Ever since Dave Shea linked to them, I’ve been fascinated by John Langdon’s Ambigrams.

I got his book Wordplay for Christmas, which is a fascinating series of new ambigrams, interspersed with philosophical musings and other treats.

Mike

Web developers, repeat after me: Flash is bad.

Flash navigation removes right-click functionality. It breaks bots and search engines. It fills up the advertiser’s arsenal with entirely new ways to obscure content and frustrate users. Sites built entirely in Flash break the basic metaphor of the Internet—the page. You can’t link or bookmark anything, and if you mistakenly hit the back-button, you’re back to square one.

And yet, there’s been some really neat stuff happening with Flash. Especially when combined with Javascript to provide unobtrusive enhancements to pages. I have here two examples… I also have a really neat idea, but I’m not talking about that until it works; I hate vapourware too. Read on…

Back up. Important topic. Booooooring topic. But I finally have a reliable mechanism in place: Except for the logs, every file that’s here on the server is sitting safe on my hard drive, in a basement in Waterloo.

It’s a comfort.

I’ll demonstrate how I’ve done it, since I think it’s a pretty good procedure for keeping a continuously synchronized duplicate. Read on…

So I’m back online again.

The (otherwise super-terrific) folks at Dreamhost sprung a surprise Rails 1.0rc4 upgrade on us, and I was definitely not prepared for it.

At any rate, I’ve got little else to say, so I’ll just share two little experiments with you: The Google Maps Autolinker and the Ajaxian File Browser.

Neither of them is perfect, but 24 hours offline wasn’t perfect either.

Since I’ve been through a handful of site migration situations, I thought I’d share a few tricks for seamless forwarding. Read on…

Nearly all webpages have a Top, a Bottom, and some kind of tile-able stuff in the middle which gives it all room to grow.

Once you try for a stretchy liquid layout, then it’s the same deal, except that the horizontal axis needs room to grow too.

The heart of liquid layouts is the Ruler. It’s a horizontal element which has one image tiled along it, and two more images stapled one at each end to close it off.

I’ve found various ways of accomplishing this simple task, so I might as well share a few. If I’m missing your favourite trick, let me know! Read on…

This wasn’t supposed to be a full redesign. And really, it isn’t.

But the time had come for me to say goodbye to the home-brew CMS that was running this site. It was instructive to create a basic CRUD system from the ground up. But its been neither educational nor interesting attempting to bolt additional features onto it, when I had little idea what I was doing at the outset.

It’s silly to spend large amounts of time implementing what’s already been done many times over in open-source packages. Read on…

Programming languages vary in power. Paul Graham argues that it’s a mistake to use anything but the most powerful language available. And power is roughly equivalent to level of abstract-ness.

PHP is a very useful language. It’s got associative arrays that completely rock, a tremendous set of functions for string processing, and a truly extraordinary level of online documentation. Besides that, it’s ubiquitous on shared hosts, so it’s a snap to get started.

But PHP is missing certain language structures. I find it curious that it was not Ruby that revealed this to me, but, in fact, Javascript. Read on…

Our new class website has launched. And it’s a portal.

Google succeeded by being just a search and not a portal. The previous version of this site succeeded by being a private forum, not a portal.

So why have I made us a portal? Read on…

I’ve been published on Position Is Everything. I had a really great time working with Big John on the article, so I hope some other folks will find it to be of use.

I’ll take the rest of this entry to have a quick look at that little thing I wrote, which attracted quite a bit of attention. Read on…