CSS and Email Forms fixed, and some PHP

Posted on 18 September 2004 in Internet, Planet Bods, Web Development

Broken (and fixed) CSS, broken (and fixed) email forms and some PHP thrown in to boot! Yay!

The F-Word v3.0

Posted on 17 August 2004 in Internet, Web Development

At long last, version 3.0 of The F-Word has gone live. Given I first started work on redesigning Catherine’s site back in December 2002, you might understand that its launch is somewhat of a relief to me.

Mozilla Firefox 0.9 and CSS problems

Posted on 16 August 2004 in Internet, Planet Bods, Web Development

If you’re using Mozilla Firefox 0.9.x - and if you are, you’ll probably know it - you might be looking at a very plain webpage without any proper colours or styles on it.

More hits, RSS and Email Validation

Posted on 11 June 2004 in Internet, Web Development

I was surprised to see the site hits go up 7000 last month, a large number of people hitting my post about my recent RSS changes, and a 1000 referrals from Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Mark site.

New Atom Full Post Feed

Posted on 3 April 2004 in Internet, Planet Bods, Web Development

There’s a new full-stories feed for your pleasure. If you use an aggregator to view the site, feel free to give it a try.

Rant ‘n’ Rave Subcategories

Posted on 30 March 2004 in Internet, Planet Bods, Web Development

I’ve been looking at the hierarchy for categories in this the site for some time and have been less than impressed with what I see.

Keywords Metadata

Posted on 24 March 2004 in Internet, Planet Bods, Web Development

It’s taken me a long time to realise, but I finally have. The meta keywords tag in HTML is now very pointless.

CSS Hacked Off

Posted on 20 January 2004 in Internet, Web Development

CSS hacks are on two levels - documented ‘features’ and undocumented browser bugs. And using the latter could be storing up a whole lodda trouble for the future.