Currently, it is very popular to "permalink" URLs by using URL rewriting to make pages normally accessed via querystring variables available through more "pretty" or human-readable URLs. Such methods, however, require access to server configuration files, and not all server have per-directory configuration options like Apache. Read more...

Facebook has a client library for PHP to interact with its API, but I found it very bloated and inefficient with many redundancies. So I set out to make my own. My primary aim was to keep it very simple - with just a few functions to retrieve any data made available by the API in a simple format. Read more...

I've been very busy recently, so just to pass the time here is something interesting I found on the internet that shows the importance of human error-checking for HTML markup, instead of just relying on a DTD-based validator such as the W3C's to validate the document. Read more...

I haven't been writing things for a while, partly because I have been taking a break from web development to work on a renderer for the Mandelbrot set (more information on the actual set can be found at the Wikipedia article on the topic). Read more...

The mailto: pseudo-protocol seems to be a very popular method of mailing form data. May I point out it is not very efficient? The main problem is that the user is forced to open up their email client just to send the mail. Also, the format isn't very good, and the to address is revealed. Read more...

This is just a small and very simple chaos game written in JavaScript for the <canvas> element. It works in Firefox and Safari. Just an experiment - I have been reading "Introducing Fractal Geometry" (Icon Books 2000 / Totem Books 2001), which looks like it is written for 12-year olds - with big illustrations and short, simple phrases - but can only be fully understood by university mathematics students (i.e. not me). At least I got the bit on the chaos game! Read more...