Good news! Google Chrome is get­ting full page zoom, and it’s the default! That only leaves Safari to imple­ment it, as IE, Firefox & Opera have had it for a while now. [1]

Full page zoom is import­ant because it means no more muck­ing about with elastic lay­outs (em-based) or liquid lay­outs (%-based). That just leaves fixed lay­outs (based on pixels), which is good because images, videos and other media are in pixels too!

Note: I’m not say­ing it’s good to use pixels for font-size: prop­er­ties! (Just all the other prop­er­ties, like height, width, mar­gin, pad­ding, etc.)

[1] Update: Safari 4 (beta) has imple­men­ted full page zoom too! All major and minor browsers have imple­men­ted full page zoom. Until wide­spread updat­ing of Safari 3 with 4 and (more import­antly) IE 6 with 7 or 8, approx. a quarter of vis­it­ors will only have text-based zoom avail­able to them. IE 6 users are likely not to know any­thing about zoom-capabilities however.

Second in a series of art­icles about tinker­ing with improv­ing your WordPress install­a­tion, we return to cus­tom 404 error pages; adding a list of pos­sibly related posts when vis­it­ors have fol­lowed an out­dated link. Other 404 error page improve­ments can be found in the first art­icle of this series.

One of the most use­ful things on a 404 page is a dir­ect link to the page vis­it­ors were try­ing to get to. Now we can’t read minds, but we do know the URI (explained in the third para­graph of the pre­vi­ous art­icle) and that’s good enough. The fol­low­ing code is adap­ted from this archGFX art­icle. The method used to trans­form the URI into a search query is very simple. If you would like a more advanced please refer to “A bet­ter 404 — Redux” at Urban Mainframe, where Jonathan Hollin expounds on his (down­load­able!) 404 page code.

There are two parts to this “related posts” code. The first part makes it pos­sible to get from “/wrong/link.html” (the URI) to “wrong link” (the search query). Read the rest…

First in a series of art­icles about tinker­ing with improv­ing your word­press install­a­tion, today we tackle cus­tom 404 error pages; the page every­one dreads get­ting when they’ve fol­lowed an out­dated link.

Four-Oh-Fours are hot again! Just recently came a across the art­icle A Better 404. I remem­ber read­ing the A List Apart art­icle “A Perfect 404″ ages ago, but had never done any­thing about it. Time to improve. 

First some quick vocab: the part after your .com (or .co.uk) is called the URI, so if www.google.com/analytics/provision/ is the address,  /analytics/provision/ would be the URI. The URI is the part that’s wrong when someone’s fol­lowed a out­dated link which means we can use the URI to cre­ate a more help­ful 404 page. To cre­ate a 404 page for your WordPress theme just cre­ate a 404.php file in the dir­ect­ory of your theme (/wp-content/themes/default/ is the default). Read the rest…

And now for some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent. A set of music samplers, tastety bits of songs, com­pactly mixed together. The first two are filled with tunes you can dance to, while the third one is much more rest­ful. Enjoy!
Read the rest…

London at night, a great series of pho­to­graphs pub­lished on the Big Picture.

Bug report­ing is tricky. Bugs are prob­lems in soft­ware where the soft­ware doesn’t work as it should. “It doesn’t work.” doesn’t get you any­where with the developer of the soft­ware in ques­tion, so the key is to report exactly what hap­pend and what should hap­pen very clearly. Steven Frank (of Panic, Inc. software-makers) has made a list explain­ing what you should and shouldn’t do when report­ing bugs. One of the things Frank spe­cific­ally men­tions as being good ways to con­vey bug reports are images and video.

A lot of open source pro­jects use Bugzilla (of Mozilla ori­gin) to track bugs and make dis­cus­sion of those bugs pos­sible. Shouldn’t Bugzilla make it pos­sible (and easy!) to include images and video in bug reports?

If Buzzfeed can do it…

The art­work for Simon Jobling’s One Phat DJ August 2008 pod­cast: Colourful Crescendo. It’s a com­bin­a­tion of Illustrator and Photoshop work mis­use of filmgrain filters.

Originally made for the July Crescendo, a month and a few name changes later, the pod­cast and accom­pa­ny­ing art­work go live today.

It’s quite fun to do pod­cast art­work; well recom­men­ded. Thanks for the chance Si!