Weekly Roundup - July 21st 2008Weekly Roundup - July 21st 2008

Posted July 21st, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of July 14th to July 20th 2008, where I look back at the posts I made over the past week as well as useful and interesting articles on other websites and blogs that I might have read.

Articles posted on my blog

Monday: Weekly Roundup - July 14th 2008
Tuesday: Switch off sound notifications in Fedora 9 KDE
Wednesday: Get a list of tables with MS SQL Server
Thursday: Get a list of all available constants with PHP
Friday: How to enable mouse wheel scrolling in Kubuntu under VMWare
Saturday: How to disable Javascript in Mozilla Firefox
Sunday: Can't mount NFS share on Ubuntu/Kubuntu

Interesting articles found offsite

Firefox

First Class Thoughts posted 8 time saving Firefox shortcut keys. I already knew about Ctrl+L to get into the address bar but not the Ctrl+K one which gets you into the search engine search field.

Firefox 3.0.1 was released, fixing several security and stability issues and other fixes.

Google

The Official Google Blog posted about the technologies behind Google ranking, looking at how the search engine is able to understand pages on the web to get people to relevent pages even if they don't feature text they are searching on; how it understands queries; and how it understands users to ensure the best local results are served.

HTML

htmlPlayground.com is a great reference tool for HTML tags and elements and CSS properties, listing all the properties/tags/attributes and then describing them with examples when clicked. Thanks to dev102.com for posting about this useful tool.

iPhone

Auto Blog reviewed the GPS features of the iPhone 3G, concluding that aside from a few intermittent errors on both the phone's part and our own, it's safe to say that the 3G works as advertised: under-promising and only slightly delivering.

Javascript

hiddenpixels.com looked at 16 lightboxes and clones with links through to each one. Lightbox is a Javascript library to show images in a modal dialog and there have been many clones/other implementations as shown by this post.

jQuery

Tom Coote posted how to do jQuery Column Filters, where you can filter the data in the columns below by a text box at the top of each column. Useful stuff. He's tested it and it works in IE 6 & 7, FF 2.0, Opera 9.24 and Safari on Windows.

nettuts.com posted 15 resources to get you started with jQuery, starting with an brief explanation of what jQuery is and why you should use it over other Javascript libraries, and then links to offsite tutorials grouped in steps: downloading the library, creating your first function, animating your effects, plugins and implementing AJAX.

Thanks to the Web Resource Depot I found the jQuery Sparklines plugin, which allows the creation of small inline charts in webpages which can be dynamically generated and updated.

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta 2 was released.

RSS

Accredited Degrees posted 100 cool things you can do with RSS, including reading books, getting recipes, sports results, word of the day, travel deals, weather and so on.

WordPress

I don't use WordPress and never have, but for those who do WordPress 2.6 was released on Tuesday. From their blog post: WordPress 2.6 "contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced".

Other Stuff

Natalie Jost at A List Apart wrote a post titled "Walking the line when you work from home", looking at the various distractions etc that you have to deal with when working from home and how to deal with some of them.

MakeUseOf.com posted links to 7 essential cheat sheets: Google Search, Windows, Mac OS/X, Gmail, Firefox on Windows, Firefox on Mac and Google Reader.