Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta was recently launched and in it was a really neat feature to allow users to pin your website onto the task bar. Here are a few tips to make sure your website makes the most of feature.
Make the most of your Favicons
Make sure you have a high quality transparent Favicon, if you don’t then your website logo will look small and out of place while on a users taskbar. If you don’t have one to hand, use favicon.cc to build one. I suggest making one which is 64px x 64px (but feel free to go up to 128px) so your icon does not look pixelated in the task bar.
I just finished my first alpha release of a new Google Chrome Extension I’m working on, it’s called Twitter Status URL Shortener and it shortens URL’s in your Twitter status box on the fly. Here is a short video of me using it.
When I started learning PHP (Back in the PHP4 days) validating data was always a pain (for me at least). Most of the resources available cited the POSIX functions as the most effective way of validating an email address or URL.
Thankfully since then, the PHP community has embraced the PCRE functions which are more efficient and are Perl-compatible. However the downside to PCRE (and POSIX for that matter) is that you need to know regular expressions, which for a newbie to learn can feel like walking through a minefield.
Recently though the Filter Functions have become a very popular method to validate data. This is due to their small learning curve.
How to use the Filter Functions
In this example (Using the filter_var() function) the filter function takes the data you input (For example: email@example.com) and will return either the data (if it’s valid) or false (if the data is not valid).
Google Chrome is well known for being very fast at rendering web pages, but based on an update on the Google Student Blog it appears to be mind bogglingly snappy. To give you a sense of how snappy, take a look at this video comparing Chromes rendering to the speed to a potato.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta was recently launched and in it was a really neat feature to allow users to pin your website onto the task bar. Here are a few tips to make sure your website makes the most of feature.