As we all know, not all browsers are created equal. Some refuse to play nice, or follow the standards of the internet, and instead mangle our websites beyond all recognition.

In order to test out what our site looks like in each of the different browsers, we need to either keep a room full of PCs, Macs, Linux boxes etc, with all the different browsers on them for testing purposes - or we can use the variety of online browser testing websites.

Browsershots is probably the most fully featured one, but there is usually a bit of a wait for screenshots to be processed, and sometimes (unless you hit the Extend button a few times), some of your screenshot requests will expire:
http://browsershots.org/

Another handy one for testing the IE range (up to IE7 at time of writing this), is the netrenderer:
http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php

Enjoy, and may your websites be free from browser anguish!

Its often what happens when building websites which feature a range of different components, that some won't play nice with others.

This is probably common knowledge to those of you who are very familiar with Drupals variety of modules, but its new to me, so I'm posting about it!

If you've got a video file that has an accompanying subtitle file which is separate, that's usually preferable to "hardcoded" subs (which are in the actual video itself).

After trying to figure out how to customize node input forms for Drupal for a while by using form_alter, I eventually stumbled across the formfilter module.

The formfilter module appears to be perfect for what I needed. Its a simplified point and click interface visible to admins only, which allows virtually any form field to be hidden.

Obviously when creating a website aimed at a less techy user audience, we're wanting to keep it simple. First impressions of the formfilter module for this seem to be pretty good.

Whenever we put our websites online, we open the doors for any and all spiders and bots to start trawling our content. Most of the time this is not too much of a bother, as long as they don't get stuck in broken loops which can burn up bandwidth, or slow down servers.

In theory we're able to use robots.txt rules to tell spiders what they're allowed to look at, and what they're not welcome to... of course plenty of spiders completely ignore robots.txt and do whatever the creator has instructed them to do... whether it's something shady, or even simply gathering data and/or files for a privately run search engine.

This is where other useful tools such as htaccess and modrewrite come in. A lot of spiders do actually include an identifying "useragent", and so by adding the following lines to our htaccess file we can deny access to a list of these "bad bots".

In this case we're blocking a couple of spambots and a media file crawler called asterias, which is associated with Singingfish - an mp3 search engine. Singingfish has the totally idiotic habit of crawling websites looking for mp3 files, and then immediately downloading every single one they find. Nice.


# Turn on mod_rewrite
RewriteEngine On
# Expandable bot list (Note: no OR on the last one)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} asterias [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Exabot [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} nicebot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]


Its a good idea to double check that only the correct useragents are being blocked, and you haven't accidentally banned every visitor and search engine under the sun!

Here's a handy HTTP request viewer which can be used to do just that.

I recently upgraded to Winamp 5.52, and while it looks all very shiny and nice, I was disappointed to find that its startup speed had slowed to a crawl. This really bugs me, as I'm often opening and closing winamp, to check out single music files or podcasts etc, so I need my media player to load instantly.

After a few searches, and some options tweaking and testing, I discovered that by uninstalling the Nullsoft plugin for Ripping and Burning, the startup of Winamp no longer has several seconds of lockup every time its loaded. Sweeeet.

Heres where to find it...

Options > Preferences > Plugins > Media Library

Uninstall the plugin:
Nullsoft Rip & Burn v1.1 [ml_disc.dll]

Of course, presumably this disables ripping and burning music files with Winamp, but I've never used this feature (or indeed many of the others in Winamp).... I simply want a decent music player, without unused bells and whistles which ruin the day to day usability of the program.

Enjoy.

Alright alright, I'll admit it, I don't own an iPod! In actual fact I haven't bothered upgrading from my old Sony NetMD Minidisc MZ-N1 player that I bought probably around 2002.

There are a lot of different programs around these days which claim to be able to turn your webcam or other video source into a cutting edge PC based security system on the cheap.

Most are terrible.

If its not a time limited trial, then its severely buggy, or just plain useless. Motion detection is one of the big issues here - on some of the software its very poorly coded, so will constantly give you false positives, from sunlight glare etc.

Thankfully I've finally found a totally freeware solution which although still in Beta, seems to work really well.

I'm pretty sure everyone involved with the interweb can find some useful generators amongst this list of 100!

100 web 2.0 generators