Use your plastic cards to spread the word

We all have them in our wallets, tons of the plastic goodies that give us cash, collect points or simply open doors (and I don’t mean by stuffing it between the doors and the frame). Now, recently I noted that in quite a lot of cases, the issuer lets us put a short text on the card — either it’s our account name, or some string identifier to distinguish the cards (like Nectar, cause you can have more than one in your family). Why not to exploit that?

Reusable rounded edges using CSS and HTML

Rounded edges are the trend now, everything has to be smooth and slick — and rounded. There are various techniques to achieve rounded edges. Today, as well as in an upcoming articles, I will describe some that are lazy enough that you should bother using them.

Display Twitter timeline in Expression Engine - Part 1

You probably noticed on the right, there are my latest Twitter messages (you could follow me, too :). There are generally two ways to fetch tweets into Expression Engine (EE). One involves using a plugin to directly access your Twitter account and display messages. The other is about monitoring your feed (or any other, in fact) and pushing new messages to a special EE weblog. Today, I will focus on the first, simpler method.

How to defog a mirror in 30 seconds

What I hate the most is when I want to shave and the mirror is fogged. Waving a razor around my face without seeing what I am exactly doing is not safe, nor comfortable. And opening the bathroom doors and waiting for the air to filter is both long and cold. But I came up with one trick, which you probably already know, but if not — read on.

Expression Engine Captcha vs Akismet

Spam sucks. It’s like the cancer of the Internet. Blogs are a major target, as the comments are a perfect way to propagate links, keywords and such. Fortunately, we have some ways to fight it. One of them is Captcha, funny looking images with text, that sometimes are so hard to read, they actually block 100% of interaction. The other is automatic spam detection based on services like Akismet. Both are available for Expression Engine (EE), but the latter seems better.

Expression Engine discussion forum - make a sticky topic

I just wanted to make a sticky out of one topic on the tweet.IM service discussion forum, and found that it’s ridiculously difficult to locate this option. After quick googling I have found the solution and I thought it would be better to highlight it in case I forget.

Leopard global ‘Open file with’ setting

Apple Mac OS X 10.5, nicely called Leopard, is one of the best operating systems I had chance to work with. The others are Tiger and Panther, 10.4 and 10.3 respectively. You see a pattern here, and although I am very fond of XP and actually kind of like Vista, I’m not an MS fan. But I acknowledge the pros and cons of each of them. One irritating thing Leopard has is that when you select a document to open with a specific application, then even though you choose to always open it with that app, it doesn’t propagate to all documents of that kind. Unlike in systems from Redmond, you have to change that property in the document’s info. I’ll show you where it is.

Simple yet perfect 2 column layout

Your probably have seen the Matthew James Taylor perfect liquid layouts. They are really good and I recommend them, but sometimes they are just overcomplicated for the task. This blog template uses a simplified version of 2 column layout that I came up with while working on it. It’s lazy compatible and here’s how it looks like.

Expression Engine and Google friendly links

We all know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important. When I am looking for something on the web, I generally don’t ask around or look through link directories — I do a quick search on Google. So the higher something appears in the search list, the better for that page’s author. Cause I’m most likely to click that, not the one that is 20 pages later. Therefore, it is important how you present your content and how you link to it (because Google collects links and ranks the content). Expression Engine (EE) can’t do much about your content, but has by default, a very nasty, search-engine unfriendly way of creating links. Let’s fix it.

Expression Engine images in RSS feed

Expression Engine (EE) is running this blog, and I have to say — EE is so much better than Wordpress. First of all, the control panel is so intuitive. Secondly, making templates is so simple. Thirdly, writing plugins is so obvious, that I really have no idea why Wordpress is still the blogging platform. But then again, the crowd is often wrong... Anyway, one irritating and not much documented bug is that EE doesn’t show images or any formatting when using default RSS feed template. Here’s how to fix it.