Apple has published an article on writing Web pages for iPhone. It’s interesting to see that iPhone supports CSS3 media queries such as media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)". Also, JavaScript execution on iPhone is limited to 5 seconds per entry point, and Apple recommends auditing Web sites for unnecessary JavaScript (Google Analytics, anyone?) to improve site performance.

Howdy gang, I’ll be in San Francisco for WordCamp from Friday the 20th through Monday the 23rd. If anyone else is going and you’d like to meet face to face let me know. Otherwise if anyone has any good questions, suggestions or topics which you’d like to see addressed please let me know and I’ll see what I can do.Incidentally I’ve been talking to Matt about filming the speakers so hopefully that will go well and I’ll be able to share some or all of the lectures later after the event for those who were not able to attend.If you are anywhere near San Francisco and you use Wordpress I would highly encourage you to attend. The event only costs $25 (schola...

This has to be one of the best tools I have seen for a while.I’m sure we all know how hard it can be to find the right domain. You know the drill. Come up with two or three keywords relating to your new Web site, then do a WHOIS on every combination you can think of, with every extension you can think of, only to come up with two poor choices after an hour of searching.Bust A Name means we don’t need to do that anymore! Just enter your keywords, click “Add”, and Bust A Name will search all combinations and find ones that are available.It’s actually quite addictive!

Now here is something you don’t see every day… someone creates a work of art from what appears to be a massive table comprised of various colored backgrounds.Very unique, and you just have to check it out. (more…)

As a heads up to everyone, our hosting provider has notified us that due to an aquisition they will be physically moving our server to a new facility sometime after 8pm on Friday July 27 on east coast US time (GMT -5). Since HTMLHelp is hosted on two different dedicated servers I’m not sure if they will both go down at the same time, or at different times, but when they do go down we are expecting it to take about 12 hours to bring them back up.Please keep this in mind if you are going to be needing to access any of the reference materials or forums over the weekend as there will be periods of unavailability.

Something went horribly wrong with the previously planned server migration at ValueWeb and the company was responsible for keeping thousands of servers off-line for much, much longer than expected. HTMLHelp’s two dedicated servers were offline for over 75 hours.The worst part was that the company failed to communicate to anyone during the longer than expected outage as they went completely silent - at times not answering customer service phone calls, and sending no status update e-mails. Although unforeseen issues sometimes arise in complex hosting environments, I feel the complete and utter lack of ability to respond during this crisis means their systems are critically flawed - ...

The following images come from a collection on Flickr entitled “Visual HTML Jokes“. I got a good chuckle from some of these so I thought I’d share just a few. (more…)

Here is a massive color chart with the useful hex codes for about 1,500 different colors. What I like best about this chart is that it keeps all the similar colors grouped together (unlike just about every other color chart I can find.) There is also a complimentary Black and White color chart here. (more…)

For quick reference sake, here is a table with hex codes for a wide range of grays from White to Black. It should assist when you are needing to pick a color for text or backgrounds.There is a complimentary color hex code chart here. (more…)

This one hour session, entitled State of the Word, from the WordCamp 2007 conference features Matt Mullenweg giving an update on the current state and future plans for WordPress.This lecture occurred on Sunday July 22, 2007 from 3:30-4:30pm in San Francisco, CA at the Swedish American Hall. Matt gave the updates and then allowed those in attendance to ask questions and make comments. (more…)

This is the video of the one hour long lecture given by Matt Cutts at the WordCamp 2007 conference in San Francisco, CA two weeks ago on the topic of Whitehat SEO tips for Bloggers. For those not familiar, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and this lecture is all about ways to make your Web site rank higher in Google and the other search engines. I’ve also written an article on this topic called Improving Search Engine Rankings.Matt’s presentation is available here, and when I get a chance I’ll try to go back and plug them into the video in the appropriate spots. In the meantime I did manage to get most, if not all, of them on film although they might be a lit...

Cape Clear’s CTO, James Pasley, presents a video explanation of XML. It’s a good little overview if you are not yet familiar with the concepts of eXtensible Markup Language.This presentation introduces the basic concepts of XML, XML namespaces and XML Schema. As the name suggests, it’s not intended to be comprehensive, but if you’re just getting started with XML it will introduce you the important aspects. Pay close attention to the section on namespaces - that’s the one area of the XML syntax that beginners find the most tricky. (more…)

This video features Google engineer Cuong Do, an engineering manager that helped scale the YouTube software and hardware infrastructure from its infancy to its current scale.He discusses challenges of dealing with the growth including hardware, software and databases. (more…)

What do you do when your blog goes from a thousand pageviews a day to a million? Well, you start out by watching this video of a lecture on HyperDB and High Performance WordPress given by Barry Abrahamson and Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp 2007, in which they explain how they scale WordPress.com across hundreds of servers and constantly tweak and improve performance.This lecture occurred on Sunday July 22, 2007 from 10am-11am in San Francisco, CA at the Swedish American Hall. (more…)

There is a great little article over at CodeLair about HTML elements which have been depreciated and what to do about it:The W3C has set several HTML elements and attributes as obselete. This tutorial shows you the HTML you shouldn’t be using, and the best ways to replace your ‘illegal’ code.There are several HTML elements and attributes that have now been declared deprecated by the World Wide Web Consortium (the organization that sets HTML standards). ‘Deprecated’ means that the elements no longer serve a purpose and have been replaced by other methods, mostly involving cascading stylesheets (CSS). Although it is recommended that web browsers continue to sup...