After updating to Firefox 3.6 on OSX I discovered many of the websites that use flash had the flash object offset by 1 pixel horizontally. Its a real pain hopefully it will be fixed soon. In the mean time I have discovered a temporary fix you can make to your HTML.
I was surprised to find that DotNetPanel hosting control panel had basically shutdown for business. I have been using DNP control panel for around 3 years, originally starting with HostingController and then Helm and finally DNP. Over all DNP seemed the most robust and easy to use, but most importantly it worked well with servers spread over different networks. That's not to say I love every part of it there is certainly parts I would change given half a chance. So now, as it turns out, I can. DotNetPanel has been released on sourceforge as an open source project called WebsitePanel.
For a recent project I was working on I wanted to display some sports results on my local football club's website. The association publishes the results weekly on its website, we also wanted to post them on our website. It would be a waste of time to type them out each week so what can we do? First solution I thought of was HTML data scrapping the results and redisplaying them, better than using an iframe as the results were not in a format that would suit our site. It would be fairly straight forward using ASP.NET on the server but this website is a Blogger site with limited server side functionality.
It struck me the other day that it is so easy to use AJAX with ASP.NET it can make you lazy. I was working on a project where I had some radio boxes and based in the selection of the radio boxes another fields was displayed or hidden. I didn't want the page to post back so initially it though I'll just pop it in a AJAX UpdatePanel and write some code to show or hide the fields after the selection is made on the RadioButtonList.
Its been quite some time since I looked at a PHP script, the first dynamic website I built was PHP and PostgresSQL and for sometime it was PHP all the way. But sometimes project requirements dictate a certain language, so later I worked with Allaire Coldfusion, ASP and ASP.NET. I used two debugging techniques for PHP. The first method is turning on error reporting which is an after the fact method of determining the problem. It can sometimes be difficult to determine the cause of the problem, as error messages often tell you exactly what is wrong not the cause. The second method employed is printing out variables at points in my scripts to narrow down the point at where the error is occurring. I thought it would be a good time to look at some of the developments in debugging PHP. Unless you write your code perfectly first time off debugging is an important part of developing any sort of software.
Implementing keyboard shortcuts can greatly improve the user interface of your web application. Interface navigation is a good place to start, for example if you are viewing a slide show of photos you may expect to be able to navigate through the photos using the left and right arrow keys on you keyboard. For an application that has a popup dialog very common functionality is the ablity to push the escape key to cancel the dialog and close it.
Its been over a month now since Internet Explorer 8 was released on March 19th. I have been busy lately and I finally got round to installing it. I have to say I was impressed, it works well and is quite responsive. I would have to say IE has caught up with FireFox in terms of all the features I like in a browser. Many of the features are already in other browsers. I spent quite a bit of time developing websites so I think best of all is the built in developer tools and JavaScript debugger.
Fluxify is a great Silverlight app that will resize your image and then email it to your favourite recipient. This is the only client size resize app that I can think of that can resize an image without first uploading and that doesn't require you to install it or assign special permissions.