melbourne chapter

Seems you can zoom further on Google. Mind you i’ve tried a number of locations around Melbourne and it seems Google has very limited zoom…

Ever found in Firefox that strange dotted outline that appears when you click a link? I’ve always thought it was just one of those things that couldn’t be fixed, until recently:

a:focus {
 
-moz-outline:0;
 
}

As pointed out by AD (below) this “strange dotted outline” I mentioned yesterday is indeed a focus box - which for accessibility reasons should not be removed - However if you wish to remove the unexpected elongated focus box in Firefox which appears when you click a link on a horizontal list menu this is a quick and dirty solution:

#menu li a:hover, #menu li a:active {
 
-moz-outline:0;
 
}

Thanks for pointing that out Ad

Chris Shiflett recently posted an article on crossdomain.xml and the dangers of allowing cross-domain Ajax requests. Something to keep in the back of your mind when using public services or crossdomain.xml services. Flickr, Youtube, Yahoo and Amazon are all fixing/fixed this issue. In short separating out the public service for API that operates to its own domain is enough to stop this potential security vector.

If you need to nicely align and image in a line of text here’s how you do it

.inline-img {
 
/* Firefox */
vertical-align:middle;
display:-moz-inline-block;
display:-moz-inline-box;
/* Everybody else */
display:inline-block;
 
}

Presto!

Recently my colleagues and I discovered some sneaky SEO strats being used to direct seemingly large amounts of competitor traffic to the RSVP personals site. Read more about it here

Keep your eyes out on soon-to-be media coverage on the story

An old gem but thought it was worth a post: connect telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl

A colleague found a nice little map integrated into a google search result today, looking for ‘design a cake’ found a company (3rd on the list) with an icon to display their location in Google Maps - quite nice. So what is involved for us to integrate this into our websites? Some discussion on the topic was on this website and the howto is on this website here. Very nifty!

Stumbled across this today, has anyone had a play with it? http://gatineau.adcenter.microsoft.com/Gatineau/ Sounds like Microsoft looking at what is going on and trying to mimic the movement (again).

I was suprised to find today that google was indexing some of my flash files which has lead to some discussion about how google is extracting the text, how it is navigating etc. We assume that now they must be using OCR, as the original issue was extracting the text from the flash file without ensuring that it is displayed to the user. A call to google or a hunt on the net is in order! If anyone knows anything about how this is working and ways for flash developers to code up google’able friendly flash swf files please post!