September 2003
Sept. 20, 2003
The pirate’s code
So, now that “talk like a pirate” day has sadly come to an end, it’s time to reveal the five minute code hack that rendered my front page semi-legible for the best part of a day. It was actually pretty simple:
[... 260 words]Auto-complete text boxes
There’s a great new article up on Sitepoint describing a technique for adding auto-complete functionality to normal HTML text input fields using Javascript. The code uses a whole bunch of browser-specific code, but it has to thanks to the unconsistent ways in which different browsers handle text selection ranges. Unfortunately the article doesn’t actually provide a demo of the code in action, so I’ve posted one here. It’s a very nice effect.
“Interactive Tabular Data”
Just spotted in a comment by Drew McLellan on Russell Beattie’s Notebook:
[... 147 words]Sept. 30, 2003
Battling comment spam
It’s a sad state of affairs when you come back to your blog after a week elsewhere and have to add another 56 domains to your blacklist. I’m actually getting more comment spam than legitimate comments now—this is becoming more than just a minor nuisance. I’m considering a number of improvements, including adding a moderation queue to comments on entries posted more than a month ago, disabling the comment form if the referral is a search engine (as per Russell Beattie’s suggestion) and adding some kind of wildcard support to the blacklist file.
[... 114 words]