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Amazon S3 is a great option for (among other things) image hosting, YSlow is a great little tool for uncovering performance related issues with a site and using Bucket Explorer allows a person to easily upload files to the S3 service while setting custom headers. Using the tool to set far future expires headers facilitates caching which improves site performance.
Continue reading “Setting Far Future Expires Headers For Images In Amazon S3”
Support: This technique is supported by IE 5.+, Firefox (and the rest of the Mozilla family) and Safari 3.0*. It is not supported by Opera** (any version), Netscape 6.2 and earlier or Camino.
Warning: I haven’t thought this all the way through, so if you see any problems with this technique other than the above support caveats, then please let me know 🙂 I’m really just writing this up because I just thought of doing it, I tried it and it worked…
Continue reading “Why Did I Never Try this Before? CSS Font-Size : 0 Hides Input Button Text”
(and several months later I finish my little JSON series…)
So far my exploration of JSON has been a fun-filled walk in the park. Moonbeams and rainbows. All that.
This last post on the subject is slightly less cool as I get into one of the least attractive components of the whole JSON thing- the use of eval() to transform a text response into a proper JavaScript object. The use of eval() is one of the reasons I originally was a little shy about using JSON. Why? eval() is slow and I try to stay away from slow if at all possible. That and the idea of eval()-ing code from some third party makes me wary.
Continue reading “JSON Feeds For Fun and Profit Part 3- wherein Eval() kind of bums me out”
If you’re using Flash and you want the best possible coverage (meaning it works with users who don’t have JS turned on) while still using something like SWFObject where possible to get around the “click here to activate and use this control” ActiveX message in Internet Explorer, then take a look at the ridiculous pattern below.
Warning- not for the squeamish…
Continue reading “Belt and Suspenders- Flash Embed With SWFObject and Conditional Comments”
Why do such a thing? For fun, of course- and to expand on a point I made today at work…
Some background- I’m working with a new guy who is not so savvy to modern HTML/CSS layout techniques and today, while talking to him about some potential techniques he might use for an upcoming site, I remarked – “With CSS you can make practically any element do whatever you need it to do, so don’t always assume you need to wrap things in a DIV* to make a layout work.” The point related to the dangers of DIV-itis and my desire** to pare down markup to its absolute (meaningful) minimum. But it also illustrates a basic idea that, once fully understood, opens up all sorts of options for problem-solving.
So, anyway, chewing on the exchange on my way home from work I was struck with the idea of doing a simple three column layout using nothing but an Unordered List. My original comment was about a UL used as a menu and tweaking it to behave like a bunch of divs (which was his original idea for the menu) or something, so I thought it might be interesting to go all out use a UL for the entire layout, tweaking the LIs in a whole bunch of different ways to suit my needs. If that doesn’t illustrate my point, nothing will.
Continue reading “A Three Column CSS Layout Using Just an Unordered List”