Michael Barton

Internet Explorer 8 was released March 19, 2009 and what an exciting browser it was supposed to be. It was going to be faster, allow you to browse privately, it was going to be be XHTML compliant, and it was going to be more secure. All those fun things, right? Sadly, IE8 was faster, had a private mode, it was XHMTL compliant, and more secure than the older IE browsers.

The Problem

You must be wondering what the problem is right? Well, there wasn’t really a problem with the browser. There was a problem with your code, wasn’t there? You coded around IE6 & IE7 bugs. You made your site look lovely in those 2 browsers, and now that IE8 is out, your site looks broken again, doesn’t it?

What are you supposed to do about it?

The Solution(s)

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In 2009, Smashing Magazine wrote up a great article about the 10 ways to improve the accessibility of your XHTML website by making it standards-compliant. A few of the things they touched up on were specifying the correct DOCTYPE, one thing we seems to ignore because most of the time our IDEs generate this for us; defining the namespace and the default language; supplying proper meta tags. They go ahead and list 10 of them.

Again, a great article. I like to brush up on the article every few months so I can save time in the long run.

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I’m researching how to get pop ups to not be blocked using flash, and in that research, I found out how to check and see if a popup was blocked or not. It’s such a simple solution I don’t know why I haven’t consciously noticed it before. I’ve created many popups in the past, just never thought about how I would check if a popup was blocked.

The Solution

Using JavaScript, put something like this in your code:

That’s it! That’s all you need to do to test if someone has blocked your popup. Now you need to decide if it’s worth the hassle of working with popups and how to handle when a popup is blocked.

The three simple ways around using popups are:
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I’m always looking for economical ways of getting pretty visuals for my sites. Techradar put together a great list of sites that will help you into some nice visuals for you web sites.

Even though I prefer a web interface when blogging, I feel I should let you all know about a great article introducing 20 or so blogging tools. It’s really well written so I don’t feel the need to summarize. Check it out and enjoy!

In a perfect world this article would be King. But… you know…

Visit Source

Ladies and Gentleman, the moment you have all been waiting for – a new CMS to come into your life and confuse the shit out of you – TomatoCMS. Just when you thought there were enough CMS’ out there to choose from, a new one pops out and says “Hello World.”

All kidding aside, I’m actually quite intrigued by TomatoCMS. Now, I haven’t tested it out yet, but this CMS does sound promising. I know there are better ones out there that you might know about (Drupal), but you should still give this one a try. And here’s why.

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I’m working on a web page thumbnail generator and a new blog post (a good one this time) about web page thumbnail generation. A topic for another day; however, when making the preloader for it…I don’t like the flash preloaders that you see every where, and I thought giving progress back wouldn’t be worth it because how am I going to know how to calculate the percentage done. You know how it says 60%, 70%, 80% percent in normal preloaders? Well, in this situation it wouldn’t be accurate to do something like that because I’m doing a whole bunch of different calculations, etc.

So what did I do? I thought, “Hey, why not just use an animated gif, like what I see on ajaxload.info?” I get back to coding and I load in my gif right? Wrong.

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