If you’re anything like me, you have traditionally used javascript alert boxes to try to identify and diagnose bugs in your javascript code. There are two major issues with this process, though.

1. It’s extremely inconvenient for your users if you’re trying to debug a live application.
2. It can be a real problem if you end up in some sort of long/infinite loop and end up outputting multiple alert boxes.

There is a better way, though, and it basically works in Internet Explorer (version 8), Firefox (with the Firebug extension installed), Chrome, Safari and Opera. This is nothing new, by any strecth of the imagination, but it still seems to be a bit of a well-kept secret for a lot of developers. Continue Reading »

As you may or may not know, Boxee (a cross-platform media center application) went into public beta a while back. Today, they released an all-new version of the beta. This new version apparently includes access to four different movie libraries (as well as all of the other features that were already part of the app).

If you haven’t checked out Boxee yet, I highly recommend you do so. While it is beta, and does have its issues, it is an awesome piece of software.

For those of you that haven’t heard, Twitter has released an official bookmarklet to allow you to tweet about just about anything you find online. While I appreciate the fact that Twitter is moving forward with tools to make it easier for its users to share information through its service (the official Twitter iPhone app, the official Twitter “Tweet” button for websites and blogs, etc.), I wish they’d put a little more work into this new bookmarklet.

Personally, I am so accustomed to using the Friendfeed bookmarklet (it’s really basically the only bookmarklet I use on a regular basis), I am disappointed that the Twitter bookmarklet doesn’t function the same way. Continue Reading »

With all of this talk lately about CSS3 and how amazing the Web will be once it gains wide browser support, it got me thinking about how well CSS2 is supported. Sadly, there are still a lot of really cool features that were introduced in the CSS2 spec that we can’t use yet, thanks to the overwhelming market share held by Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

In this article, I’ll take a quick look at some under-used CSS2 features and examine whether or not they are supported in IE7. Continue Reading »

I honestly have no idea when this was announced, but Twitter will start disabling its “Basic Auth” on Aug. 16, 2010 (the system will be completely unavailable by Aug. 31). For Twitter users, this doesn’t really mean anything. However, for Web developers that use various interfaces and plug-ins to share information on Twitter, this is big.

The majority of API libraries and classes that were (and, as of this writing, still are) listed in the official Twitter API documentation will stop working. This change, as far as I can tell, will effect the way tweets are sent and the way tweets are received. Therefore, whether you’re trying to post tweets from an external source, or you’re simply trying to list your latest tweets, if the interface uses the old system of Basic Auth, it’s going to stop working on Aug. 31. Continue Reading »

In my previous post, I outlined how you can add support for the new custom menus that were enabled in WordPress 3. Tonight, I will briefly review the process of creating and organizing those new menus from within your WordPress administration area.

To start with, make sure you’ve activated the theme into which you added the custom menu support. Once you’ve done that, you will see a “Menus” link in the “Appearance” menu on the left sidebar of your administration area. Click on that link and you will see a fresh new screen with a few options on it. Continue Reading »

One of the cool new features that was unveiled as part of Wordpress 3 is the ability to create custom menus with a drag-and-drop interface, similar to the way widgets are added to “sidebars.” However, documentation for this new feature is still extremely sparse. After reading a handful of tutorials explaining small bits of the new feature, and performing a lot of trial-and-error testing, I finally got these new custom menus working with a new theme I was building.

The first step is to enable the custom menus within your theme. That is what I’ll try to cover in this article. In an upcoming article, I’ll discuss how to actually create the menus within Wordpress and start using them. Continue Reading »

I am taking John Allsopp’s HTML5 Live course offered by SitePoint (a great deal, by the way), right now, and he shared a neat little tip that I wanted to pass on. You can use many of the new HTML5 elements (header, article, section, etc.) right now, even in older browsers like Internet Explorer 7.

All you need to do is add an extra “boolean attribute” to the element, and you can then style them with CSS in almost all of the browsers currently being used. Continue Reading »

I’m sure there have been times when you’ve wanted to link to a particular part of a YouTube video but, if you’re anything like me, you had no idea how to go about doing so. Well, you have two options:

1. You can link to the video on YouTube and specify the minute and second at which you want the video to start playing.
2. You can embed the video and specify the second at which you would like the video to start playing. Continue Reading »

Earlier this evening, I was trying to figure out how to make “private” Wordpress pages available to all of the registered users on one of my particular blogs. Unfortunately, user capabilities is still one area where Wordpress is seriously lacking out-of-the-box, and there are very few plug-ins that actually seem to work properly for this purpose.

However, after a bit of Googling, I found a really helpful post on Steve Taylor’s blog. In addition to providing a very simple, two-line solution to my particular situation, Steve’s post offers a few other tips that could come in really handy for Wordpress administrators.