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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 29 Oct 2008 at 19:08
- Comments
There are a number of code-syntax debates in the world of programming. Everyone has the common goal of establishing some sort of code-syntax standard so developers can easily work on each others' code, but everyone disagrees on exactly what the standard should be. Some programming languages, like Python, have largely solved this problem by enforcing a specific syntax on developers. However, these syntax debates still exist in many programming communities, such as the PHP developer community, as PHP gives developers a lot of syntax freedom. …
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Fri 24 Oct 2008 at 18:55
Six Revisions, a blog I probably should mention more often, posted a collection of thirty Photoshop illustration tutorials earlier this month. Illustration is always something that I have wanted to be able to do, but I just don't seem to have the artistic talent for illustration. Nonetheless, I'm still working on becoming a master Photoshop illustrator one day. I'm working on trying to create a Christmas scene, hopefully before Christmas... If you want to avoid sifting through Good-tutorials.com's huge selection of illustration tutorials, t…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 22 Oct 2008 at 11:49
- Comments
SitePoint has released their latest book about CSS titled Everything You Know about CSS Is Wrong! I've been very pleased with SitePoint lately for releasing a lot of books outside the typical beginner range. When they first started to publish books, most of their books were pretty basic (although still well written) and were certainly geared towards beginners in that particular subject. However, I guess since they already have books covering these beginner areas, they have been publishing a lot more intermediate and advance level books l…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Mon 20 Oct 2008 at 11:50
One of the cool new things that we have added at Lowter recently is an all-in-one RSS feed that contains both our articles and our blog entries. Granted, the feed doesn't contain "all" of Lowter's content, such as new forum threads and blog comments, but it is very encompassing nonetheless. Coding such an all-in-one RSS feed is pretty easy!
First, I'm going to assume that you want to make a combined feed of both your articles and blog entries. You can easily change the code to fit whatever combining scenario you have, such as different so…
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- Author
- Matt Oakes
- Date
- Sun 19 Oct 2008 at 13:26
I sometimes feel like I write too much about Opera, but I couldn't really pass this article up! Opera have just released a large report that attempts to document the current state of the webpages that make up the World Wide Web. The report is called MAMA (Metadata Analysis and Mining Application) and it uses a large set of URLs (3,509,180 URLs in 3,011,668 domains) to generate statistics about the current state of webpages on the Internet. The report details many different aspects of the Internet, including what server software the website u…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Sat 18 Oct 2008 at 10:22
- Comments
Those of you who are members of the Lowter Forums (which I highly encourage you to become) may have noticed the huge increase in spam in the past few weeks. It got to the point where we were just pruning the New Users forum in order to remove the spam from the site as quickly as possible. Months after Matt showed me the Akismet plugin for PunBB (the forum software we use), I finally got around to installing the plugin and tackling the spam problem we've been having. Some spam still gets through the filter, but overall it catches almost all o…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 15 Oct 2008 at 19:59
- Comments
Awhile back there was a great thread on SitePoint Forums about the best semantic naming convention for a typical layout shell (header, footer, content, navigation, etc.). A lot of people posted what they thought was the best semantic naming scheme, usually along these lines:
<div id="header">
...
</div>
<div id="sidebar">
...
</div>
<div id="content">
...
</div>
<div id="footer">
...
</div>
Largely, this is the same semantic naming convention that I would use: heade…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Tue 14 Oct 2008 at 0:07
- Comments
Cloud computing is one of the rages online nowadays, with tons of applications hopping onto the bandwagon with services like Amazon S3. Wikipedia defines cloud computing as "a style of computing in which IT-related capabilities are provided 'as a service', allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet ('in the cloud') without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them". Basically, cloud computing is storing information in the "cloud" or a centralised location and the…
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- Author
- Matt Oakes
- Date
- Thu 9 Oct 2008 at 22:19
- Comments
This blog post was originally going to be about the new features of Opera 9.6 and how much I like them. However, I spotted a major flaw with one of the new features and luckily it's a flaw that anyone can fix with a little bit of modification.
One of the great new features of Opera 9.6 is that it will show a styled page when it comes across an RSS or Atom feed, which makes it readable to humans. It then has a big button that you press to subscribe to the feed. It's a great little feature... assuming you use the built-in feed reader. The …
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Tue 7 Oct 2008 at 15:05
- Comments
The Choose Opera blog posted a funny little chart about typical web browser users of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Apple Safari. It is funny, especially the Apple Safari row, but the chart also has a little accuracy in my opinion. IE users are generally either not informed or stubborn about switching to a better browser. Opera users tend to be a little elitist, but only because they're using the better browser (I do use Opera myself). Power users of Apple Safari are almost certainly using it for the "Private Browsing" feature, …
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Fri 3 Oct 2008 at 8:28
Apple's iPhone has become the "cool" platform in the development world, especially with the introduction of the App Store, where developers have been raking in the dough by selling their applications for only a few dollars. When the iPhone was initially released, Apple touted that the development platform was simply the "web", so developers had to use traditional web technologies - XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript - to develop iPhone applications, which ran through Safari. This worked, except for that the applications were slow (because EDGE is slo…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 1 Oct 2008 at 21:37
Google's new Android mobile platform is said to pose a real challenge to Apple's growing dominance of the US smartphone market. However, after simply looking at various screenshots of Android, it is easy for me to say that Android is not a real threat to Apple, at least yet. Apple understands design, which is why people find their products visually appealing. Even the smallest detail Apple attends to. Everything is crafted to the pixel, especially on the iPhone. Apple's attention to detail is amazing. Google Android, on the other hand, la…
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