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.

About Us Pages - Is There A Point?

For a long time, I automatically included an "About Us" page on every website I did. Why? It just seemed to be "the done thing".

But the more I think about it, it's pointless most of the time. (Note: I'm talking about commercial websites here.)

Sure, there will be cases where it is relevant, but most of the time, who cares? People are generally visiting your website for selfish reasons. They want something. They're not really that interested in you, only what you can do for them.

And About Us pages always seem to be the most difficult to do; the hardest to write. So I'm not going to do them anymore unless there's a convincing reason to include one!

What do you think?

The Move is Taking Shape...

Our move into a larger office is getting closer...

We've painted a couple of the walls, carpet is down, phone lines have been switched on (now we just need to wait for the actual phones to be installed!)

When we signed the lease there was about 5 or 6 weeks until we officially took over. At the time we thought, "That'll take forever!" In reality, it has really only just been long enough!

Only a week to go!