BlogmyQuery – BMQ

I don’t know about other parts of the world, but here in Sweden many people talk about week numbers instead of dates. It drives me absolutely crazy since I never have a clue what the current week is. I wish people would just start using dates instead… but that will never happen, so I have to adapt somehow.

One way is to go to vecka.nu every time someone starts talking week numbers. It works, but it feels awkward to have to visit a website just to find out what week it is. Well, you don’t have to, at least not if you’re using a Mac (I have no idea about other systems).

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Posted in Mac, Productivity.

An incredibly useful CSS3 feature when you’re creating columns with floats is box-sizing. It lets you choose which box sizing model to use – whether or not an element’s width and height include padding and border or not.

This is useful since it makes it much easier to define flexible widths where you also need padding and/or borders. A typical example is laying out forms, which can be a real pain when you want flexible widths.

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Posted in CSS.

When Microsoft released IE8, they added a way of ensuring which rendering mode the browser uses. You do it by setting a non-standard header, either with a meta element in your HTML or by configuring your web server to send the header as part of the HTTP response. A lot more details can be found in Defining Document Compatibility (that URL looks far from stable, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t work).

Always making sure to use a doctype that triggers full standards mode I’ve never encountered a need to use this myself, but I encountered it recently on a couple of sites. What I noticed was that using the following meta element to set the compatibility header will cause a validation error (Bad value “X-UA-Compatibleâ€� for attribute “http-equivâ€� on element “metaâ€�) in HTML5:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />

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Posted in Browsers, HTML 5, Web Standards.

In my experience it’s a pretty rare thing to find a restaurant (or café/coffeehouse) website that is usable and makes it easy to find the information you would expect to find – menus (with prices!), opening hours, directions, reservation info, etc.

Visiting Never said about restaurant websites tells me that I’m not alone. Phew! On the site there are many quotes of things you’ll never (or extremely rarely) actually hear people say, to illustrate some of the usability issues commonly found on such sites.

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Posted in Accessibility, Usability.

WordPress by default creates a whole lot of automatic feeds for you. Feeds for posts, feeds for comments, feeds for categories… just about anything you could imaginably turn into a feed it does. It doesn’t add link elements pointing to all of the feeds it creates, but nevertheless the feeds are there for anyone looking.

But what if you don’t want these magical mystery feeds? What if you want to have full control over which feeds your site has, what they contain and how they are delivered? Well, I think I have figured out how, but it was far from easy to find the information needed to make WordPress output feeds exactly the way you want to. I hope this post will make things a little easier for others looking to do the same thing.

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Posted in WordPress.