Jem's field notes

It’s funny: one of the reasons I quit my old job was because it was leaving me mentally drained, exhausted and frustrated at the end of the day. I stopped blogging because all I wanted to do was rant about certain people making things very awkward. Now I’ve got my new job I come home… read full entry »

As most of you are aware, some issues were found with some of the CodeGrrl scripts late last year and an announcement was made with the necessary fixes. Unfortunately, despite these fixes being easily and freely available people still ignored the risks (despite hundreds being exploited) or even worse: deleted the protection.php file (which had… read full entry »

You know it’s time to have a clean out when you find: ..hot chocolate sachets dated “BEST BEFORE END JUN 96” behind a box of teabags (probably equally as old) in the back of a cupboard.

I saw mince pies and Christmas cake in Tesco (supermarket) today. I don’t know whether to be giddy with excitement that Christmas isn’t far off or cynical about Christmas stock appearing on the shelves already. That said, at least I’ve not seen any snowmen Christmas decorations yet… Edit (20:46): Programs that try and sound good… read full entry »

I was going through my hits and mint stats as per usual this evening and noticed that the lovely Carly was plugging me again.. I went to check out why I was being linked to find a thread at a forum where the discussion of tables and divs had come up. About three quarters of… read full entry »

Made some new changes to BellaBuffs this week thanks to feedback and bug reports from Téa P. They are as follows: Fixed XHTML validity issue in form textareas in: join.php, update.php and contact.php Changed value of submit button in contact.php (copy&paste error!) Included footer.php in join.php error messages Added fixEmail() to “Reply-To: ” in e-mail… read full entry »

What with the recent increase in dooce-ing and an article in this weeks Micro Mart about “the perils of blogging” it got me thinking about how many of my readers write about work, and how many would be willing to give up their blog or lose their job, should the situation arise. Personally, I’m quite… read full entry »

Firstly, does anyone know if there is a way (or a program) to alter the mapping of keys on a Mac? I keep hitting ” for @ and vice versa and it’s incredibly frustrating when I’m coding all day and keep surrounding attributes with superfluous @. Update: Instead of re-mapping the keys myself I managed… read full entry »

I think I did well today. Excusing the fact that when my boss asked me to e-mail my colleagues I ended up typing in my personal e-mail address (force of habit) instead of my work address. Then, when I went to upgrade a client’s forum because it was about 10 versions out of date, Transmit… read full entry »

Defensive Design for the Web: How to Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Online Crisis Points, by 37signals, Matthew Linderman and Jason Fried, really should be called “Examples of Bad Error Messages, Forms, etc” because although there were lots of pretty screenshots in the book, there wasn’t much in the way of real solutions… read full entry »