John Cox

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Interesting

Marginal REVOLUTION

Close the Washington Monument — Marginal Revolution

Schneier argues that the National Park Service's plan to add airport-style security to the Washington Monument misses a larger point about how we respond to terrorism. He contends that closing the monument permanently would actually serve a more important symbolic function—forcing lawmakers to confront the fear driving excessive security measures and the trade-off between safety and liberty that defines post-9/11 America. By keeping it closed, the monument would stand as a reminder that terrorism succeeds when it makes us fundamentally alter our open society, and that true leadership means accepting reasonable risks rather than pursuing impossible absolute security.

Permalink philosophysecuritypolitics

www.sitepoint.com

What’s New in Firebug 1.6 » SitePoint

This piece is a release announcement for Firebug 1.6, written by a developer who credits the plug-in with transforming client-side coding and still considers it the best browser development tool. It walks through the headline additions, including a command line available from any panel, console message filtering, a console.table() command, easier HTML inspection, copyable CSS rules, and a Stack panel that shows call frames at breakpoints. What sets it apart from other Firebug 1.6 write-ups is its opening nostalgia for the pre-Firebug era and its closing invitation for readers to say whether they still use Firebug or have switched tools.

Permalink

WebsitePolicies

Head JS :: The only script in your HEAD

I can't summarize this content because it's marketing material for a commercial service rather than an article that argues a position or reports information. This page promotes WebsitePolicies' legal document generation platform through product descriptions, customer testimonials, and calls to action, but doesn't contain substantive reporting or argumentation worth capturing in a summary.

Permalink privacydevelopmentbusinesstools

www.elated.com

jQuery Mobile: What Can It Do for You?

This 2011-era tutorial walks through jQuery Mobile 1.0 alpha, showing how markup-driven pages, Ajax page loading, transitions, touch-friendly forms, list views, theming, and tap/swipe events let a developer build mobile-style web interfaces with little or no hand-written JavaScript. It is worth keeping as a practical, code-heavy primer on the framework's early feature set, and as a snapshot of an alpha release whose dialogs and event support were still rough, which the reader's later comments about broken events and changepage problems confirm.

Permalink programmingmobilejquery

www.git-tower.com

Tower - The most powerful Git client for Mac

Tower is a Git client GUI that simplifies complex Git operations through a visual interface, offering features like pull requests, interactive rebasing, conflict resolution, and file history tracking without requiring command-line expertise. The tool is marketed to developers and designers who want faster workflows and clearer visualization of version control operations.

Permalink productivitydevelopmentmactools

the Guardian

Onextrapixel

33 Great Mac Applications for Web Designers | Onextrapixel - Showcasing Web Treats Without A Hitch

This article catalogs 33 Mac applications across various categories—productivity, design, development, file management, and utilities—offering brief descriptions of each app's core functionality to help designers and developers find tools suited to their workflows. The list spans task managers like Things and The Hit List, design applications like Sketch and Acorn, web development tools like Espresso and CSSEdit, and utility apps for everything from clipboard management to file organization. The piece aims to help Mac users identify productivity-enhancing software that can accelerate their work and improve their professional output.

Permalink productivityappsmactools

blog.jquery.com

jQuery: » New Official jQuery Plugins Provide Templating, Data Linking and Globalization

Microsoft has donated three new plugins to jQuery that have been officially accepted as part of the project: jQuery Templates (for client-side templating, later integrated into jQuery Core), jQuery Data Link (for data synchronization), and jQuery Globalization (supporting over 350 cultures and locales). The announcement marks the result of seven months of collaborative development between Microsoft and the jQuery team to ensure the plugins meet jQuery's code standards and community needs, with full documentation and source code made available on GitHub.

Permalink developmenttutorialpluginsjquery

Smashing Magazine

Equal Height Column Layouts with Borders and Negative Margins in CSS - Smashing Magazine

This article demonstrates three progressive CSS techniques for creating layouts with equal-height columns using only borders and negative margins, without relying on images, extra markup, CSS3, pseudo-classes, JavaScript, or absolute positioning. The author builds a two-column layout by using a border on one column to create the background color for the other, then extends this approach to two-column and three-column layouts with vertical borders between columns, explaining the underlying CSS concepts like block formatting contexts, stacking order, and positioning needed to make each technique work.

Permalink designdevelopmenttutorial

tonymacx86.blogspot.com

Queness

17 Useful Htaccess Tricks and Tips

This article presents 17 practical .htaccess techniques divided into general optimization methods and security hardening measures. The general section covers tasks like setting timezone, implementing SEO-friendly redirects, file compression, and caching strategies, while the security section focuses on preventing malicious attacks through hotlink protection, blocking suspicious URL patterns, restricting access to sensitive files, and filtering unwanted bots and referrers. The author claims to have tested these methods and presents them as both essential security protections and efficiency improvements for web server management.

Permalink performancesecuritydevelopmenttutorial

letteringjs.com

Lettering.js - A jQuery plugin for radical web typography.

Lettering.js is a jQuery plugin that wraps individual letters in HTML spans, enabling designers to apply CSS styling to single characters rather than entire words or lines. This solves the limitation of CSS, which lacks granular typographic control, and allows for effects like custom kerning, decorative letter treatments, and editorial design techniques that would otherwise require images or workarounds.

Permalink designjquerycss3

www.sitepoint.com

3 Lightweight Alternatives to phpMyAdmin » SitePoint

This 2010 piece by Craig Buckler argues that phpMyAdmin is overkill for everyday MySQL chores like checking data, editing records, or backing up, and recommends three lightweight PHP-based alternatives instead: SQL Buddy, Adminer, and PHP Mini Admin, which range from about 10kB to 320kB. It is worth recognising because it makes a concrete case for Adminer as a single-file tool that supports several database engines, with each tool's download size and installation simplicity front and centre. The appended FAQ is generic filler added later and does not change the article's core recommendations.

Permalink programmingdevelopmenttools

msdn.microsoft.com

Script Junkie | The Ins and Outs of CSS Resets

Browsers apply different default styles to HTML elements because the HTML standard specifies only content structure, not presentation, leaving each browser to implement its own baseline styling—resulting in elements like headings and paragraphs rendering at different sizes and margins across browsers. The article explains how this fundamental inconsistency causes layout problems and demonstrates several approaches to solve it, from manual resets to comprehensive frameworks like YUI Reset and Eric Meyer's Reset, which systematically override browser defaults to create a predictable foundation for consistent cross-browser design. While a CSS reset requires additional work to re-style elements afterward, establishing this uniform baseline prevents the cascade of layout issues that arise from seemingly minor rendering differences.

Permalink designtutorialcss3

Web Designer Notebook

Web Designer Notebook » Are CSS Frameworks Evil?

The author reconsiders their initial dismissal of CSS frameworks after experimenting with Blueprint, 960 Grid System, and YUI 3 Grids for wireframing projects. While acknowledging the valid criticisms about non-semantic class names and code bloat, they argue that frameworks provide genuine practical value by offering solid foundations that save time, particularly for quick projects, prototypes, and teams where consistency matters more than perfect code purity. The author concludes that frameworks are a reasonable tool when circumstances call for them, even if custom, semantically pure CSS remains the ideal in many situations.

Permalink designcss3

webdesignledger.com

10 Fresh jQuery Plugins and Tutorials | Tutorials

A roundup of ten jQuery tutorials and plugins designed to help developers add dynamic visual effects to websites, including navigation menus with background image sliding, image cropping tools, carousels, slideshows, collapsing menus, and customizable UI components like styled tooltips and enhanced select lists. The collection emphasizes lightweight, easy-to-implement solutions that improve user interface functionality and web typography capabilities.

Permalink tutorialpluginsjquery