Have you ever been frustrated with your site’s inability to break free of the line? By the very nature of HTML, most themes are prone to being reduced to a series of horizontal and vertical lines with no overlap. It’s nice and orderly but boring—nothing ever stands out. Many rely on large images to break the monotony but it’s simple to do it with small PNG images and a bit of CSS using positioning!

Learn how to do this in two minutes following my near-light speed tutorial. (more…)

How much is too much?

Input validation has long been a highly debated field. No one disputes some sort of validation is appropriate, but the question how much is subject of great debate. And more: server-side only enough, or are modern websites expected to have client-side too? Google “email validation,” or more specifically, “php email validation” and you’ll find hundreds of scripts all of which go about it different ways.

Programmers have spent years of man-hours working on the same sets of problems when it comes to validation. Username, password, email address, name, phone number, and so on. These fields are common in thousands of registration pages. Most have different ways of handling it. I will admit I’ve reinvented the wheel a few times. Perhaps this is because there is no definitive set of functions cross-language cross-platform that we’ve all agreed upon as the way to validate. (more…)