programming – TannerRitchie Web Applications

Web developers and Dunning-Kruger syndrome

Roland Tanner — Tue, 16 May 2017 20:17:34 +0000

As this article lays out, programmers high opinion of their own skills, combined with lack of knowledge, can be a dangerous thing.

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The Joel Test and the Half a Loaf Principle

Roland Tanner — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 20:31:53 +0000

A pretty good summary of what’s required by a software development team. The Joel Test Do you use source control? Can you make a build in one step? Do you make daily builds? Do you have a bug database? Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Do you […]

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Fix WordPress dashboard display error in Chrome

Roland Tanner — Sat, 05 Sep 2015 16:52:19 +0000

An annoying bug causes the WordPress dashboard menu to be messed up in Chrome. See image to the left. This appears to be a Chrome/Webkit bug that Google are not in a rush to fix. To fix in your WordPress theme code, add the following to functions.php: function chromefix_inline_css(){ wp_add_inline_style( 'wp-admin', '#adminmenu { transform: translateZ(0); […]

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Problem with default WordPress robots.txt

Roland Tanner — Sat, 11 Apr 2015 18:05:48 +0000

A WordPress site we administer had the following automatically generated robots.txt file (in a fairly vanilla installation). User-agent: * Disallow: Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes Disallow: /wp-login.php Disallow: /wp-content/plugins Disallow: /wp-content/cache Disallow: /wp-content/themes Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /comments Note the lines which block indexing of theme and plugins. This used to be fine, but with Google now […]

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IE z-index bug and how to squash it …

Roland Tanner — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 03:56:46 +0000

A useful one to remember, because it’s cropped up in multiple sites recently. IE (at least up to 9) does not handle z-index correctly. New *positioned* elements create new stacking contexts, beginning at zero, so you can run into counter-intuitive behaviour like the following: <div id="positioned-div" style="position: relative;"> <div id="inner-div" style='z-index: 1000'> Hello world </div> […]

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PHP ISBN 10 to ISBN 13 converter

Roland Tanner — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 06:14:10 +0000

This is a bit of code I wrote a few years ago. I couldn't find any tool anywhere that would convert old-school ISBN 10s to the new ISBN 13, and check that the numbers have been entered correctly. The algorithm for ISBNs isn't that complicated, so I came up with the following, which is available for anyone that wants it. We've been using it in-house, and it's been totally reliable, for since ISBN 13s became ubiquitous, because we had hundreds of ISBN 10s to convert. For Amazon, ISBN 10 is still a requirement when using the API to find books, so the need for ISBN 10s is still alive and well.

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