Mapki has a detailed list of URL parameters for Google Maps. Setting daddr is useful when you want to create a link for a user to get directions. You can also control the zoom level, type of map (normal, satellite, terrain, etc), overlay information and lots of other things.
Author Archives: Ian Dunn
CMSMS Skeleton Module
Skeleton is a CMS Made Simple module you can use as the base for writing a new module. It has all the basic code in place already.
Convert Filenames to Lowercase on Linux
If you transfer files from a Windows server to a Linux one, you may get some broken links because Linux is case-sensative while Windows isn’t. You can rename all the files on the Linux server to their lowercase equivalents with this shell script from Linux Journal. #!/bin/sh # lowerit # convert all file names in […]
Blogging as Narcissism
WordPress’s creator, Matt Mullenweg, expresses my sentiments on blogging exactly: “I used to think constantly about building an audience for my blog but now my attitude is that if I’m not blogging for myself it’s not worth it. I don’t force myself to post once a day, I just do it when it feels natural. Sometimes people […]
Tracking Project Hours/Deadlines
Lately I’ve been trying to work out a good process for quoting projects and tracking the billable hours and deadlines. I’ve had a couple large projects go over budget/deadline, and I think two of the main reasons are that I wasn’t realistic enough in the quote, and that I just wasn’t being intentional about monitoring […]
Lightbox Clones
The Lightbox Clones Matrix is a list of scripts that do inline popups, ala Lightbox. You can filter by JavaScript frameworks and features.
Using overflow to Clear Floated Elements
If you have an element whose children are all floated, it won’t have any height to it. I’ve always just put an extra <div style=”clear: both;”> at the bottom of the container to force it to clear, but it looks like there’s been a much better way for a few years now. Alex Walker points […]
Free Icon Sets
These are some of the better free icon sets I’ve seen:
Writing Semantic (X)HTML
Jesse Skinner explains why developers should use appropriate semantic tags when marking up a page, rather than just putting everything inside a <div>. Here’s a quick reference list of what I commonly use: <div> – For large page sections, and when there isn’t a specific semantic tag <h1> … <h6>: For section header titles <p> […]
Placing an Element In Front of an Object
Here’s how to have a drop-down menu appear on top of a Flash object:
- Add a z-index of 0 to the object’s containing div
- Add <param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”> inside the object tag
- Add wmode=”transparent” to the embed tag
via Sheriar Designs
The Good, Bad and Ugly of SEO Methods
I agree with a lot of what Derek Powazek wrote about the SEO industry in Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists. His main gist is that the good SEO techniques — like using tags that match the semantics of the content and setting up 301 redirects when pages move — should just be considered good development practices, and […]
The Best Way to Define Font Sizes in CSS
Often designers will want fixed font sizes so that the text on the actual size will exactly match their mockups, but The Web is Not Print (see also Pixel Perfect Design Does Not Necessarily Equal Good Web Design). A List Apart has a worked out a good method for sizing text consistently across browsers while […]
Internet Explorer Doesn’t Match PNG Color to CSS Color
All currently available versions of Internet Explorer incorrectly display colors in PNG images. To work around that, instead of setting a background color, you can use create 1×1 pixel image with the color you want, and set it as a repeating background image.
CSS Drop-Down Menus
Tomas Bagdanavicius has created a fast, themeable, cross-browser CSS-based Drop-Down Menu Framework that only uses Javascript for IE6.
NTP Service Doesn’t Start Serving Until It Stablizes
I just spent an hour trying to figure out why the NTP service I installed wasn’t working, and then I came across this slightly important little fact: Your internal workstation computers will not be able to use the server as a synchronisation source until the LOCAL(0) clock has stable time. This may take up to 15 […]
How to Build a Template in CMS Made Simple While Maintaining Sanity
I’m not a big fan of CMS Made Simple, but I end up doing a lot of sites in it by request. It’s taken me awhile, but I think I’ve found a way to structure templates that doesn’t make me want to club baby seals out of frustration. First, what I don’t like about it. […]
Find largest directories on a Linux box
These commands will return the largest 10 directories on a Linux box.
du -k / | sort -n | tail -20
via peterbe.com
Passing dates and times between PHP and MySQL
Richard Lord wrote a good article explaining the various ways of handling dates and times with PHP and MySQL.
Accessing cforms Data Directly
I’m using the cforms plugin on one site at the client’s request, and I needed to access some of the form’s data. Their API didn’t have what I needed, so I thought I’d just query the database directly. But when I looked at the database I didn’t see any tables for it. I thought that […]
Find recently modified files in Linux
This will list all the files on a Linux system that were modified in the past 5 days
find /path/to/start/at -mtime -5 -print