News
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Standalone Internet Explorer 6 for Testing
by Castwide on 7-29-2009 • 12 commentsIt finally happened. Every Windows computer in my office is running Internet Explorer 7 or higher. Unfortunately, IE 6 still accounts for too much traffic to ignore. Instead of rolling back on one of my workstations, I decided to look for options that would let me run both versions. The best solution I found was MultipleIE from TredoSoft.
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Secure Persistent Login Cookies
by Castwide on 7-12-2009 • 12 commentsToday I ran across an article by Barry Jaspan where he describes a method for making persistent login cookies more secure. It's definitely worthwhile reading for anyone implementing an authentication system that allows users to store their logins.
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FCKeditor 2.6.4.1
by admin on 7-9-2009 • 13 commentsIf you're anything like me, you don't go looking for updates to your software unless you discover a bug or some other problem. I went to the FCKeditor site to see if there was anything to be done about the annoying bug that made the page scroll anytime you hit the enter key.
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Giving the Clients What They Want
by Castwide on 2-12-2009 • 15 commentsWhen selling software or development services, your first instinct might be to agree to any feature the client requests. This can seem like the right thing to do from a sales standpoint, especially if you're trying to land a contract that you expect will lead to more work in the future. In the IT world, however, this approach is often a terrible idea.
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New Pagemill Coming Soon
by Castwide on 12-12-2008 • 14 commentsVersion 3.0.0 of the PHP Pagemill is currently under development and should be released before the end of the year. Among the new features:
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Dynamic SQL Queries
by admin on 12-4-2008 • 14 commentsIn most of my web development, I use parameterized queries instead of a full-blown ORM for databases. Even though I'm a big proponent of OOP, most ORMs require too much boilerplate for my taste, and I like to have easy access to manipulate SQL queries directly (granted, of course, the benefit of parameterization to secure queries against SQL injection). A recent project, however, has proven that writing query strings by hand can become more of a pain than it's worth.
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Three Things You Should Understand about SEO
by Castwide on 12-3-2008 • 14 commentsWeb site owners can spend fortunes on search engine optimization. As someone said in The Cavern of COBOL, "You can't spell 'snake oil' without 'SEO'." Three common problems I see in SEO consultation:
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XML and JSON
by Castwide on 11-27-2008 • 12 commentsI've been looking into an alternative method for serializing data in PHP instead of the serialize() and unserialize() functions. Those functions are fine for serializing objects, but I wanted to find a solution that was more portable for simple data. Two obvious answers are XML and JSON, but I wasn't sure which made more sense for this particular scenario. While looking for insight, I ran across this article on Ajaxian.
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Entering Tabs in Web Forms
by Castwide on 11-21-2008 • 16 commentsThe typical behavior of the tab key in browsers is to move focus to the next selectable element. It makes sense in most scenarios; but sometimes—for example, when you're writing code in a textarea element—you might want to indent your text instead. Here is some JavaScript that makes it possible to change the behavior of the tab key.
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Updates and Recurring Bugs
by admin on 11-14-2008 • 14 commentsI've finally upgraded this blog to the newest version of the Phrameworks Kernel. In the process, I encountered a bug in something that has given me numerous problems in the past: character encoding.