Web Development

Web Development

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7 March 2008: It’s too wide! Or, the problems of not actually knowing how your users actually use web browsers

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.

2 February 2008: Tales of Merging Three Copies of Movable Type Into One

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…

24 January 2008: No more free CustomFields for Movable Type users.

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.

9 November 2007: Movable Type 4: are your entry screen text boxes greyed out?

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!

18 January 2007: Your granny won’t ever use ‘Second Life’

The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles

7 December 2006: Changing minds - using Yahoo’s JavaScript event library in anger

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.

12 August 2006: The battle of the Spam

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.

22 December 2005: myCommute

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.

27 November 2005: No Spam Attacks Today

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.

19 November 2005: New Email Form

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.

20 October 2005: Moving The Type

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.

5 July 2005: myCommute Prototype

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.

11 May 2005: backstage.bbc.co.uk has arrived

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.

10 May 2005: Go… Do Things with RSS

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.

10 April 2005: Code Buzz

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.

22 January 2005: Bods Central v3 and Conditional Comments

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.

18 September 2004: CSS and Email Forms fixed, and some PHP

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

17 August 2004: The F-Word v3.0

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.

16 August 2004: Mozilla Firefox 0.9 and CSS problems

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.

11 June 2004: More hits, RSS and Email Validation

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.

3 April 2004: New Atom Full Post Feed

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.

30 March 2004: Rant ‘n’ Rave Subcategories

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.

24 March 2004: Keywords Metadata

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

20 January 2004: CSS Hacked Off

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.

4 December 2003: The Swirling Mists of Time

It was roundabout this time in 1996 that I started work on my first website.

28 October 2003: Page Not Found

One of my last tasks as a Client Side Developer at the BBC has now snook online.

9 October 2003: More Theme Switcher Fun

The theme switcher now works properly. Honest. Believe me. Please?

4 October 2003: Theme Chooser (and Konqueror’s handling of alternate stylesheets)

A new, and rather pointless theme chooser has been added to the site. Enjoy!

2 October 2003: The Death of the Technical

Today I struggled with some HTML. Does this set a worrying path to technical oblivion?

17 September 2003: Wot no head (tag)?

Apparently in HTML documents, you don’t actually have to have HTML, HEAD or BODY tags. Well you learn something new every day…

25 July 2003: Far Too Easy JavaScript

JavaScript that’s too easy? That’s a bit of a swizz isn’t it?

23 July 2003: Cynthia Says.

Cynthia Says is a web site accessibility validator, and this is some information on it.

20 July 2003: Planet Bods and JavaScript.

New look Planet Bods out now - take a look and let me know what you think.

9 June 2003: Hell hath no fury like a Today message board user annoyed

How a slight bug in a redesign affected one internet community.

11 May 2003: Meeting the strictest accessibility standards

BodsCentral now meets the strictest web accessibility guidelines, as set by the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

26 April 2003: Must Use Correct Markup….

How do you markup a script in HTML? Well where there is a will, there is a way.

30 January 2003: Browsers Bugs (or how to ruin an OK site design.)

If you’re a Mac IE5 user, this site looks a bit rough. Sorry, but it’s not my fault! Honest!

26 September 2002: Web Standards and Accessibility

About the Bods Central accessibility and web standards policies.

30 July 2002: Not Best Viewed In…

The ‘best viewed in’ culture has taken to locking people with certain web browsers out of the site completely. Which is neither nice nor sensible.

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