Download speed detection

Just came across a useful piece of javascript, designed to test the connection speed of your visitor. I'm thinking that if you have a page with a lot of flash on it (or even a lot of static images), you might be able to use this to send people on slower connections to a "lighter" version. Or better still, load the lighter version by default and send people on faster connections to the "prettier" version.

I haven't tested it yet... but it looks like it might come in handy!

Font Sizes and Browser Quirks

This website has been online for almost 6 months now, And Ben has just pointed out a font sizing quirk that has made the text here unreadable on IE for Windows if the Text Size (in the View menu) is set to Smaller or Smallest.

And he was right - I'd never checked it before.

Turns out, using this is a no-no:
body {
font: 0.8em/1.6em Verdana, sans-serif;
}

Owen Briggs has written a fairly in-depth study (and taken a gazillion screen shots) highlighting the different methods of text sizing and their various behaviours across different browsers.

It appears a more reliable way to achieve the goal is:
body {
font: 100% Verdana, sans-serif;
}

#wrapper {
font-size: 0.8em;
line-height: 1.6em;
}

And before anyone gets on their soapbox and says I shouldn't specify a font size anyway, go and read Owen's post. I particluarly like:

"One sizing wisdom is that a document's main text should be left alone so it can display at whatever the browser default is. This sounds good, but since most browsers default to a text size that I have to back up to the kitchen to read, I decided the zen approach to design wasn't for me. Besides, if I was really zen I wouldn't write a stylesheet." (Italics mine)

Go Hack Yourself!

This is good. Some newbie hacker, in an attempt to prove himself, attempts to delete someone else's hard drive. They supply him with their IP address: 127.0.0.1.

The problem is, 127.0.0.1 always refers back to your own computer.

Wonder what happens? Read the story here...

Image Replacment Techniques

There are about a thousand ways to use CSS to display an image in place of plain text it seems. Why do it? Well, it's a method of maintaining correct markup (for search engine spiders and screen readers) while giving you typographical freedom to use ny font you like.

CSS-Discuss has a page with links to some image replacment techniques that I'm sure will come in handy.

Custom Checkboxes

Slayeroffice.com has come up with a method to customise checkboxes on forms, and it appears to degrade nicely into regular checkboxes if the user has Javascript or images turned off, too.

Bye Bye phpCollab, Hello NetOffice

I have been a phpCollab user for several years, and last week made the switch over to NetOffice.

Why?

One of the main reasons is that phpCollab is still stuck on version 2.4, and has been for along time. Sure, they have a 2.5 in beta, but that's been in beta for a long time, too. NetOffice have a stable 2.5, a 2.6 beta, and a starting to get some direction for a 3.0 release. Bug fixes seem to be attended to in a reasonable amount of time for an open source project, so we've migrated over to the 2.6 release. It features:

• An improved interface


• Time tracking


• Built-in customised reports


• Meetings

I feel that time tracking is the most important addition. With some minor customisations, we will be able to run a billing report so we can send an itemised invoice for each project. We can see how many billable hours have been done each week (and hence measure productivity). We can check each person's workload based upon estimated hours allocated with each task. Useful stuff.

We'll get some of these mods together and post them here soon...

Embedding Flash Best Practices

Embedding Flash and maintining standards-compliant code can be a bit of a nightmare.

Here is an article on "best practices" for embedding Flash.