Congress is about to pass internet censorship, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill – PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House – to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity.

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Learn about the protests against SOPA

• Infographic: the American Censorship Day protests, in numbers and screenshots
• Full list of Participating Sites

Read these articles

• House takes Senate’s bad Internet censorship bill, tries making it worse
• Protect The Internet
• SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet
• SOPA on OpenCongress
• PIPA on OpenCongress

Join the fight

Stop American Censorship

Computers have been capable of displaying multiple fonts for several decades now, so it might seem odd that fonts are only just now becoming standardised on the web. However, disagreement on file formats along with complex font licensing issues have turned this into quite a difficult challenge to overcome. Fortunately, CSS 3 has put the spotlight back on web fonts, and the web is rapidly moving into a multi-font future.

Applying various fonts to blocks of text is nothing new. However, the ability to include new font faces is indeed new, where as before, we were limited to the browser defaults. To include a new font, download the font file that you’d like to include, and then use the @font-face rule to specify a name for the font along with a file path. After that, you can use the font as you normally would.

@font-face {
   /* Select a name for your font */
  font-family: special-font;
 
  /* Point to the font file */
  src: url('myfont.otf');
}
 
/* Now use it! */
body {
  font-family: special-font, Arial;
}

Browser Compatibility

This seems simple enough, and indeed, the @font-face rule works in every browser going all the way back to early versions of Internet Explorer. Including fonts isn’t quite that straightforward due to a few lingering file format compatibility issues, but fortunately, several font services have greatly simplified the process and abstracted away these problems. My favourite font service is Google Web Fonts, and I highly recommend you check it out. You can pick any fully licensed font for free, and then all you have to do is include a CSS file from Google’s fast content delivery network. Once the external CSS file has been included, the new font is available to use in other CSS documents.

• Google’s Content Distribution Network has libraries on their various servers across the world and if you use their CDN link, when a user’s browser resolves the URL, their browser will automatically download the file from the closest available server, which will be a much faster download than if you force a user to download the file from your host server in whichever country your website is hosted.
• Google’s Content Distribution Network will save you a great deal of bandwidth if you have large traffic on your website and a limited bandwidth with your host.
• There is a good chance that the Google hosted version of that library is already cached on the user’s browser cache, as lot of big websites and portals use Google’s CDN links including Google itself and Google’s servers instruct browsers to cache the file for one year if there are quite a few requests for the same hosted file.

How to use Google CDN

Google’s CDN provides most of the popular, open source JavaScript Libraries with two ways of using each of them via the direct path in the script tags and via The Google AJAX Libraries API.

To use the Google AJAX Libraries API we need to include the Google “jsapi” script:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>

The Google AJAX Libraries API provides a simple and powerful google.load() method which accepts two arguments, the first argument to google.load is the name of a library. The second argument is the version of the library:

<script>
google.load("jquery", "1.3.2");
google.load("jqueryui", "1.7.1");
    google.setOnLoadCallback(function(){
        // use this instead of:
        /*
            $(document).ready(function(){  });
        */
    });
</script>

But to use this API, there is a different approach for the ready functions of all the libraries. For example, in the above code, we use google.setOnLoadCallback(function(){ }); instead of jQuery’s ready function. In-fact we use google.setOnLoadCallback(function(){ }); instead of all different library’s ready functions. This can be seen as a drawback or a good feature; I see it as a good feature as it gives me a single ready function for all libraries.

The second method to use Google’s CDN links is by the direct paths of the libraries in the script tags

Below is a list of all the JavaScript Libraries Google CDN provides with the direct paths and google.load implementation:

jQuery

name: jquery
versions: 1.2.3, 1.2.6, 1.3.0, 1.3.1, 1.3.2
load request: google.load("jquery", "1.3.2");
extras: uncompressed:true, e.g., google.load("jquery", "1.3.2", {uncompressed:true});
path: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js
path(u): http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.js

jQuery UI

name: jqueryui
versions: 1.5.2, 1.5.3, 1.6, 1.7.0, 1.7.1
load request: google.load("jqueryui", "1.7.1");
extras: uncompressed:true, e.g., google.load("jqueryui", "1.7.1", {uncompressed:true});
path: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.7.1/jquery-ui.min.js
path(u): http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.7.1/jquery-ui.js
note: This library depends on jquery. Before loading this module, you must load jquery. e.g.:
        google.load("jquery", "1.3.2");
        google.load("jqueryui", "1.7.1");

Prototype

name: prototype
versions: 1.6.0.2, 1.6.0.3
load request: google.load("prototype", "1.6.0.3");
path: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.3/prototype.js

script.aculo.us

name: scriptaculous
versions: 1.8.1, 1.8.2
load request: google.load("scriptaculous", "1.8.2");
path: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/scriptaculous/1.8.2/scriptaculous.js
note: This library depends on Prototype. Before loading this module, you must load Prototype. e.g.:
        google.load("prototype", "1.6");
        google.load("scriptaculous", "1.8.2");

SWFObject

name: swfobject
versions: 2.1
load request: google.load("swfobject", "2.1");
extras: uncompressed:true, e.g., google.load("swfobject", "2.1", {uncompressed:true});
path: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/swfobject/2.1/swfobject.js
path(u): http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/swfobject/2.1/swfobject_src.js

Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)

name: yui
versions: 2.6.0, 2.7.0
load request: load request: google.load("yui", "2.7.0");
extras: uncompressed:true, e.g., google.load("yui", "2.7.0", {uncompressed:true});
path: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.7.0/build/yuiloader/yuiloader-min.js
path(u): http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.7.0/build/yuiloader/yuiloader.js

A survey by Accenture also showed that nearly 40 percent of those queried also planned to migrate critical operations to open source systems in the next 12 months.

About half the 300 organizations – in both the public and private sectors – already are using or have committed to using open source software and about a third are experimenting with OSS. Fully 88 percent of those that already are using OSS in their operations plan to increase their investment.

What may be the key finding in the survey, however, is the reasons behind the move toward open source: Quality.

Firms in the U.K. were more positive about the quality. When asked which aspects of OSS were very or quite important in their decision to go with the open source solutions, 86 percent of the UK organizations surveyed said open source provided better quality software than proprietary systems, and just 49 percent pointed to the lower total cost of ownership. In the U.S., those figures were 66 percent and 65 percent, respectively.

When it came to the disadvantages of open source, those in the U.S. were far more likely to cite the lack of “true standards” (42 percent) or “development control” (29 percent), while those in the U.K. were focused overwhelmingly on training and education in how to use open source (41 percent), though the standards also were an issue (29 percent). Interestingly, no one in the U.S. cited training and education as an issue.

But in the U.S., companies were far more likely to expect their investment to increase than in the U.K. — 82 percent versus 56 percent.

From Net Workworld

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Benefits

• Scalable, dynamic storage. Use as much or little as you want and only pay for what you use.
• Manage files through our online control panel or programmatically through our REST API.
• Serve files publicly at blazing speeds through Limelight Networks CDN technology.

Pricing

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• Outgoing bandwidth starts at $0.22 per gigabyte

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Once your on Cloud Files

Read my post on using a CDN with Codeigniter.

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#some_div   {
     margin: 0 auto;
}

One of the issues of this is that when used on websites with multiple pages, the layout can appear to “jump” a little bit when going back and forth between pages that require scroll bars and pages that do not. This is because the ~16px width of the scroll bar in the browser window causes the content area to become that much narrower and the wrap div re-centers itself in the narrower content area causing the jump.

One way to eliminate this jump is to force scroll bars onto every page regardless if they need them or not. This may annoy some purists out there, but I think it’s a decent solution.

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html    {
     overflow-y:scroll;
}

I just used this in a recent project and it checks out with all browsers including IE6.

Read more about Google’s Chrome Frame

Thanks Google!

On August 15th, 2008 October 1, 2008 we will begin phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 across all 37signals products. In order to continue using the products without any hiccups, Internet Explorer 6 users should upgrade to a newer browser:

Read it all at 37Signals.

Well, time for a CSS 3 trick! I will cover rounded corners! This is only supported by Firefox and Safari. Below you should see a box with rounded corners!

Here is the code:

<div style="-moz-border-radius: 5px;
background-color: #333;
-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
border: 1px solid #fff;">
 
This box has rounded corners!</div>

function Wrapper() {
 
}

Then inside that function I create my “methods” if you will…

function Wrapper() {
     this.MyMethod = function(var) {
          return var;
     }
}

Once I am done creating the methods I now need to call my new javascript methods, I can do this by creating a new instance of my function that wraps the methods.

var MyScript = new Wrapper();

After creating the new instance I can now call my methods.

MyScript.MyMethod('Some Text');