Setting an Expires (or Cache-Control) header in Apache will help speed up your website. I’m running Apache 2.x, and define an expires header for all of the site’s static assets (images, stylesheets, and scripts).
Tags: .htaccess, Apache, Apache HTTP Server, configuration, expires header, images, scripts, stylesheets, Web browsers, Yahoo! Inc.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, or more accurately, France, the forces of good and evil do battle once more. It’s not the seventh instalment of the Star Wars series, it’s a collection of striking images, created by Cedric Delsaux, involving characters from the Star Wars franchise in bleak surroundings.
Tags: Adam Lamping, animation, Asides, Bounty Hunter, C-3PO, Cedric Delsaux, computer, custodian, Darth Vader, Death Star, Emperor, Empire, evil, France, freedom, French, galaxy, George Lucas, good, images, Jabba the Hutt, Jango Fett, Leia, Lille, Paris, photographer, Princess, Princess Leia, R2, R2-D2, rebels, room and bounty hunter, spaceships, Star Wars, Storm Trooper, the Star, X-Wing
Many people who have worked on websites know that standard HTML and CSS allows the webpage author to assign any font of their choosing to a text element on a page. However, they also know that there is no guarantee that the element will show the desired font, as the browsing user may not have the same font, or set of fonts, installed on their local system. More often than not, only a set of “common” fonts are installed, for example Arial on the PC and Helvetica on the Mac. This has been a significant issue which has been addressed by two methods: the Fahrner Image Replacement (FIR) method and the Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) method.
Tags: CSS, FIR, Flash, Flash Replacement, Fonts, HTML, HTML & XHTML, Image Replacement, images, Shaun Inman, SIFR, Todd Fahrner, Typography
There is a web browser that has only a vague association with modern web standards. That browser is Internet Explorer 6. Wouldn’t it be great if it supported stuff like translucent PNGs? Well, now you can add decent PNG support to IE5.5+ on Windows with no changes to your website HTML source code. This script will add near-native PNG support with full alpha opacity, with only one line in your CSS file, that applies to all <img> tags and also background images!
Tags: Angus Turnbull, behavior, Browsers, cascading stylesheets, Code, CSS, Design, gif, HTML & XHTML, ie, images, Internet Explorer, Mac, Microsoft, png, transparency
A CAPTCHA (an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”, trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. The term was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, and Nicholas J. Hopper of Carnegie Mellon University, and John Langford of IBM. A common type of captcha requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. Because the test is administered by a computer, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is administered by a human, a captcha is sometimes described as a reverse Turing test. This term, however, is misleading because it could also mean a Turing test in which the participants are both attempting to prove they are the computer.
Tags: automated, C#, Captcha, Carnegie Mellon University, Code, ColdFusion, computers, humans, IBM, images, John Langford, Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, online polls, test, Turing