Craig Jackson's Blog

Tired of flash ads?
2009/05/28 08:33:52

Tired of those flashy, supposedly cool, ads that hover over the page? And, you struggle to find that tiny "x" button to get rid of it (How do you like my infomercial intro?). Well, here is a simple solution that saves your bandwidth and keeps those ads from distracting you. Get Firefox, if you do not have it already. Then, just download the Flashblock add-on from the firefox add-ons repository. Restart Firefox and it will be blocking the flash from your browser.

Blizzard is displaying pages in pure XML and XSL
2009/04/02 10:19:20

Are we getting one step closer to moving into the Semantic Web? Blizzard is displaying pages in pure XML with XSL laying out. Check out the Archivist Class in Diablo 3. As you will see in the source, they basically have a hierarchical system of xsl/xml imports to streamline development without creating new full XSL files for each page.

MySQL Group By Datetime fields
2009/03/16 17:39:12

Here is a quick tip on grouping by datetime fields in MySQL.

Firefox and Safari have dug into Explorer's Market Share
2009/02/03 14:58:42

The latest monthly browser share report from Net Applications show that Internet Explorer's share continues on it's downward spiral. While, Firefox and Safari continue to rise.

Here are the following changes in market share over the past year (comparing this January's results with last January's results):

  • Safari +42.4%
  • Firefox +26.8%
  • Opera +15.4%
  • Internet Explorer -10.5%
Google Mars 5.0
2009/02/02 13:53:12

Google Earth has got to be one of my favorite pieces of software ever. It is a masterpiece and simply great that you can just pop open the program and learn about the world around you with easy drag, zoom and tilt functionality. I have been able to use it to familiarize myself with my vacation destinations without being there in-person. Also, I have checked out the bizarre city-grid of a city like Paris. Not too mention, you can feel like you are taking a cab in Time Square with 3D Buildings.

New Design Coming Soon
2009/01/22 12:27:29

Well, I have started creating my new theme for this site that will be up shortly. I gotta get rid of this default theme. :)

Phishing scheme gets a viral victim
2009/01/06 09:36:20

Twitter has been hit by the latest phishing scheme: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/01/gone-phishing.html

Phishing is an illegal act, in which someone replicates a current live site to a different domain address. Then, they spam email boxes with their fake site (or use other methods to get you to their fake site), trying to get you to login at their site. If you input your username and password into the fake site, now they have the credentials to login to your account on the real site.

Full Release of my project Validation API for Drupal
2008/12/22 17:24:55

Released the first version of my Google Summer of Code project Validation API. Here are the features of the project:

  • Admin UI system to manage everything.
  • It will work with core fields, custom module form fields, CCK fields, etc.
  • You can create one validation rule that can be applied to as many fields on your site as you want.
  • Arguments can be used on validation rules to allow them to be flexible.
  • Links added to fields for a quick method to add validations to fields.
How to simply add on to the jQuery UI Draggable widget
2008/12/11 14:02:46

Do you feel that the jQuery UI's widgets lack some needed functionality? Well, I am here to show you how to add an option to the jQuery UI Draggable options. We are going to run through how to create a settable option that will output the difference from the starting offset to the current offset of a dragging element.

Rounded Tabbed Links with CSS Rounded Corners (Border-Radius)
2008/12/03 17:05:11

Firefox and Safari both offer means to create rounded borders of a box with simple CSS. This has been a very demanded need for many. For me, I am just tired of jumping into Gimp to create a rounded-corner image and rotate it 3 times to get all the corners of a box. The following CSS properties are how to implement the rounded borders on a HTML element:

Firefox:

-moz-border-radius: #px;
-moz-border-radius-topleft: #px;
-moz-border-radius-topright: #px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomleft: #px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomright: #px;

Safari: