Blog / Andy Langton's Website

Virgin Media: ports 3128 and 8080

Every now and then I use a port scanner on computers I work with to check which services are accepting connections from the internet. For a typical client PC, there should normally be no ports accessible, and for a server, only those ports specifically enabled for services.

Full article Responses (1) 18.01.2010. 18:38

Breaking Google with advanced search operators

Or: What is it with all of the weird Google Books/YouTube results?

Full article Responses (3) 16.07.2009. 21:02

Rel="canonical" - does it actually fix duplicate content issues?

All of the major search engines recently agreed on an element to address the problems webmasters experience related to duplicate content. I feel their pain, and while I dislike proprietary features (since they don't address the underlying problem) it seems like it might be a useful tool in certain circumstances.

Full article Responses (4) 17.02.2009. 18:20

Amazon encourages users to click phishing emails

While Amazon are not the worst culprits, they sent me an email today which illustrates how larger organisations are failing to help their users protect themselves against phishing emails.

Full article Responses (3) 22.11.2008. 15:39

Jquery: show/hide multiple elements independently

Hiding a single element with Jquery was pretty straightforward. But what about if you want to show/hide multiple elements independently?

Full article Responses (184) 13.10.2008. 18:52

Use PHP and cURL to retrieve URL contents (with a few options)

url_get_contents - a function to retrieve the contents of a remote URL with PHP and the cURL library.

Full article Responses (5) 03.06.2008. 22:17

Learn philosophy from...a joke book

Philosophy is probably my second most common reading material. But yes, Sartre is terrifically boring.

Full article Responses (0) 03.06.2008. 21:09

Accessible show/hide content with jquery

Update: Show/hide multiple elements independently

I'm a big fan of jquery since I don't often need to write any javascript, but for the times I do it cuts out most of the hassle of accessing on page elements, using CSS selectors and really helps with an accessible approach.

Full article Responses (25) 17.05.2008. 13:30

Persai: dull but effective

As I suppose quite a few people did, I signed up for the beta of Persai as a reader of the now defunct uncov. I imagine that gives them a fairly direct batch of beta testers, all over-fond of the word 'fail'. I've used it solely from an end-user point of view: I haven't done any testing to try to figure out the technology yet.

Full article Responses (0) 17.05.2008. 12:45

Anderton's Music: highly recommended. UX2: great

I recently went shopping for some home-recording equipment, and thought I'd share my experience and give credit where it's due. Online merchants note - a little bit of friendly customer service goes a long way.

Full article Responses (3) 02.05.2008. 20:40

Use mod_speling to fix mis-typed URIs

I just discovered the Apache module mod_speling (yup, one 'l') which is a fantastic way to ensure visitors who mistype URIs get automatically redirected to the correct location.

Full article Responses (3) 30.04.2007. 20:04

Get viewport size (width and height) with javascript

While finding out monitor resolution with javascript can be useful for statistics and certain other applications, often the need is to determine how much space is available within the browser window.

Full article Responses (104) 12.04.2007. 19:27

Permanent (301) Redirects with PHP

If you want to permanently redirect a small number of URIs, or redirect based on conditions defined in PHP, then you need a permanent PHP redirect.

Full article Responses (4) 30.03.2007. 18:46

Get Monitor Screen Resolution with Javascript

Find out and display a user's screen resolution with javascript.

Full article Responses (49) 28.03.2007. 00:15

Javascript/CSS Scrollbar Effects

The ability to change a visitors scrollbars actually uses CSS rather than javascript.

Full article Responses (18) 26.03.2007. 15:48

Javascript and Search Engine Spiders

Historically, javascript has been 'hidden' from search engines; their spiders did not understand javascript and could not interpret even the most basic of javascript code.

Full article Responses (0) 01.03.2007. 22:33

Javascript Redirect Scripts

Redirecting a visitor with javascript is pretty straightforward. The simplest way is to use one of the methods below.

Full article Responses (53) 23.02.2007. 10:45

Embedding Fonts With CSS (IE only)

I'm not a big fan of forcing users to see things 'my way' but a client recently wanted to use a wacky font for headings, and was only concerned with viewers using IE. (Whether this is a good idea or not is for a different discussion!)

Full article Responses (0) 22.02.2007. 18:43