Got some persistent variables you want to pass from the server-side into your jQuery application? If you’ve got lots of complex data then you probably want to pull it in as JSON data, but for a handful of scalar variables it can be nice to just output them in the document head as meta tags.

<meta [...]

On Wednesday April 7th 2010 a process that would normally involve several weeks or even months of legislative scrutiny was shoe-horned into a two hour House of Commons debate. A debate largely unattended by the vast majority of MPs. What was the debate about? It was about the proposed new Digital Economy Bill which among [...]

PHPMailer is a handy little class which smoothes out the minefiled that is sending email with PHP. Okay, it’s not exactly difficult, but it’s not always striaghtforward either.
I did come across a niggly little bug in the latest release (2.3 at time of writing) which causes a large number of mail clients to incorrectly parse [...]

As of today ISPs in the UK are required by law to monitor and record all internet traffic. This includes the websites you visit and all your email and IM conversations. You know, private stuff.
ISPs are required by law to hand over any and all of this information to the security services, police and most [...]

Uniform Server 3.5 Apollo is an excellent environment for those of us who, for whatever reason, use Windows for PHP development. Unforunately it comes without cURL support. After a bit of digging I figured out (i’m no linux sysadmin) how fairly simple it is to get cURL up and running with uniserver.
The following assumes that [...]

Remember the first time you realised that URLs could be relative? Did you know that they can be protocol relative too. I’m not ashamed to say that I didn’t. But, what do I mean by protocol relative?
Essentially a protocol relative URL will request external resources such as images and scripts in the context of the [...]

Partly because I wanted to make something using the Twitter Search API, and partly because I wanted to do something relatively easy in PHP after spending far too long working with ASP, and because I hate Internet Explorer, I created icanhazrealbrowser.com
The site uses Twitter’s Search API to keep track of anyone ‘hating on’ Internet Explorer. [...]

By this time next year, if IE 6’s usage pattern continues to match that of IE5, IE6 will be around 13% – iedeathmarch.org
In my opinion a 13% market share is still too high to drop IE6 support completely for anything intended for consumption by the general public. Let’s not forget that the majority of computer [...]

This one had me stumped. The control panel for our CMS worked fine, just as it had been since, well since forever. The problem was that when visited with Internet Explorer users were now being presented with a brief flash of the login page followed by a 404 Not Found error.
After repeatedly pummeling my desk [...]

Rick recently asked me help out with the redesign of the G&G Motorsport site. The task? An Ajax powered drop-down inline contact form available from any page. The solution? jQuery.
G&G Motorsports is an independent company specialising in the supply, fitting and calibration of engine control systems. The new site needed to serve up news, [...]