DHD Blog » Articles & Tips

Contact Form

Douglas — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 06:00:48 +0000

Unfortunately, I’ve decided to remove the rotation on my contact form. I’ve always known that it made the text not render properly in Safari, but I never got around to doing anything about it.

Now, my contact form is just plain old straight. (But the super fun fun button is still there!)

I’ve also had a little spam problem. Originally, I just had a field hidden via CSS, that asked not to be filled in. If someone disobeyed the instruction and filled in the field, then they must have been a stupid spam bot. This worked at first, but not anymore.

To fix this, I simply swapped around the ‘name’ attributes, so spam bots will think the hidden field is actually the subject field, and be lured into filling it in. Let’s hope this will work!

Extending Paths in Illustrator

Douglas — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 03:18:47 +0000

This is one thing that always annoyed me after switching from Freehand to Illustrator. I just couldn’t work out how to extend a path — eg. you draw an open path, then want to come back and add some more on the end. In Freehand, you would just select the end point, then use the pen tool to keep drawing as usual, but in Illustrator this would just start a new path.

Method #1 — Add Anchor Points Tool

This is a pretty bad one. My first solution was to just use the Add Anchor Points Tool to add a bunch of points just before the end, and then drag them around to where I really wanted them to go! Not fun.

Method #2 — Join

My next idea was to just make a new path, then join the 2 together. It works, but you don’t get to see the bit in the middle until the end. This is especially annoying if you want to make it curvy.

Method #3 — The Pen Tool

This is the proper way, that I eventually found by accident, and then in the help files as well. It’s like what I was originally doing in Freehand, but slightly different. Instead of using the ‘Direct Selection Tool’ (white pointer) to select the end point, you use the regular Pen Tool to select the endpoint first, then you can keep drawing like usual!

Why didn’t I think of this earlier? Am I the only one that didn’t know this already?

New Blog Theme for 2009

Douglas — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 03:49:56 +0000

Well yes, it’s actually 2010 now, but it was supposed to be 2009.

It finally matches my website! It still needs a bit of work, refining the style of the sidebar, (and maybe even adding some animation to it, like my old theme).

So much stuff has happened in the last year since I wrote a post. Sometime soon (maybe) I’ll write something about it…

Update: Oops… I forgot to update the copyright notice to 2010. To fix that, I replaced it with some PHP code to always display the current year, so I never have to remember again! echo date('Y');

The HTML Doctype

Douglas — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:00:38 +0000

If you’ve been following HTML 5, then you’ve seen the new doctype:

…compared to the old HTML 4.01 one…

It starts out the same… but doesn’t have any of the version information. It’s also much easier to remember (has anyone memorised the old one?)

Is it time yet to use the HTML 5 Doctype?

Hold on a second… did I just say HTML 5 doctype? Nothing in it says anything about a version, let alone version 5. According to the draft HTML 5 Specification, the doctype “is a mostly useless, but required, header”. Its only purpose is to convince browsers to render the page in standards mode. From the draft HTML 5 Specification:

DOCTYPEs are required for legacy reasons. When omitted, browsers tend to use a different rendering mode that is incompatible with some specifications. Including the DOCTYPE in a document ensures that the browser makes a best-effort attempt at following the relevant specifications.

So, where does that leave us now?

To answer the previous question first, yes, we can use the new doctype now. Even Google does on their home page.

If you use the ‘new’ HTML doctype, then you are just saying that the page is HTML (not XHTML or something else), and you want the browser to render your page in standards mode. It doesn’t mean you’re using ‘HTML 5’ — will the doctype change again for HTML 6? Who knows? …but I don’t think it will.

— but you might still want to be careful. On client sites, I would still use the HTML 4.01 Strict Doctype (not XHTML, but that’s another story…). On personal sites, I will use the new HTML doctype — it’s still relatively new, so you need to be prepared to change things if it causes unknown and unpredictable side-effects (but there shouldn’t be).

Could we have been using the doctype before ‘HTML 5’ even existed? All that really matters is that the browser knows that you’re serving HTML, and it renders the page in standards mode. So, I suppose we could have.

Upgrading Wordpress

Douglas — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:00:33 +0000

In the last couple of days, I’ve upgraded 4 different Wordpress installations — across local and production servers, including 2 Wordpress µ. Local servers are ok to upgrade, production servers are a pain.

Everything went pretty smoothly, except this blog…

The FTP connection kept on failing, and not uploading all the files. Some files got half uploaded, and things just didn’t work out nicely. The whole process took forever, because of the huge number of files (it takes longer to upload a lot of small files than one big file). When I thought it was finished, I later found out that not all the wp-admin files got uploaded properly.

By then, I was really frustrated with the whole thing, so I just deleted all the wordpress files (except wp-content of course) to start all over again. I was going to just upload the whole archive file together, and un-compress it on the server, but uploading that failed half-way as well.

In the end, I just uploaded all the files almost one-by-one, which wasn’t fun (it was more like 5 at a time, because that turned out to be reliable as well). Maybe I should stop being such a cheapskate, and use a paid web host instead… with reliable FTP.

That’s not all…

Another issue I had was I found that if you tried to visit my blog during all this, you were served a page with a bunch of random Wordpress PHP code printed out. Imagine if it printed out your hard-coded database password or an API key or something similar. That could turn out badly. How should you upgrade websites securely? Maybe next time I will change the .htaccess file to block all requests and show an “upgrading…” page. Is there a better way of doing this?

Alarm Clock gets 1001 views!

Douglas — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 05:39:30 +0000

My photo of an alarm clock finally got over 1000 views on Flickr!

It’s been there for just over 1 year and gradually increasing, but I recently found a very good way of getting lots of people to see you: Try joining lots of groups that give out awards to each other. These groups’ rules say you have to view and comment other people.

A new way to vertically centre with CSS

Douglas — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 04:20:27 +0000

I just discovered a new way to vertically (and horizontally) centre objects in CSS!

All it needs is 1 line of CSS (no dummy objects either!)

#theobject { position:absolute; top:0; bottom:0; left:0; right:0; margin:auto; }

After testing on all of my browsers, I tried it on browsershots.org, which lets you see screenshots of your webpage on many diferent browsers. You may have guessed, the only problem is that Internet Explorer ≤ 7 doesn’t support it (grr). The sort of good news is that Internet Explorer 8 (still beta) DOES support this, so this technique may be usable in the (hopefully not to distant) future.

You can view my test page.

New Website (again!)

Douglas — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 23:50:00 +0000

I now have another new website! … And a domain name!

You can visit my new website at DouglasHeriot.com!

The address to the blog has also changed — it’s now blog.DouglasHeriot.com.

My website is hosted for free by 000webhost.com. They provide all the features you would normally have to pay a lot for. I would recommend them.

My email is hosted with Google Apps. That lets me use my domain with many Google services such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc.

My domain is hosted by Namecheap. I think they’re pretty good but I don’t have much experience with them or any other domain registrars. At the moment my domain is the only thing I pay for for my website – only $8.88 a year!