John On Web Stuff » Sitepoint

15 Must Bookmark Sites for Design Inspiration

John — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 12:35:10 +0000

SitePoint » 15 Must Bookmark Sites for Design Inspiration.

Is Online Censorship On the Rise?

John — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 05:26:23 +0000

Censorship of the Internet is definitely alive and well in countries where oppressive government regimes seek to control the flow of information, such as China, Uzbekistan, Cuba, and Iran. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) found that there are 125 journalists behind bars around the world as of the start of this month. That’s actually a drop of 2 from 2007, but given that 45% of imprisoned journalists are bloggers or work exclusively online it is clear that the rise of the Internet as an information source has led to a parallel rise in censorship. SitePoint » Is Online Censorship On the Rise?.

Userfly: Usability From Your Actual Users

John — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:17:53 +0000

Chris Estreich, a senior engineer at classifieds site Oodle today soft-launched a new site aimed at web developers called Userfly. Using JavaScript, Userfly captures and records browsing data from your visitors and lets you plat it back as a movie later. The site is really rough — this is a very beta release — and probably isn’t quite ready for any press coverage, but I was so impressed by the demo (and had a lot of fun playing with it), that I couldn’t resist. SitePoint » Userfly: Usability From Your Actual Users.

Very cool site if you want to optimise your site’s usability.

Australia’s Net Censorship Sparks Outrage

John — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:28:34 +0000

One of the most important Internet stories in Australia right now is that country’s federal government’s plan to start requiring ISP level censorship of the Internet. As part of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s AU$125.8 million Cyber-saftey plan. The plan requires that ISPs deliver a “clean-feed” web service to homes, school, and and public web access points. The government will maintain two blacklists, one that filters out illegal material, mostly child pornography, and another that filters out objectionable material as determined by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The first list will be mandatory, while users will be able to opt out of the latter. SitePoint » Australia’s Net Censorship Sparks Outrage.

8 Sites for Watching English Evolve

John — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:26:53 +0000

In one of my favorite television shows, “Futurama,” there is a running gag that in the future, the word “ask” has been replaced by the more colloquial “aks” (pronounced axe). It might be a long time before the accepted spellings and pronunciations of common words like “ask” change, but the joke highlights a very real aspect of language: it evolves. The English language has changed a lot over the past 150 years, for example, in both spelling, pronunciation, and addition and subtraction of words. SitePoint » 8 Sites for Watching English Evolve.

arguments: A JavaScript Oddity

John — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:55:17 +0000

arguments is the name of a local, array-like object available inside every function. It’s quirky, often ignored, but the source of much programming wizardry; all the major JavaScript libraries tap into the power of the arguments object. It’s something every JavaScript programmer should become familiar with.

Inside any function you can access it through the variable: arguments, and it contains an array of all the arguments that were supplied to the function when it was called. It’s not actually a JavaScript array; typeof arguments will return the value: “object”. You can access the individual argument values through an array index, and it has a length property like other arrays, but it doesn’t have the standard Array methods like push and pop.

SitePoint » arguments: A JavaScript Oddity.

7 Places to Find the Code You Need

John — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:17:26 +0000

A recent thread on SitePoint’s forums discussed how best to learn from other people’s code. For many people learning by example is the optimal way to pick up a new programming language, idea, or technique. But finding that ideal piece of code to look at and learn from isn’t always easy. That’s where code search engines and snippet libraries come into play.

SitePoint Blogs » 7 Places to Find the Code You Need.

Techy Treasures #1: Feelin’ Empty

John — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 01:16:35 +0000

Techy Treasures is a new, regular feature where we’ll be publishing tips, tricks and code snippets for web developers. These are not blue-sky bubbles, they’re solid, proven ideas that you can use in the wild with confidence. SitePoint Blogs » Techy Treasures #1: Feelin’ Empty.

I know I’ll be adding stuff from here to my code library!

Adobe Releases Flash 10 Player

John — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:16:38 +0000

Adobe today officially released the tenth version of its ubiquitous Flash player on the world. Flash 10, which was previously known under the code name “Astro,” adds a large number of new features to the Flash player, but the most flashy (forgive the terrible pun) are certainly the 3D support, the new text engine, and the Pixel Bender image processor, which was formerly known as Hydra.

SitePoint Blogs » Adobe Releases Flash 10 Player.