my window on the web

Web Development

XAMPP and mod_rewrite (getting clean URLs to work)

If you're using a CMS or blog app, like Drupal or Wordpress (even if you're not) chances are you'll probably want to enable clean URLs (sometimes called search engine friendly URLs). This cool little feature uses an Apache module called mod_rewrite, and if you're developing your site using XAMPP this is disabled by default (possibly for security reasons).

Essential Firefox web developer / designer add-ons

I've been taking a few Firefox add-ons for granted, so here's a little nod to some excellent add-ons which have made my life easier. I'm not going to list 50, simply because I've found either some do the same thing, or I don't end up using them as much as I thought. So here they are:

  • Firebug
  • Web Developer Toolbar
  • Dummy Lipsum
  • IE Tab

Getting alt text to display without a caption using img_assist

I ran into a spot of trouble recently with img_assist, in that it only displayed alt text if there was also a caption below the image. Img_Assist takes the alt text from a combination of the title and description, and these fields are filled by default from the title and body of the image node. Although there is no real need for a caption below each image, you will almost always need alt text.