Thursday, April 29, 2010
Its All Their Fault. Politics for the Facebook Generation
Watch the video, then visit the site. Idealist? Probably, but maybe this is the first general election in the UK where there is a real desire for change, and a means to influence it. The internet gives us all a voice and a way to educate ourselves about the issues, and to make informed decisions. Check it out.
An interesting DOCTYPE and JavaScript fix.
I've been working on a new project at work this week and found this interesting little bug. My JavaScript worked perfectly in a static page on my local server, but when it was moved into a dynamic template driven page, it failed, with a cryptic message in Firebug..
syntax error
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
Not much use for debugging huh? Especially considering identical code worked perfectly on the static box. It turns out, that if you have a script without an "src"attribute set correctly, or if you have an error in an external JSON feed, the DOCTYPE will fail.
So then, this tricky to find, but easy to fix error is fixed by making sure every script your page is being called correctly. In my scenario, it was due to an error in and external JSON file.
Hope it helps.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Why Some Men Have Dogs And Not Wives
2. Dogs don't notice if you call them by another dog's name.
3. Dogs like it if you leave a lot of things on the floor.
4. A dog's parents never visit.
5. Dogs agree that you have to raise your voice to get your point across.
6. You never have to wait for a dog; they're ready to go 24 hours a day.
7. Dogs find you amusing when you're drunk..
8. Dogs like to go hunting and fishing.
9. A dog will not wake you up at night to ask, "If I died, would you
get another dog?"
10. If a dog has babies, you can put an ad in the paper and give them away.
11. A dog will let you put a studded collar on it without calling you a pervert.
12. If a dog smells another dog on you, they don't get mad. They just
think it's interesting.
13. Dogs like to ride in the back of a pickup truck. And last, but certainly not least: 14. If a dog leaves, it won't take half of your stuff.
Posterous. First Impressions
I've noticed quite a few people using Posterous of late, so I thought I'd see what the buzz was about.It's a very cool idea. Post something once, by email, SMS or web, and publish to your Posterous homepage, Twitter feed, Flickr stream, Facebook profile etc.
So, here goes. My first posterous post. Overall, I'm impressed. Lot's of really nicely done interface design, with a bit of Prototype goodness thrown in. It was easy to setup an account, it's possible to be up and running almost instantly, but I opted to go through the signup process so I could customise my posts and setup publishing to Blogger etc. I'm hoping that now I have the means to post once and publish everywhere in one hit, I will be able to post more often, as I usually find myself too busy to sit and write long posts. Fingers crossed, you may even see proper regular posts.
My one gripe? It's a biggie I'm afraid.
Posterous allows you to import from your other blogs. I thought this would be a great idea, being able to put everything in once place so I have some historic content from the off, but in practice, it seems a bit flawed. As you can see, I have quite a few posts here already, but the import process has truncated them all! So, you can read the first paragraph, and that's it. Not even a link through to the original blog article. Arrrgh. For the time being, bear with me while I go back and manually add the missing content.
Other than that, very cool. I'm definately going to try to post regularly and see how it goes. Watch this space!
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Dan Bull - Dear Auntie [an open letter to the BBC]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soGKRMb8p0U&feature=youtube_gdata
Genius. With a serious message.