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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Sun 28 Dec 2008 at 14:07
- Comments
As Matt said in his last blog post, both Matt and I are making predictions about what will happen in 2009 with technology and web development. We'll revisit both our posts at the end of next year to see who was right and who was wrong! Make sure to read Matt's post for his predictions too.
OpenID
Prediction: OpenID will officially die out and lose all hope of being adopted as a widespread standard.
Matt predicted that OpenID would become a login method on more mainstream websites, but still lack mainstream use. My prediction is simi…
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- Author
- Matt Oakes
- Date
- Sat 27 Dec 2008 at 10:50
- Comments
As is typical at the end of each year, we're going to make some predictions about next year and technology. I'm going to start with my five predictions and Ethan will add his five in a separate blog post tomorrow. At the end of 2009, it will be interesting to see who got what right.
Microformats
Prediction: Microformats will be incorporated into more websites; however, few people will make use of the extra data at all.
Microformats have started to pick up steam in 2008 and are just starting to be used on mainstream websites. I think…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Tue 23 Dec 2008 at 22:15
- Comments
Since I now have most of my family using Opera, I am hearing more and more about browser sniffing issues with Opera. They tell me that some website will not work for them, so I investigate the issue and, after telling Opera to identify itself as a different browser, I get into the website fine without any rendering or scripting issues to be found. Really, browser sniffing has no place on the web whatsoever. Why would you deny users access when their browser can render the website perfectly?
Now, there are cases where browser sniffing is a…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Fri 19 Dec 2008 at 14:50
I have programmed at least four or five BBCode libraries during my programming career, with each iteration improving in some way or another. With my last BBCode library (currently used on Lowter), I thought it would last me longer and survive any major issues requiring me to reprogram it. Of course, I was wrong and I have spent these past few days working on a new BBCode library to replace Lowter's current one.
The old BBCode library faced a few problems:
The code wasn't easily expandable.
Acronyms, link indexing, and table-of-conten…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Mon 15 Dec 2008 at 9:13
AppleInsider last week reported about a series of patent filings by Apple detailing a potential 3D interface for Mac OS X. The multidimensional interface features a number of ways to organise windows, applications, and more. Overall, the 3D interface makes an attempt to utilise better the larger monitors available on the market. You can read the original post on AppleInsider for all of the specific details of the 3D interface.
I've often wondered where interfaces will go next. Graphical interfaces have constantly been improving over the …
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- Author
- Matt Oakes
- Date
- Sat 13 Dec 2008 at 6:12
Everyone in the UK will have heard of the BBC iPlayer. All of the adverts in between programmes include at least a brief mention of the iPlayer and what it does. For those not living in the UK or who are unfamiliar with the BBC iPlayer, it essentially allows UK citizens to access all of the BBC's vast amounts of online content in one place.
I use it a lot (much more than I use regular TV) and it's strange to think that the iPlayer only came out less than a year ago. (It was actually released on Christmas day 2007. No idea why they chose t…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Fri 12 Dec 2008 at 9:37
A lot of websites nowadays are featuring glossy menus with a very slick gloss to them. It's part of the Web 2.0 fad that has been plaguing the web these past few years. Nonetheless, these menus look pretty snazzy and are actually very easy to create, even for people who are not very talented with Photoshop.
Create the Document
First, create a new document 430 by 40 pixels. You can vary the dimensions if you wish, the following steps are rather easy to apply to any dimensions. I would recommend at least having elongated dimensions …
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 10 Dec 2008 at 22:32
- Comments
Now that the SitePoint Podcast has gone through three episodes and I have had time to listen to all of them and assess the content, I highly recommend adding the SitePoint Podcast to your listening schedule! There are a lot of good tech podcasts out there (CNET's Buzz Out Loud is my favourite by far), but there are only a handful of good podcasts about web development alone.
WebDevRadio is the only other web development podcast that I have found informative. Part of the reason I'm not a fan of other web development podcasts is because they…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Mon 8 Dec 2008 at 11:29
- Comments
Here at Lowter, we finally have a few pieces of our new administration interface, something we have needed for months. When we moved from Ottoman to our own custom-coded system, I never actually coded an admin interface to accompany it. Everything was managed through PHPMyAdmin, directly adding content into our MySQL database. Awful idea I know. Now though, we have the ability to administer most of our day-to-day content on Lowter. One of the aspects of our new admin interface that I settled on right away is having the design extremely sim…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Fri 5 Dec 2008 at 16:46
As many of you may have guessed by now, we are pretty big fans of the Opera web browser here at Lowter. We certainly like Opera for its solid set of features, but especially for its superior web standards support. A new Opera version is always exciting for me because of the constant improvement of Opera on all levels. Two days ago, Opera released Opera 10.0 Alpha 1 for Windows, Mac OS, and UNIX.
The biggest improvement is the upgrade of the Presto rendering engine of Opera, which now passes the Acid3 Test. Here are all of the maj…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 3 Dec 2008 at 17:03
With companies constantly cutting back nowadays, web development projects are consistently being shipped overseas, making web development jobs and projects much harder to find. I use to have a constant stream of projects coming in from clients (I mainly do sub-contracts), but it seems I'm now having to go out and search for jobs. In my case, this isn't too bad because I need to focus on school anyway, but for others this is not the case.
The only two job-search tools I have used with success are the SitePoint Marketplace (quite a long time…
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- Author
- Matt Oakes
- Date
- Mon 1 Dec 2008 at 12:50
- Comments
Hiring a photographer to take a photograph of a generic object or of a scenic landscape is sometimes a waste of both money and time. Often it is better simply to get the image off of the Internet.
You do however have to consider where you get the image from. Simply using an image you found on Google Images is likely to leave you in breach of copyright. Therefore, you will need to look for images with permission from the photographer to use the images commercially. There are many websites setup specifically for this job and sometimes they…
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