Via: Online Schools

Have you ever wanted to redirect your index.php page to yourroot domain? So this:

http://www.mysite.co.uk/index.php

Automatically redirects to this:

http://www.mysite.co.uk/

You have… excellent! Well with the following code snippet for the .htaccess file you can now achieve this:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.mysite.co.uk/ [R=301,L]

I’ve just spent some time swapping out our security Captcha code to use reCAPTCHA on both our Website Healthcheck form and our SEO Enquiry Form form. The process is extremely straightforward, no hassle and the site contains all the instructions you need, i would definitely recommend it.

Not only does this particular security image produce W3C compliant HTML it is also helping to digitise books as the words that you are asked to re-type are ones that computers have trouble reading using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.

There is more information about the service here: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html it is worth a read.

If you’ve ever wondered wanted to know how PayPal returns data to you from a transaction (and we have) then look no further than this blog courtesy of the PayPal X Developer Network.

This explains the POST, PDT and IPN return types. Ok, so not the most interesting night time reading but someone needs to know this kind of stuff.

In other news Google has bought BumpTop; the software that turns your flat desktop into a 3D interactive space. I’ve tried the software and whilst it did impress visually it did not make sense, to me at least, on a desktop machine where you have a keyboard and mouse. However I can completely see the benefits on a touch based piece of hardware, like the iPad. Are Google about to impress with some new mobile device that makes use of this technology? or maybe their own large iPad style device? Only time will tell.

We took delivery last week of our very own Apple iPad. Freshly imported from the US along with a US iTunes account and a $100 gift voucher for lots of sparkly new iPad Apps.

And the verdict is…
…what a fabulous bit of kit. It’s important to understand that the iPad will disappoint if you don’t understand what it’s for. If you want a quick, small and fairly light device for browsing the web, sending and receiving email and most other thing you do when at home, then the iPad may be for you. If you want a business machine, it certainly won’t replace your laptop - unless you only use it for resting your pen and note pad on.

The actual iPad itself is a lovely looking piece of kit. Typically Apple, the materials and construction are second to none. The screen is vibrant and the resolution on HD movie stunning. And, personally, I don’t have any issues with the touch keyboard and size.

The Apps selection is limited at the moment and running iPhone apps on it simply doubles the size of the App - which is a bit rubbish from what I’ve seen so far.

The Safari browser is currently detected as a mobile browser, which is a little frustrating. I have a big screen and don’t want to be served iPhone site versions. No doubt, developers will catch on - this one has

Main Benefits/positive points so far:
Immediate on button - no boot up time
Long battery time
Lovely screen/display
Very quick
Keynote on the go is effective - but importantly not the full version
Works great with Bluetooth headphones (Sennheiser mm450)
Excellent video/movies
oh - and looks cool in Starbucks (but you may get mugged for it)

Main faults/frustrations so far:
Massive finger print issue
Easy to drop (like a big bar of soap)
No Flash - but maybe that’s not such a bad thing!
Sites recognise the iPad Safari as a mobile browser
Limited Apps at the moment - but increasing daily
Won’t charge from your USB as not powerful enough. Needs mains.

I’ll update further over time.

After many attempts at trying to, unsuccesfully, merge branch changes into my trunk using SVN I came across a working solution, courtesy of http://crunchlife.com/. Here it is:

Step 1: checkout the trunk to a working folder

svn checkout file:///repository/project/trunk /home/project-trunk

Step 2: Perform a merge bewteen the SVN repos trunk and branch with onto the checked out trunk folder

svn merge file:///repository/project/trunk
file:///repository/project/branches/my-branch /home/project-trunk

Step 3: Commit the changes on the trunk folder back to the repos

svn commit /home/project-trunk -m"merging my-branch into trunk"

Step 4: Sit back, relax and be happy

In this era of cloud computing and moving hardware to some unseen location, floating in the ether, it is interestingto learn about IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) that are now also available ‘in the cloud’. Not having to install software on your machine and deal with all the hassle that comes with it is definitely something that has legs.

Here are some of the available solutions:

Bespin by Mozilla Labs

Coderun Studio

Kodingen

Each has their own features and benefits but they all provide interesting UI and easy on the eye layout and styling. More investigation is needed into these and other solutions before actually making a switch from on machine coding to in the cloud coding but it is an exciting development for development.

Everyone wants to have the fancy stuff on their site, don’t they? Nice images, gradients, that fancy serif font the MD saw on the London based digital media agency with the cool anti-aliasing. It all looks nice on the design but when it comes down actual putting together the nuts and bolts PHP, XHTML, CSS etc it may not always be possible. Someone, somewhere is going to be disappointed.

The question of typography and web safe fonts is one that has a number of different solutions to help achieve that look the designer had in his mind’s eye, each with pros and cons. MightyMeta has taken much of the pain out of deciding which is best with this guide to getting a web safe font and related cheat sheet: http://www.mightymeta.co.uk/introducing-the-web-safe-font-cheat-sheet/

It’s time for a quick top ten run down of the most downloaded web browsers for the Windows OS.

1. Mozilla Firefox
2. Internet Explorer
3. Google Chrome
4. Avant Browser
5. Opera
6. SlimBrowser
7. Internet Explorer 9
8. Windows Internet Explorer 8 for MSN
9. Apple Safari
10. Netscape Navigator

As you can see some old favourites in there as well as some unexpected ones, not least Avant Browser. This one being based on the IE rendering engine, I’ve not used it myself but will certainly have to check it out, although I’m not sure why you would want to create a browser based on IE with all its shortcomings.

I have to say my own personal browser of choice at the moment is Chrome; it’s quick, lightweight and just seems to never have any problems.

I recently read this post: http://carsonified.com/blog/design/setting-rather-than-resetting-default-styling/ which talks about using your reset CSS in a slightly different way; by making it your default styling.

Most of Miromedia’s sites, up to this point, have been built with a reset.css that attempts to start off a basic site which is consistent across browsers (based on Eric Meyer’s own reset.css). Once this reset is done we apply our own styles for the website framework, then the client specific CSS as dictated by the design. A fairly common approach.

Now, however, our philosophy has changed so that the reset becomes the cross browser baseline as well as the default setting for framework and CMS. This approach not only reduces the amount of CSS used in the stylesheet it also makes it much easier to read and diagnose problems. In addition to this we now place all website frontend CSS into one stylesheet, removing the need to use the @import rule. This reduces the number of HTTP requests and also helps prevent download stalling if a stylesheet cannot be found.

Changes like these help us to improve and develop our flagship product. Even at Miromedia we are constansly learning new things and new ways to tackle problems and increase performance.