Cencorship in the UK - The Pirate Bay blocked >>
The movie- and record industry have for quite a while told us that piracy is stealing and that it kills music and funds terrorism. These allegations have untill recently only been amusing and sometimes outright funny because they hold no truth whatsoever. But with the recent ruling by a british court telling UK ISP's to block The Pirate Bay, things have taken an ugly new direction.
Ubuntu and Asus X54C - suspend / hibernate bug >>
The Asus X54C is a good, inexpensive laptop that seems to be made for Ubuntu. The installation process couldn't be any easier, everything works straight out of the box, the performance is more than good enough for everyday use, and the battery is decent. The only problem is a known problem that makes it impossible to wake Ubuntu after beeing suspended (hibernate), forcing you to do a hard restart. This is very annoying and should be fixed ASAP, but untill it does it is quite simple to do yourself using a script that I found over at Code Central.
Install Oracle Java on Ubuntu >>
OpenJDK has been the standard Java-versjon on Ubuntu for quite a while now, and even though it is sufficient for everyday use; there are times when you need the official Java version from Oracle. This can be quite a hassle to setup for the uninitiated, but is acctually quite straight forward providing you have some experience with Linux/Ubuntu. For those of you who don't have that experience, I have written this short how-to.
Install GNOME Shell on Ubuntu 11.10 and upwards >>
The decision to switch from GNOME to Unity as the default shell interface for Ubuntu 10.10+ sparked quite a bit of controversy when it was announced, and not everyone was happy with this change. Many people complained that it was unusable, slow and the worst thing since the plaque. While I usually support the choices made by Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth, I found the current version of Unity (for Ubuntu 11.10) to be a bit disappointing. Don't misunderstand me, I like the idea behind Unity, but for the moment it is to slow and unresponsive for my use. That is why I have written this short article that describes how to replace Unity with GNOME Shell.
Responsive Web Design - CSS for mobile devices >>
Responsive Web Design is, simply explained, a design that adapts it's layout related to the screen space available. For example, we wouldn't want a web page on a mobile device to display the same way as on a laptop computer due to space limitations. This we want to do accomplish without having to write excessive amounts of code or having a dedicated mobile version of our site. Enter: Responsive Web Design and CSS Media Queries.
HTML5 tag-support for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 >>
HTML5 has many new structural tags (for example header, nav, article, section, aside, footer and nav) that are very useful for semantically annotating your markup, and these tags should really be used to replace all your old div-tags whenever possible. The only problem is that older browser, especially IE 6-8, won't recognize these tags and will just display them like inline elementes instead of block elements. The consequence is that your layout will suffer.
Plugin: MODx application/xhtml+xml >>
This simple plugin makes your pages proper xhtml by setting the correct MIME-type for your MODX documents.
Recommended HTML meta tags >>
Meta tags may not be the most sexy or exciting topic around, but it's still quite important as far as Web development is concerned. It can be hard for novices to understand the use of meta tags, and it is my impression that many new Web developers and designers are unsure about the use of meta tags at least once during their career. At least I was. That is why I in this short article I will try to give an explanation of the different meta elements and what they do.
The importance of markup validation >>
This article will give an introduction to what HTML and CSS validation is, explain why it is considered a good practice writing markup code that conforms to the standards set by The World Wide Web Consortium, as well as giving some motivational hints to why this is advantageous for you and your site.
HTML5 links and resources >>
Some useful links and resources about HTML5.
