March 11th, 2010
Something that has always bugged me about Firefox is that if it encounters a broken image it doesn’t display an image place-holder. Instead it displays the alt attribute as in-line text. This can cause problems if your primary development browser is Firefox, as you may not notice broken images on a page.
For a while there has been an option in the config to display image place-holders while a page loads but not for broken images as on IE (yes I’m praising an IE feature!).
Image placeholders on load is set to ON by default, your can change this if you want by going to about:config and searching for ‘image’. The option your looking for is:
browser.display.show_image_placeholders
Just double click to change the value.
As I said before, this doesn’t affect broken images after the page has loaded, and after several searches it looks like the option just isn’t available to Fx users as a general setting. There is however a solution…
Firefox allows users to specify custom CSS to be applied to websites on a global basis, e.g if you want your default link colour on unvisited links to be black instead of the default blue.
You do this by making changes to your global content css file. You can find it at the following location (OS Specific – I’m on windows 7) ‘%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\chrome’ (if your on a domain you will need to edit it in your roaming folder), look for a file called ‘UserContent-example.css’ and rename it to ‘UserContent.css’, this will then be loaded by Firefox when it fires up.
Add the following CSS to the file and restart Firefox..
/* Enable image placeholders */
@-moz-document url-prefix(http), url-prefix(file) {
img:-moz-broken{
-moz-force-broken-image-icon:1;
width:24px;
height:24px;
}
}
Thats it… when you next come accross a broken/missing image, you will get a box the size you have defined in its place with the alt inside it.
Tags: broken image, CSS, firefox, Fx, image placeholder, missing image, mozilla
Posted in CSS, Mozilla, Tools of the Trade, Website Design | No Comments »
January 25th, 2010
Since I moved to my VPS, one of the biggest problems I’ve had is with spam. Not just with my email account but everyone who’s email accounts Im hosting on the VPS have all seen a sharp increase in spam emails.
On the reseller server I had access to grey-listing and SpamAssassin to filter mail as it arrived and I got maybe 2 or 3 a week, but the day after I moved onto the vps this shot up to between 20 and 50 a day! I have my emails pushed straight to my phone as well so this fast became a bit of a pain.
My VPS did come with SpamAssassin pre-installed as part of Plesk but due to the licence I have installed I couldn’t use it so this caused two problems, 1) emails are not filtered for spam and 2) SpamAssassin is using up precious memory while not actually helping.
The first thing I did was to turn off SpamAssassin, it was using a lot of memory as even tho it wasn’t filtering any mail it was still scanning every message that arrived on the server, On advice of my hosting providers tech support I decided not to un-install it in case it caused problems so I just stopped the service from running and then disabled it from auto starting on system reboot to preventing it restarting if I ever need to reboot the server.
I then tried to find the grey-listing software used on my old reseller server, this seemed to work really well so I wanted it on my server too. Support told me they were using a script put together by Brent Meisher written to work specifically with Plesk but unfortunately the repo had been removed and I couldn’t download the files.
I was speaking with a support engineer about it and he mentioned a new tool he was playing with called SpamDyke and how it was looking promising as a replacement to their current grey-listing solution, so I decided to give it a try.
The good news is, that since I started writing this blog post, SpamDyke has been added into the atomic repositories, so to install it is as simple as using apt get or yum. Configuration is just as simple, the default settings are actually quite effective and I’ve been using them for two weeks and haven’t received a single piece of spam.
All the information you need can be found on the SpamDyke website and the README file is really useful.
This is something I defiantly recommend to everyone who is running their own mail server.
Tags: Brent Meisher, grey-listing, Plesk, spam, spamassassin, spamdyke, vps
Posted in CSS, Javascript, Other, PHP, SEO | 1 Comment »
November 26th, 2009
Google are playing with a new website design for a select number of thier ‘.com’ visitors today, not too much has changed and they are keeping with the minimalist look, but have changed a few colours and replaced the default browser buttons for some nice blue images.
The biggest change comes on the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages) where the navigation has moved from the top of the results to a left hand column
New Google SERP Design
Iif you cant wait for it to be rolled out worldwide, you can get a sneak peak by following these steps
1) log out of your Google account if currently logged in
2) goto http://google.com/ncr
3) type the following javascript into your address bar to add a cookie to your browser
javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com"); alert('cookie added');
4) reload the page and you should see the new design…
Googles Nov 09 Redesign
UPDATE:
if you would like to remove the cookie from your browser, them enter the following into your address bar
javascript:void(document.cookie='PREF=20b6e4c2f44943bb;path=/;domain=.google.com;expires=Sat, 01-Jan-2000 00:00:00 GMT'); alert('cookie removed');
Tags: cookie, design, google, serp
Posted in Google, T'Internet News, Website Design | 1 Comment »
November 18th, 2009
The Microsoft Internet Explorer Development team has made a post on their blog about the next instalment of the Internet Explorer Saga (rumoured to be the last Redmond based browser to bear the name Internet Explorer). Unfortunately there is no alpha build available with this post for us to play with, just the usual spiel telling us about how good IE9 is will be might be, and how it compares to the “latest” (as of 18/11/09) builds of other more popular browsers.
Full of “how are javascript engine is better than your javascript engine” talk, there isn’t much about the features it will include, or a reason why they dont just release a version 8.* will all these updates rather than just going for version 9, but it does highlight their focus on improving CSS support (including rounded corners), its defiantly worth a quick read and also a bookmark for those of you not already subscribed to the RSS feed.
You can find the post on the IE Developer Blog
Tags: CSS, ie9, internet explorer, Microsoft
Posted in CSS, Microsoft, Tools of the Trade | No Comments »
November 9th, 2009
Mozilla Firefox is 5 years old today!
Version 1.0 of the popular open source web browser was unleashed upon the world November 9th 2004 and has gone from strength to strength ever since.
Currently on version 3.5 Firefox has gained huge following over the years (including yours truly) and is currently chasing the heals of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer well ahead of the compitition (Opera, Google Chrome, Safari, etc).
You can read more on the history of Mozilla Firefox on this wikipedia article.
Users of Twitter can show their support by adding a Twibbon to your Twitter profile picture
And everyone else can forward this link to friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances and anyone else you meet on the street – http://getfirefox.com/ and help to make the web a better place
Tags: firefox, Firefox5, mozilla
Posted in Mozilla, Tools of the Trade | No Comments »
