I’ve been using Silvio Rizzi’s excellent Reeder for iPad for the past several days. It’s far and away the nicest Google Reader application for iPad, and maybe anywhere. One thing that I noticed about it was that for some of the sites in my feed there were big fancy icons, while others were stuck with favicon.ico

ArsTechnica has one of these fancy icons and in the source of their page, I found:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://static.arstechnica.com/apple-touch-icon.png" />

Once I had that, the rest was easy. I found an image that I wanted to use, and scaled it to 150 x 150, then saved it as a .png. I uploaded it the root directory on my website and added that line of html to the top of my WordPress theme. According to the Apple documentation, the ideal size for iPhone is 57×57, but it says that the OS will scale it for you if your icon is a different size.

Done and done.

As an added bonus, if someone wants to save your site as an icon on their iPhone or iPad, they will get your fancy icon, instead of a crappy screenshot of your webpage.
via Safari Web Content Guide: Configuring Web Applications.

Right to Left

One of the important things to understand about how browsers read your CSS selectors, is that they read them from right to left. That means that in the selector ul > li a[title="home"] the first thing thing interpreted is a[title="home"]. This first part is also referred to as the “key selector” in that ultimately, it is the element being selected.

via Efficiently Rendering CSS | CSS-Tricks.

Dear ADP,

It’s 2010. Your website is very very broken. Your website does not even allow me to login from my mac. Several of your competitors websites do. Please address this now, or I’ll be moving on to a new payroll provider.

Thanks!

Archie

PS – I’d really like to have paperless paystubs for people with direct deposit.

But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

via Thoughts on Flash.

YouTube is about creating and watching the worlds biggest video collection; therefore, the design should make the video the star. To that end, the new look is more subdued, stripped down and simple than before. The design should help ease users into advanced features, while providing power users with all the functionality they want.

via YouTube Blog: The Video Page Gets a Makeover.

You could be forgiven for thinking that it is relatively simple matter to build a Facebook application or to integrate Facebook Connect into your website, request access to users’ profile information (and get it) and use that data for pretty much whatever you need to do with it. Unfortunately that is just not the way it works when it comes to Facebook user data.

This is a great piece on the Facebook developer site about the ambiguities of the Facebook TOS as it applies to keeping Facebook user data. As I’m working on a project thats directly related to this, I found this article invaluable.

via Facebook | web.tech.law: Legal labyrinth for Facebook developers: storing and using user data.

The next big hurdles were player management and matchmaking. After considering a few different options, they went with an open-source messaging server called ejabberd — while it’s written in Erlang, a language that they said had some “crazy syntax” (they showed an inexplicable piece of code on the projection screen to make their point), it scaled very well and clustered the way they wanted it to.

It’s pretty amazing how ofter jabber gets used as a messaging protocol. I did some initial architecture work for a text based iPhone game, and quickly found that Ejabberd was going to make life a lot easier. I looked at Chesspark, an online chess playing community. They developed an Ajax jabber client based on the Strophe.js framework for gameplay and messaging. And by using an open protocol, they were able to leverage XMPP libraries on other platforms, and extend their gameplay onto the Chess.com for iPhone, more easily. Ngmoco had a lot of the same ideas, the whole article is well worth the read.

via GDC 2010: Ngmoco explains how Eliminate was built.

WordPress has this nifty feature where it keep copies off all the revisions to your posts. It’s handy becuase if you update an post, or have more than one person working on a post, you can go back to a previously saved version.

Sounds awesome.

So, after a little mishap this morning, I went looking for an older version of somthing I posted, only to find that I didn’t have any saved post revisions.

Bummer for me.

After scouring my WordPress settings and seeing nothing, I found this little gem.

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

in my wp-config.php.

The good people over at Dreamhost, where this site is hosted, set that by default to save on database space because if you save lots of revsions of the same post, you’ll end up with a huge WordPress database. Makes sense, I guess. Anyways, once I changed the false to true and reloaded the page, all was well again.

“… but not, says the article, before the fabricated information, chalked up to “credible sources,” was used as justification to ground some international flights, and even evacuate New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

via Slashdot

(via) Aldosoft.