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How to find free photos on the web

Aug 23rd

While there are lots of places on the web where you can find photos, you need to remember that they're often copyrighted and protected by law, whether they carry a notice or not. That being the case, you have a couple of practical and legal alternatives. One is to use a specialist site like Stock.XCHNG, who offer a large range of stock photos for registered members.More >>

The secret to effective online forms

Jun 29th

People are busy and easily get frustrated. Don't annoy them by asking for too many things in your online forms. Nobody has the time or the patience to fill in a dozen fields, just to join your email newsletter.More >>

Windows explorer thumbnails

Aug 17th, 2009

Windows XP has a tendency to sprinkle lots of hidden thumbs.db files all over your hard drive, specifically in folders that have images of any kind. Windows uses these cache files to store preview thumbnails of your images, so they don't have to be created each time you open the folder the images are in.More >>

XAMPP directory missmatch

Jun 15th, 2009

If you get a directory missmatch warning when you launch the XAMPP control panel, it's almost certainly because you've installed XAMPP without an installer.More >>

Naming procedure line labels

Apr 13th, 2009

I recently worked on improving a VB6 application, and as part of the task, I decided to clean up the way procedures used line labels.More >>

Don't hide common file extensions

Mar 9th, 2009

By default, Windows XP doesn't display common filename extensions like .exe, .doc, .xls and others. While you may not be aware of this, malware writers certainly are, and they use this knowledge to trick you into opening dangerous files.More >>

Automatic tabindex with PHP

Dec 8th, 2008

As most of us who've created HTML forms know, the tabindex attribute is a nice way to force text fields, checkboxes, dropdowns and buttons to be in a predefined order, so the user can utilise the tab key to navigate between them.More >>

Sanitising uploaded filenames

Dec 1st, 2008

Because of the differences in the way Linux and Windows systems handle filenames, and because users often upload files which have spaces, quotes, and other punctuation characters in the name, it's important that you strip out these characters from the filename before saving the file on the webserver.More >>

Multiple versions of IE

Nov 24th, 2008

A clever bloke by the name of Yousif Al Saif has come up with a way of having multiple versions of IE running on your windows workstation. Handy for us poor sods who still have to support what is probably the worst standards-compliant browser ever made.More >>

Get your mum to test it

Aug 4th, 2008

Here's some great advice on how to cheaply but effectively test a website for usability: I've used a subtle variation of this on a number of occasions, and I can tell you that it really works.More >>

Reject those nosy email messages

Feb 4th, 2008

MS Outlook uses a tracking option which enables the sender of an email to determine when the recipient has actually read it. If, like me, you find this feature an intrusion of privacy, you can do something about it.More >>

Converting PHP arrays to XML

Nov 1st, 2007

I thought I'd share with you a PHP class I found useful lately. I had to take a comma-delimited text file and turn it into an XML text stream. With the ubiquity of XML these days, you might find it useful too, if you dabble in PHP software development.More >>

20 usability tips for bloggers

Oct 14th, 2007

Do you have a blog but need some ideas on how to make it work better? If so, make sure you read Tom Johnson's fantastic usability tips for bloggers. Here's the gist of what Tom's saying:More >>

CSS reference guide

Oct 8th, 2007

The folks at xhtml.com have put together a first-rate CSS reference guide with lots of useful examples and illustrations.More >>

Don't send HTML-only newsletters

Oct 2nd, 2007

Does your organisation send out email newsletters to your customers or prospects? If so, here's a tip.More >>

Ebay phishing scam

Aug 10th, 2007

Last weekend, I got one of those unpaid item reminder emails from what looked on the surface to be the automated Ebay system. Here's how I immediately recognised it as a phishing scam:More >>

Simple HTML chart

Jun 16th, 2007

One of our readers recently observed that we don't seem to be using any images to draw our barcharts and wondered how it was done.More >>

Getting the client IP address

Jun 5th, 2007

We've seen plenty of PHP scripts that rely on the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] variable when trying to establish the IP address of the client computer. The problem with this approach is that if your visitor is behind a corporate firewall or proxy, then the above will actually be the IP of the firewall or proxy, not the visitors computer.More >>

Easy printer friendly pages

May 31st, 2007

You don't need to muck around with JavaScript, page redirection or PDF integration just to make your XHTML web pages printer friendly.More >>

PHP last day of the month calculation

May 15th, 2007

Here's the easiest way to output the last day of any month using PHP: function lastday($month = '', $year = '') {More >>

Email pet peeves

May 9th, 2007

Peggy Duncan over at Fastpitch writes about email pet peeves that cause stress in the workplace. If you found our post on email etiquette a little disdainful, have a read of Peggy's article.More >>

VB.NET inifile class

May 3rd, 2007

If you're a VB.NET developer who's also programmed in the various Visual Basic flavours which preceded it, you would have noticed that the new standard for custom program settings storage is XML files.More >>

MySQL database housekeeping

Apr 11th, 2007

As part of regular ongoing database housekeeping, you should repair and optimise your MySQL tables on a regular basis.More >>

CSS selector order

Apr 7th, 2007

Given the stylesheet declaration outlined below: .uno {More >>

Don't waste my bandwidth

Mar 25th, 2007

I got spammed recently by some knuckleheads who curiously must have thought I'd somehow be interested in their cheesy and unsolicited newsletter. The email consisted of a whopping 415Kb embedded JPEG image and a short text intro:More >>

PHP leap year calculation

Mar 24th, 2007

A simple little function to calculate whether a specified year is a leap year or not:More >>

Deleting history in Firefox

Mar 20th, 2007

Have you ever made a typo when entering a URL in Firefox? Firefox remembers any entered URL's, so it can match them against what you type, whether they're valid or not.More >>

A website for under $500?

Mar 8th, 2007

I still occasionally get asked by prospects if I can help them build a website on a sub $500 budget. These days I just tell them to ask their favourite nephew (who dabbles in HTML) to start right here.More >>

Nobody cares about your stupid cat

Feb 24th, 2007

If you're writing for an audience (as opposed to for yourself) Ronald Huereca at Weblog Tools Collection offers some tips on topics not to blog about:More >>

How to download videos from Youtube

Feb 19th, 2007

With our woeful broadband speeds here in the lucky country, no wonder lots of us see Youtube as only conceptually useful.More >>

Internet country codes

Feb 8th, 2007

We recently worked on a geocoding project which required a lookup table of all the ISO country codes and their names:More >>

More secure admin logins

Jan 15th, 2007

A good way to improve the security of your website administration login is to restrict the input field length for the username and password to something reasonable. This is commonly done with the maxlength attribute in HTML:More >>

Pitfalls of third-party controls

Dec 27th, 2006

Quite some time ago, I documented how manifest files can be used to make VB6 applications look like they were designed for Windows XP. Having recently worked on a project which liberally used third-party ActiveX controls, I experienced one major pitfall of this approach.More >>

Hacking XP Themes

Dec 16th, 2006

If your corporate standard operating environment precludes you from changing the default (blue) Windows XP desktop theme and your system administrators have disabled your registry editor, here's an alternative way of doing it:More >>

Better screen cursor management in VB

Dec 8th, 2006

One of the more subtle aspects of traditional VB application development is controlling the screen cursor when you're performing some lengthy operation which might involve multiple functions or subroutines. The polite thing to do is obviously set the screen cursor to an hourglass just before you commence a processing task which is likely to take more than second or so. The polite thing is to also switch it back to an arrow, once you're finished.More >>

Is your mobile diverting to voicemail too quickly?

Dec 4th, 2006

I finally learnt how to extend the time my mobile phone rings before going to voicemail.More >>

The perfect HTML markup guide

Nov 21st, 2006

While there are lots of HTML primers out there, there's one which every web designer should read and understand. It's 37 Steps to Perfect Markup by Tommy Olsson. Strictly speaking, this is not for beginners but rather for those folks who think they know enough HTML to get by. Because, it's often these same folks who lack the understanding of the repercussions of getting it even slightly wrong.More >>

Checking for Office applications in Visual Basic

Nov 16th, 2006

I recently got an email from one of our readers who found our Spellchecking from Visual Basic article useful but wanted to know if there was a way to ensure that Microsoft Word was installed before attempting to invoke the spellchecking function.More >>

Parsing comma-separated data in PHP

Oct 14th, 2006

It's only recently that I discovered the PHP function fgetcsv(), which offers a quick and powerful way of handling CSV data, such as that exported by Excel and other spreadsheets.More >>

Stripping whitespace in PHP

Sep 20th, 2006

Here's a simple way to strip all whitespace from a string in PHP, which is useful for properly trimming any user input:More >>

Spellchecking from Visual Basic

Sep 13th, 2006

Here's a quick way to run a spellcheck on any data stream from within your VB6 application:More >>

Office and backup files

Sep 1st, 2006

One of our readers commented on a negative side-effect of our disk cleaning tip we posted last week. It seems that if you use our batch file to clean your hard disk, your Microsoft Office applications may no longer work correctly.More >>

Quick disk cleanup

Aug 25th, 2006

Every few months, I like to do a little spring cleaning and remove the hundreds of temporary and backup files which get left behind by various applications.More >>

Office personalised menus

Aug 18th, 2006

Microsoft have done a number of counter-intuitive things over the years in the quest of improved usability and after the pesky office assistant and the distracting auto spelling and grammar checker, the personalized menus introduced in Office 2000 are often the very next thing many advanced users turn off before they use any of it's components.More >>

Finding duplicate records with SQL

Aug 15th, 2006

Although I don't spend a lot of time doing any type of relational database administration, occasionally I get asked to find duplicate records in tables. Here's the easiest way to do it, assuming your database supports subqueries:More >>

Deleting files with bad names in Linux

Jul 18th, 2006

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 >>

Fancy HTML tables with CSS

Jun 30th, 2006

I got an email from an anonymous reader a few days ago who, after presumably reading my recent article on pretty tables, wanted to know if there was a way to extend the idea:More >>

Pretty HTML tables with CSS

Jun 20th, 2006

Back in old days of web design, making pretty tables was usually achieved by nesting one table within another. By setting the background colour of the outer table a few shades darker than the inner one, you could achieve a nice bordered look. With the move to XHTML, this is generally considered to be poor design as it contravenes the principle that you should use CSS for the presentation and the HTML only for markup.More >>

Form loading trap in VB.NET

Apr 21st, 2006

One of the first problems a VB6 developer encounters when migrating to VB.NET is that the way forms are loaded has changed completely. Although this (typical) VB6 method of loading the main application form is syntactically correct, it will definitely not produce the desired result:More >>

Preventing image theft

Apr 7th, 2006

We're getting a little annoyed with some webmasters out there who continue to link directly to some of the images on our website. As far as we're concerned, this practise equates to theft because they're using the bandwidth we pay for. By adding these four lines to our .htaccess file, we have now put a stop to the pilfering:More >>

PC Inspector File Recovery

Mar 22nd, 2006

Have you ever had to recover deleted files on your Windows XP/2000 computer? Not the ones in your recycle bin but the ones you've permanently deleted?More >>

PHP upgrade woes

Nov 27th, 2005

There's been lots of noise about PHP 5.0.5 breaking application code which had been happily running for quite some time under previous versions.More >>

Email etiquette

Nov 19th, 2005

Dealing with junk mail from spammers is one thing. But junk mail I personally get from people I know is another. Chain letters, stupid attachments, pointless replies and virus hoaxes are not only a waste of bandwidth but they're a waste of time as well.More >>

As fresh as a Daisy

Oct 16th, 2005

If you're running one of the numerous flavours of the Windows operating system, you've no doubt experienced the continuous and systematic updates or hotfixes you're having to apply to your computer just to keep it secure. This is normally done via Internet Explorer, via the Tools > Windows Update menu or by pointing your browser directly to the Microsoft Windows Update website.More >>

Mozilla autocomplete bug

Oct 12th, 2005

I recently came across an annoying little bug which seems to affect all Mozilla based browsers, including the current version (1.07) of Firefox. It seems to happen when you have a form text input field and you're using Javascript to validate whether the user has entered anything into that input field. So, for instance if you had a text input field like this:More >>

Home pages are becoming redundant

Oct 9th, 2005

Recent usability testing conducted by Mark Hurst boldly asserts that Google has made home pages virtuallyMore >>

Lightweight ADO class

Sep 9th, 2005

When putting together dynamic web applications in an ASP environment, developers use ADO recordsets for the overwhelming majority of their database interfacing. Although most web applications will involve data entry forms, where the user will insert, update and delete database records, the biggest performance issues are in presenting recordset output to the client browser.More >>

Readnotify. Spyware?

Aug 24th, 2005

When I first heard of this from a colleague of mine, and based on her enthusiastic explanation, I thought it was just another shonky internet venture. But I was only partially right, it's a little more sinister than that.More >>

Flash blocker

Aug 18th, 2005

All advertising is annoying. But Macromedia have upped the annoyance factor by a couple notches with their irritating technology which allows websites to get around popup-blockers and ad-blockers. Since most browsers don't have the ability to turn off Flash on an individual website basis, many commercial websites have now adopted it as a means of advertising their wares.More >>

Genuine advantage cracked

Jul 28th, 2005

A few days ago, Microsoft has implemented Genuine Advantage, a scheme which attempts to stamp out the use of pirated copies of Windows XP, by insisting that users must verify their serial number before they can run Windows Update.More >>

Disk usage

Jul 24th, 2005

As a Linux developer, sometimes you need to know how much space is taken up by files in a directory. The following command shows all files in the current directory, ordered by descending file size:More >>

Managing incoming email

Jul 11th, 2005

Mark Hurst, the good experience guy and customer experience consultant has a free downloadable whitepaper on managing incoming email.More >>

Click here. No, click there!

Jul 2nd, 2005

If all interface designers bothered to read W3C's HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines we wouldn't have the current state of link idiocy that seems to abound the web.More >>

Optimise your internet connection

Jun 26th, 2005

Windows XP and 2000 are by default configured for Ethernet network usage rather than high-speed internet connections, which have a much larger latency when transmitting packets of data.More >>

MySQL backup

Jun 14th, 2005

For those of you lucky enough to have Linux shell access here's a quick tip for backing up and restoring your MySQL database:More >>

Hungarian notation

Jun 6th, 2005

Hungarian notation is a naming convention in computer programming, in which the name of an object indicates its type and intended use. According to Charles Simonyi, the inventor of Hungarian notation and senior programmer (at the time) at Microsoft, it was invented so:More >>