Entries posted in July, 2006

Westpac ranked the worst for website presentation

One of our most popular articles is my rant on the Westpac crippled feedback page which attempted to explain that the banking giant not only had a poor grasp of web standards and design, but was also very difficult to communicate with.  More »

Document your PHP projects with PHPXRef

PHPXref is a handy developer tool, written by Gareth Watts, which cross-references the source code in PHP projects and creates readable HTML documentation which can be viewed with any web browser. The main features of PHPXref are: No web server required to view output.  More »

Analysing software license agreements

Do you know of anyone who actually reads the license agreement when they install a piece of software? Me either. We typically just click on that “accept” button without reading the license first. Lines and lines of legalise, where we understand all the words but the sentences don’t make much sense.  More »

Deleting files with bad names in Linux

In an earlier post I talked about the usefulness of the Linux “find” command to delete old files. Another, perhaps less common, use is to delete files with “bad characters” in the name. For instance, the famous “tar” archiver allows you to exclude certain files by specifying the “–exclude=filename” option.  More »

Better web security with SiteAdvisor

Everyone who’s used the web has at some point encountered spyware attacks, online scams and spamming sites which earn their profits by taking advantage of user ignorance.  More »

Google is now officially a verb

According to the folks behind Merriam-Webster, google is now officially a verb, after having been submitted for consideration some three months ago. It’s approved meaning is: To use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web.  More »

Why every business needs a CMS

According to Melbourne IT, while more than 90% of internet users get to websites via search engines, more than 50% of all Australian businesses who have a website cannot easily be found in a major search engine like Google.  More »

Windows Live? Hardly.

It’s been over three months since the launch of Windows Live, Microsoft’s klutzy “Google killer” project. Like Google, Windows Live is offering “personalisation of your homepage”, with news, weather, mail, and (apparently) more.  More »