Graceful Exits

Steve compares “graceful degradation” with “progressive enhancement.” Mostly he takes issue (rightly) with the rhetorical spin that the former applies to the idea of building a website. But I think you can compare them with each other as if they were two different types of crowbar instead: two ways of prising open the task in [...]

Creating your own arrows in OpenOffice (.org, 2.0) is a pain. There’s tutorials out there that claim to show how to create arrows from OOo diagrams, but I’ve not had much success with those. However, by taking apart an existing arrow, I’ve managed to work out the rather nasty syntax
OOo arrow libraries are suffixed .soe, [...]

Drupal, along with Plone and dotnetnuke, beat some monumentally big playas to the first awards of the OpenID bounty. This is awarded to projects which implement a number of requirements which, together, constitute agreed OpenID functionality. And these three projects passed the finishing line first, despite the likes of Microsoft’s lip-service to the OpenID cause.
Of [...]

Sick and tired of getting a million hits, all to the same page, which more often than not hasn’t been updated in the mean time? Want to reduce your bandwidth and server-time loads without necessarily impairing your visitors’ experience of your site?
If you haven’t ever had cause to use it, there’s a standard called ETag [...]

What happens when nobody will take responsibility for a standard that the web relies on?
RSS, the standard millions of us use to syndicate content, and view other people’s syndicated content, was originally invented by Ramanathan Guha at Netscape, for use on its my.netscape.com portal. Soon afterwards, Netscape lost interest in the format, leaving it ownerless [...]

Firefox’s implementation of Javascript is quite forgiving: often a little too forgiving, when it ought to be strict about issues that could pose a security risk. Indeed, Firefox’s silent “the programmer meant this” in the instance I’ve just been tackling was only revealed by the IE error:
No such interface supported

Enlightening, no? The error message is [...]

Now I know the title sounds presumptuous, but there’s a certain methodology I’ve settled into that seems to work really well for encouraging Javascript that’s legible and safe. I thought I’d share it with anyone that doesn’t consider themselves a JS playa, in case it’s of some use to you too.
Most Javascript libraries these [...]

Following my recent success with putting a Flickr feed on my website’s front page is the conversion of this to an all-purpose feed reporter, where RSS/Atom flavour and feed specifics are dealt with by Javascript associative arrays of functions, keyed on both variables respectively.
If you’re lucky then the feed should wait a bit while it [...]

After a bit of a struggle I’ve managed to get wireless networking at home. Unfortunately, my first attempts to test the connectivity to the rest of the world coincided with the power outages at Telehouse, a “bullet-proof” ISP that too many people rely on, including ADSL services, the BBC website, Nominet, some DNS servers….
I have [...]

A number of posts are currently in stasis waiting for me to actually finish them, but I thought it was worth mentioning the selection of my most recent Flickr photos that now graces my homepage. While the rest of that page awaits serious styling and content work, I’ve dilly-dallied by creating this bit of eye-candy.
The [...]