Al Priest’s Blog

Okay, so this is going to sound like an advert, but it’s a neat idea so I thought i’d blog about it. Cahoot have a facility for their customers to automatically generate a unique set of single-use credit card details associated to you.
It’s called the Webcard and the idea is that everytime you want to [...]

Announcing my first Google maps mashup – my Pub Finder. It integrates content from the great www.BeerInTheEvening.com site with maps, and then gives variably coloured icons denoting the rating of the pub.
To use it: move the map to an area you’d like to visit. If no pubs appear, then enter the placename of where you [...]

Tired of sitting through automated menus when you call companies? Some enterprising fellows have setup the gethuman website which will tell you the ‘cheats’ to get through to a live person. UK listings here

Here it is – On One Map – http://ononemap.com/
At last someone has integrated Google Maps with estate agents’ feed in the UK. Whilst there has been a mashup of US craigslist and google maps for a while, this is the first time i’ve seen it done in the UK. It get its’ detail from a [...]

If you add encarta@conversagent.com to your MSN IM contacts list, you can ask it questions. Neat. It’ll even open Encarta in a sidebar in Messenger to answer your question in more detail.
From Chris Sells’ blog.

One of the few pages from a set of Gmail power tips, this page shows you how to use Plus Addressing. Essentially it lets you have many email addresses based on your single gmail one, and then filter/block them at will. i.e. you don’t have to give out your real email address to companies. Of [...]

The Google / Amazon / etc search box in Firefox is very useful, but a little bit bigger (or at least a customisable width) would make it so much nicer. Today I came across an extension which provides a ‘grab’ handle to let you resize the search box to suit your needs.

So, you write your form tags and the browser renders extra space after the closing tag. Solution linked below.
Problems with extra vertical space after forms

I’ve just been reading up on mocks for testing and they look like a pretty neat and powerful way to improve your testing. I’ve written this sample code based on the example Martin Fowler gives in his excellent article.
This example is of an order which attempts to fullfil itself from a Warehouse. Here’s the Warehouse [...]

In your ASPX page, add the following such that it renders in the top-right of the popup window

And add this code such that it renders in the bottom-left of the popup window

Then add the following Javascript to your page and make a call to resizeThisWindow().
// Default window dimensions to add to the size we ‘read’ [...]