For those needing the best RSS and Atom parser on the net, SimplePie answers the call. It’s light (one file) yet powerful enough for almost any job. (Float like butterfly, sting like bitch.) The documentation is amazing and the community of people backing it far exceeds anything else. OMG did I mention the caching feature??

When it comes to RSS parsing, I’ve been around the block - Magpie RSS is too complex, packed with features I’d never use. And Last RSS works sporadically - loving some server configurations and hating others.

Though Vanna White expresses her love for Arial, and Helvetica alike, at least she crushes the hearts of sans-serif fans. It’s clear she’s a Mac groupie. Sajak smartly diverts the question.

According to Microsoft support , correctly displaying PNG’s in Internet Explorer should be as simple as copying & pasting their example. This is the CSS that Microsoft claims will correctly display :

filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='image.png', sizingMethod='crop');

The above code will work for inline CSS, that is, CSS mixed with HTML:

<div id="png_bg" style="position:absolute; left:140px; height:400; width:400;
     filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(
     src='image.png', sizingMethod='crop');" >
</div>

If you don’t want to mix your CSS with your HTML, external style sheets are the obvious choice. However the above example won’t work in an external style sheet. Instead, the path to image.png needs to be absolute, like this: /direct/path/to/image.png

Your external style sheet would look something like this:

#png_bg {
    background-image: none;
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(enabled=true, sizingMethod=crop, src='/path/to/image.png');
}

Shout at me if I got this all wrong.

Internet Explorer (IE) yanks a furry cats ass. If for any reason you disagree with me, then you’re retarded. It’s that simple.

Assuming you want to disable a few select options, don’t try the following in IE6:

<select name="ie_sucks">
   <option disabled="disabled">One</option>
   <option disabled="disabled">Two</option>
   <option>Three</option>
</select>

Although the above example is valid XHTML (and therefore works in Opera, Firefox, Safari, etc), IE6 displays all three options as selectable, as if the disabled option was never set. Thankfully lattimore.id.au has come up with a nice fix.

Puke you later IE.

Update: I should also note that IE7 doesn’t accept disabled="disabled" in an option field. Sweet Christ.

Iris Luckhaus has a collection of awesome artwork that looks strikingly similar to the early days of Captain America - or not. It’s good poo, people. Hug it.

iCal just plain rules. Though it’s not a super-detailed, completely all-knowing calendar application, it’s the most user friendly offline event tracker to date. (The best online calendar is Google Calendar, hands down.)

Allowing your loyal, web-savvy fans to download iCal files (enabling them to instantly add events to their iCal program), or subscribing to iCal feeds (allowing their iCal program to update the users calendar whenever they chose - much like RSS) can bring a smile to even the pickiest of web surfers.

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Here’s a group thinking outside the box of boxes. Luke Taylor, with Ed Heal, Chris Barrett, Tim Brown, Kieren Dickins and Kalvyn James designed Kingston University’s 2006 identity based around the idea that “at Kingston, we look at things differently”. Clearly, they do.

Cake can be a real bitch with errors. Deciphering exactly what went wrong (and in what file) can take way longer than it should. One such example was a blank Missing Layout error I received last week. Upon firing up one of my Cake apps on my server, the following appeared when visiting a particular page:

Missing Layout: You are seeing this error because the layout file can't be found or doesn't exist.

Notice: If you want to customize this error message, create /cat/views/errors/missing_layout.thtml.

Fatal: Confirm you have created the file :

Now normally, the last line above points you to the file it’s trying to find. This is Cake’s way of pointing you in the right direction - a hint, if you will.

Example: Fatal: Confirm you have created the file : \project\app\views\pages\index.thtml.

Cake’s “hint” to me was blank. CakePHP, eat me.

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