Today, I was searching for some glass scratch remover and came across this little web site. The web site in and of itself is OK, but the implementation of the floating menu is marvelous. Here’s a screenshot of this floating menu in Firefox:

The idea is simple but surprisingly, only few web developers employ it: Provide always-available access to frequently used portions of the web site or the web page. That prevents the web design from getting cluttered with “BACK TO TOP” and/or duplicate link buttons.

And because I was in a good mood, I took a 15–second screencast as well, using the free software Jing from TechSmith.

Since we have to bail out the government and the already-rich (why couldn’t they just write off the 7 billion and make a deal with the IRS), we’re getting at least something for free: High-quality finance related icons.

Aside from being gorgeous and free, these icons also come in raster and vector formats. By the way, the icon set comes from the fine folks at Icon Eden, and if you’re interested in custom icons for your software, I’m sure they would appreciate a visit.

Tell’em I sent you.

For about two years, I’ve been subscribing to various online job search engines. You know, just to keep an eye out and see what’s in demand.

At any rate, every now and then, I see something awe-inspiring, similar to the following:

Say what? The perfect opportunity for the right candidate! Unlike the perfect opportunity for the wrong candidate. Or any other permutation, involving the words perfect opportunity and right candidate.

Then again, it’s a rough economy, and those twenty-something hot-shots from the recruiting firm are running out of ideas.

What are your favorite phrases from job ads?

Yes, they are gorgeous and free. The maker of this icon set allows you to use this set of 128 free icons “in any projects.” The icons have a consistent style, with just a tad of a glossy look. All you need to do in return for using them for free is to share the link.

That’s what I call awesome! Thanks guys.

It is Friday, and most of us creative types deserve a good diversion every now and then. How’bout Streaming Museum?

Basically, artists and innovators exhibit hip and happening stuff — ranging from music to stories to film excerpts and lectures — that’s going to be displayed in cyberspace and public space on seven (7) continents.

Among the exhibitors are Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, James Nachtwey, John Cage (whom I interviewed back in 1992), Agnes Denes, Buckminster Fuller, Jacob ter Veldhuis, Anni Rapinoja, Brian Mackern and several others.

Currently showing is “Artists and Innovators for the Environment” Part One.

Enjoy your Friday! 

Does not work. At the time of this writing, Internet Explorer 7 does (still) not expand XML-based character entities, such as ', <, > or ".

That may seem fairly obvious and perhaps even normal to the XML mavens out there, but I still keep forgetting from time to time that some web browsers may neither be able, willing nor ready to interpret those “friendly” charcter entities.

• Instead of using ' (apostrophe) in your XHTML markup, use: '
• Instead of using " (quotes) in your XHTML markup, use: "
• Instead of using > (greater than) in your XHTML markup, use: >
• Instead of using < (less than) in your XHTML markup, use: <

For situations in which you receive an RSS feed or other XML-based content, it would be best to replace the “friendly” character entities with escaped characters or the decimal character entities I’ve listed above.

In PHP, for example, you would do something like this:
$text = str_replace(’'’, ‘\”, $text);

In ASP, for example, you would do something like this:
text = replace(text, “'”, “'”)

Let me know if you have any additional insights into this subject. Thanks!

Any web developer who gathers information from actual human beings knows that there is always somebody who

• a) might be new to the whole Internet thing and doesn’t understand what they need to enter on web forms,
• b) likes entering weird stuff just because they can, or
• c) thinks they can exploit some kind of vulnerability on your web site by attempting to enter SQL or XSS injection code.

Obviously, the best and final defense (in my somewhat biased opinion) takes place on the back-end in your ASP, PHP, Java or .NET code.

However, the folks at JavaScript Coder and I believe that you can save a lot of time and trouble for about 90 percent of your end-users by helping them along with a little bit of front-end, client-side form validation.

Aside from jQuery (written by John Resig), the form validation script from JavaScript Coder is is probably the other JavaScript library I wish I had written myself. However, this script library does such a great job at validating form input, I simply keep re-using it from one project to the next.

They have excellent examples and documentation for this form validation script, and so I’ll restrain myself from repeating that. Let me just note that this script considers numerous real-world scenarios AND allows you to append your own custom validations (e.g., matching passwords).

In a nutshell, with this form validation script, you can check the following:

• required fields have a value (other than blank spaces)
• the maximum and minimum lengths of text input fields are enforced
• only specific types of characters are entered (alphabetic, numeric, alphanumeric, with & without spaces)
• the input matches your regular expression pattern
• at least one radio buttons is selected
• a specific OPTION from a SELECT element is not selected
• e-mail addresses are in the correct format

Considering the price of this JavaScript library ($0), this is an awesome bargain.

JR.com is currently selling refurbished Wacom graphics tablets for $39.99.

The Wacom UCTE440 Graphire 4×5 Graphics Tablet is a 4×5 inch graphics tablet that includes Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 and more. It also includes the Pressure Sensitive Pen & Cordless Mouse, is ideal for drawing & painting and comes in metallic blue.

The graphic pen with eraser has 512 levels of pressure sensitivity for natural brush control. Flip it over and it acts as an eraser in such software programs as MS Word and Photoshop. By the way, the tablet comes with free copies of Color Efex Pro 2 GE, Corel Painter Essentials 2, Evernote Plus and JustWrite Office 4.

According to Jr.com’s web site, This Wacom UCTE440 has been Factory-Refurbished to perform as if it were new. It comes with a 1-Year Warranty from Wacom.

Sometimes you just want to select the correct option from a drop-down field (aka Select element in an HTML form).

If you have a Preferences or Account Setting page in your web application, or something similar, chances are you sometimes need to display the correct option in an HTML form Select element. For example, if the end-user selected a specific country during the original registration process, you want to make sure that the correct country gets displayed in the Account Settings page, right?

And sometimes, you just have a pre-determined number of options in a select (or drop-down) field. For example, countries, states, regions or products. Not everyone has all of those option values and descriptions (i.e., text) in a database, and so you end up having to select the correct option as soon as the page has loaded.

The solution that I have used in this situation works really well if you get the value (for example, the name of the country) from PHP or ASP and want to plug it into your JavaScript code. We are using getElementById(), so your form elements need to have an ID tag with a value.

Obviously, this also requires a modern web browser that can handle the associated JavaScript. Unless you’re several years behind updating your web browser, however, you should have no problems.

The approach is fairly simple, and the only tricky thing is to remember the proper syntax. Here is an example with PHP and JavaScript:

That’s it.