Just stumbled upon this Translator tool using AJAX which translates text you enter in realtime into other languages. My, I don’t want to see the traffic stats of this one.

Neat though.

Every year the Plain English Campaign nominates publications for being the worst and hardest to understand.

The examples of this year’s winners on the BBC site are a real sight to behold, my favourite being this recipe for involuntarily electrocuting yourself:

6. Poole Lighting Limited for a sheet of instructions – “3. The switched main live is generally a single black wire and this is connected to the brown wire(s) on the fitting. On a wall light this should be a single red wire. The neutral is generally two black wires and these are connected to the blue wire(s). On a wall light this should be a single black wire. The mains earth wire(s) must be connected to all green/yellow wire(s) or earth terminal on the fitting. When completed ensure that there are no bare or loose strands of wire exposed, and cover all exposed areas of terminal blocks with insulation tape.”

Funnily enough I fail to find anything on this publication on the PEC site itself, which is not a good example that you can be usable, accessible and pretty…

Right now I am working on a project that will be a paypal-esque financial application, and of course security is a big issue with this one.

We had a great meeting talking about security measures that could be added to the forms to ensure that only real users will be able to log-in.

I collected the ones I could think of based on the W3C whitepaper and own experiences and this is the list with pro and contra for each of them: (more…)

I just looked through some of my older scripts and other people’s code and realised that a lot of time we bloat our methods by repeating the same functionality.

This is especially true when it comes to generating a lot of HTML via the DOM.

We keep repeating the same document.createElement and setAttribute lines over and over. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to create those once when initialising our script and then cloning them? (more…)

If you ever wondered if and where people read your RSS feeds, you might be in for a surprise, when your audience is in Taiwan. It seems there is a new product available that prints out RSS feeds onto toilet paper Would be great to have a control element to define the print strength, in case you want to leave a lasting impression.