logon2 Blog

If you don’t know what favicons are, look up at your tabs. You’ll notice that some of them, or at least this one, will have an icon. These are called ‘favicons’ (short for “Favourite” icon) . You might notice some tabs that don’t have a favicon. To me, sites with favicons seem more professional, complete and polished. Also, they make it easier for me to negotiate my tabs. Have a look at my tabs at the moment:

Notice how one of them has no favicon and a particularly unhelpful title. Now I’ll have to click on that tab (or press CTRL+3, or whatever)
to find out what it is - how annoying, I shouldn’t have to do this.

Because I can tell that you’re smart - I know that you want to use favicons on your site. It’s pretty easy - just create the icon and add some codeThe easiest way to get some favicon action is to use an online ico generator, here are some:

• Favicon.cc
• Dynamic Drive FavIcon Generator
• Favicon.co.uk

Then just add a some lines of code to your template:

<link rel="icon" href="http://yoursite.tld/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

It’s worth noting that some browsers automatically search for “favicon.ico” on the document root of your website so it might be a good idea to name it “(httpdocs)/favicon.ico”. If you don’t want to do that, you can save it anywhere and just use a PNG file, just change the MIME type:

<link rel="icon" href="http://yoursite.tld/favicon.ico" type="image/png">

I personally prefer to edit my favicons locally, so I can make them transparent and high resolution for extra shine. Keep your eyes out for a post on that.

It’s possible that you’re thinking, “Processing PHP in CSS? That’s plain stinks.,” just from reading the heading. It does stink, but so does maintaining two CSS files, updating your colour scheme manually (or even by sed), changing common dimensions, and all the other crap that goes with static files. Think about it this way - would you build a site out of many HTML files or would you use some kind of template system (like Pretty Smarties)? By now I hope you’re less sceptical. If you’re interested, please read on. (more…)

When I moved across to XHTML a few years ago, the transition was mostly quite easy. Using thesse logical rules got me though 90% of the transition:

1. Close all tags, use lower-case tags, use lower-case attributes and maintain nesting order.
2. Markup is for content, CSS is for presentation. That one was easy.
3. Use the right tag for the right job (in the right place) and make things accessible.

However, one thing that can’t be covered by a general rule is the complete removal of tags. Most removed tags were non-standard and started out as proprietary - like <marquee> and the tag we’re going to talk about, <embed>. (more…)

Rose’s Knitting Centre offers a wide range of current Australian yarns in its online wool shop. Visitors can buy Patons, Cleckheaton, Shepherd and Panda yarns in any colour available directly from the shop.

Transactions are managed by the shopping cart software and can automatically calculate postage, handling and then process the transaction.

logon2 Contact Form is used to allow customers easily enquire about specific products without hassle, as well as make general enquiries.

Visit Rose’s Knitting  Centre.

Now that logon2 hosts quite a few sites that are dynamic and make use of MySQL databases, I decided to implement automatic daily database backup tool. Such a tool gives me peace of mind as well as advantage over any competitors who don’t perform automatic backups. Lomadaba (logon2 Mass Database Backup) is my solution. (more…)

A common website design feature is the inclusion of navigation links (top level or otherwise) in the footer. Often, links are separated by a hyphen ( - ) or a pipe ( | ). It’s very easy to enter these separators in the markup, like so:

<a href="/">Home</a> |
<a href="/about/">About</a> |
<a href="/contact/">Contact</a>

I guess it’s OK to do that, but it’s not really great practice because the pipes ( | ) are not actually part of the content and are only meant for presentation, so they shouldn’t really be part of the HTML. Another problem with this is that it’s inflexible. What if we want more space between the pipes and the links? Do we enter a bunch of “&nbsp;”s? That’s ugly^.

We can use the CSS border property to add the separators for us by adding a left-border to each of the links.

“But what about the first link?“

The answer is the :first-child CSS pseudo-selector. It allows us to define CSS properties to the first element of its kind within a container. So in this instance, we can apply no border to the first child. Here’s how the lot would look:

<ul id="footer">
	<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
	<li><a href="/about/">About</a></li>
	<li><a href="/contact/">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

ul#footer li {
    display:inline; /* so they display horizontally */
    border-left:1px solid #000000; /* our 'pipe' */
    padding-left:1em;
    padding-right:1em;
}
 
/* here it is, the first-child pseudo-selector */
ul#footer li:first-child {
    border:none; /* no 'pipe' before the first element */
}

It requires a bit more coding initially but it’s more elegant because it separates concerns and it’s also more accessible for screen readers and our friendly neighbourhood search engines*.

^ I know, this very site doesn’t follow this site doesn’t follow these practices. I’m a hypocrite!
* FACT

Ran XAMPP, tried to access the development virtual host for Kids On The Rise ( http://localhost:99 ) and got this:

Warning: Unknown([PATH HERE]): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

Some other Fatal error came up but I forgot to copy it, sorry.

The error message is unhelpful but it was pretty easy to fix. I just deleted the .htaccess file from the root and tested. It worked! After restoring a backup of the .htaccess file everything worked. Hooray!

The Barrabool Rural Protection Group needed a website to share news and information quickly and efficiently. They now have a blog set up, allowing them to post news, add pages, engage in discussion and automatically send new content to subscribers.

The turnaround time for Barrabool Rural Protection Group’s blog was 42 hours including domain registration and discussion.

Have a look at Barrabool Rural Protection Group’s site to learn more about how they want to protect McAdam Park from over development as a result of a new motorbike / motorcross track.

Artist Guysel’s straight-line abstract art website was actually launched in March so this celebratory blog post is slightly late. This website update project presented some milestones for logon2:

• Gallery2 instead of miniGal for photo gallery management
• Pretty Smarties, logon2’s very own Template System, was used to keep pages consistent and content separated from presentation at source.
• Working with PHP as CGI on an external server

Artist Guysel in logon2’s folio

Most PHP programmers would have come across this old chestnut before:
Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by page.php line 42

This can happen when you try doing a HTTP redirect or send HTTP 404, as it can happen whenever you try to send headers once they’ve already been sent. When a user sees this, they are basically left high and dry, often on a blank page. The solution is simple:
(more…)