madCarrot

:focus on what?

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 00:05:27 +0000

Internet Explorer is very annoying, it does not support the CSS pseudo functionality for :focus. It also only supports :hover when used with a anchor tag.

This limits us greatly mainly because we are forced to use the javascript events onMouseOver / onMouseOut to trigger style changes on other 'elements' (for example the HTML button element).

relativelyabsolute.com shows us how we can get around this, using a .htc file (cssfocusandhover.htc) we can add the functionality to our web site. It is not ideal and if you have a large stylesheet it wont work at all.

So what does it do? the .htc file reads all your external stylesheets and replaces any instance of :focus / :hover with a non intrusive JavaScript alternative, hence eradicating the need for events such as onMouseOver and onMouseOut.

Pass Sessions between subdomains in php

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 12:06:30 +0000

If you want to be able to pass session data between subdomains you need to add the following to the php.ini file.

session.cookie_domain = .mydomain.com

If you are unable to modify the the php.ini file you can add the following before the session.start() function on any page which creates the session cookie.

ini_set("session.cookie_domain", ".mydomain.com");

Changing the Week Start Day in Movable Type

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 10:22:46 +0000

We were working on a site for a client who wanted to send out a HTML newsletter every Wednesday to their customers. We decided to use Movable Type to generate the weekly newsletter. We set the archive type to weekly and generated a weekly archive template. Then using PHP we sent out the HTML page in an email.

Each new entry added in the week would make up the weekly newsletter. The only problem was that the weeks within Movable type start on a Sunday. Therefore we had to wait until Monday to start the new newsletter.

Conform or not conform, that is the question.

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 21:47:16 +0000

With everyone advocating the use of web standards nowadays I decided to take a look at some of the top visited sites according to Netcraft and see what results were given when passing it through the W3C's validator.

Creating a Google Sitemap in Movable Type

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 17:06:26 +0000

Google have started a new (June 2005) project called Google Sitemaps. The idea behind it is to give the Googlebot a helping hand when spidering your website. We are told that by adding a sitemap we allow for more efficient and tailored searches. Allowing the search engine to harvest links that it may otherwise miss.

According to Google using a sitemap will not give us higher search rankings and still does not guarantee search placement.

So now for the technical bit. A site map is basically an XML document made up of links (URL's) from your site, obviously the more links the more accurately it will map to your website.

We've been featured

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:28:16 +0000

We'd all like to give a big thanks to cssdrive, cssmania and unmatchedstyle for featuring our web site in their CSS galleries for June '05.

Seeing the site on the gallery reminds us why we're putting in all the extra hours :)

Internet Explorer 7 - IE7

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 21:32:15 +0000

So Microsoft has announced that IE7 is coming and it is going to fix some of the well documented bugs, have tabbed browsing and support alpha channels in PNG images. The most important thing in my mind is, will IE finally conform to the W3C standards?

Oh and back in November 2004 Ben English fom Microsoft had this to say:

Features such as tabbed browsing are not important to IE users.

madCarrot - It's all brand new

Sat, 14 May 2005 16:47:31 +0000

After launching the original madCarrot web site back in January 2002 we have decided now is the time for a complete overhaul, and hey why not include a totally new brand design too.

Our new site now includes a blog, this allows us to communicate company news. We also hope to include web design information, so that we can contribute our knowledge back to the web design community.