Distributing Fonts Via @font-face

Instead of using images, Flash or JavaScript to replace normal text with non-standard fonts, you can now use CSS’s @font-face rule. It will tell the browser to download the fonts and render the text using them. Internet Explorer uses the EOT format and everyone else uses TrueType, so you need to declare the sources in […]

Cross-Domain AJAX Requests

Browsers prevent standard AJAX calls across domains for security reasons, but you can make JSONP calls instead. If you’re using jQuery you just need to add ‘callback=?’ to the url: $.getJSON('http://some-foreign-server.net/ajax-handler.php?param1=foo&param2=bar&amp;callback=?', function(data) { // do stuff } ); Then setup the request handler to prepend the callback parameter to the response and wrap it in […]

Force HTTP requests in WordPress

I was working with a hosting client who wanted all of his pages to load via HTTP, except for a shopping cart. mod_rewrite rules are probably the most efficient way to do that, but we were having trouble getting that working, so I wrote a quick WordPress plugin to redirect HTTPS requests to HTTP, but allow […]

Why Cube Farms are a Bad Idea

Campaign Monitor’s blog has a post about their new office space, and in it they write about several reasons why private offices are necessary for programmers, including this quote from Paul Graham: “After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to […]

Troubleshooting Slow MySQL Queries

Ian Gilfillan’s article on using indexes in MySQL has a good explanation of how to use the EXPLAIN statement to analyze a query, and what to look out for. You can also check out Jesse Farmer’s optimization tips for a primer on more advanced techniques.

Updating OpenDNS With a Dynamic IP From an Endian Firewall

The Endian router/firewall appliance comes with a Dynamic DNS client that supports the major DDNS providers, but it doesn’t support updating OpenDNS, which is necessary for any custom settings on your OpenDNS account to be applied to the traffic you pass through their servers. It’s possible to configure this yourself, though. There’s a helpful post […]

Z-Index Stacking Contexts

One important thing to keep in mind while working with z-index is that multiple stacking orders are created based on the markup hierarchy. This means that an element with a z-index of 30 can actually appear below an element with a z-index of 20, if the z-index of the original element’s parent is 10. Paolo […]

Ian Dunn

WordPress Developer

Distributing Fonts Via @font-face

Cross-Domain AJAX Requests

Force HTTP requests in WordPress

Why Cube Farms are a Bad Idea

Troubleshooting Slow MySQL Queries

Updating OpenDNS With a Dynamic IP From an Endian Firewall

Z-Index Stacking Contexts