Andy Boyd

I’ve heard a few references to CURL but never knew much about it.  CURL allows you to scrape/use other web pages as data .  The most interesting use (I found) is you can automatically fill out form data and retrieve the $_POST array.  CURL… it’s one bad mutha…
http://www.phpit.net/article/using-curl-php/1 

A great resource for learning how to create themes or modify your existing firefox theme:

http://www.tom-cat.com/mozilla/firefox/userchrome.html

I haven’t tried it yet, but maybe when I get some time…

If you don’t have any formal training in Graphic Design the Design Principles articles on DigitalWeb are second to none. This article discusses design techniques used on a sampling of layouts from CSSZenGarden.

A Web Design Review

The secure your code article from A List Apart by “Niklas Bivald” has some great insights:

While most community managers already know these basics, here’s a short list for newcomers:

• Strip out single and double quotes or convert them to their HTML entities (‘ and ’ for opening and closing single quotes, “ and ” for opening and closing double quotes). Please note however, that this does not entirely protect you. An attacker could still use String.fromCharCode(39) in an eval() function.
• Convert < and > to < and >.
• Convert all line breaks to
  . If you do this on all code, including style tags, you will save yourself from an attack. See “IE, CSS and JavaScript”.
• Check your self-created code tags (such as [URL]) to make sure the user is not allowed to inject JavaScript in URLs or CSS.
• Consider stripping out the word “script” to prevent someone from trying to inject the word JavaScript. Keep in mind, though, that as far as IE is concerned, “ja\n\sc\nript” is valid.
• Use regular expressions (server side) to validate and sanitize user input, as described above
• Validate CSS input!

Interested in how users scan websites as they read? This article from Jakob Nielsen is pretty interesting

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

I have been fighting recently with an email campaign I have been working on. The HTML message looks great in my browser, but gets slaughtered in all the different email clients, especially GMAIL. I am disapointed with GMAIL’s poor support of CSS, but Google is doing so many other cool web-geeky things that I just can’t hold it against them (as if they care about me anyways).

After scouring the web for some information about what works and what doesn’t, I found the following article. It told me exactly what I needed to know… back to table based HTML for email clients… oh the humanity…

Guide to CSS Support in Email