For a period of two or three weeks at the start of July 2009 all my sites, including this one, were unavailable. The physical node that hosts the VPS that hosts the sites was wiped out in a mass hack attack perpetrated against the operators, VAServ. All VPS data on the node was destroyed, which unfortunately included my personal email, web content, source code repositories and so on.
click here to read the rest of this post »ie6 – so long as it works
June 29th, 2009 by John Girvin
Internet Explorer 6 has been around a long time, and for a number of reasons will continue to “be around” for some time to come. Lee Munroe has written a good post on the problems and approaches to dealing with Internet Explorer 6 when working on web applications.
click here to read the rest of this post »refresh belfast – hello atto
June 16th, 2009 by John Girvin
I was at Refresh Belfast at the Black Box in Hill Street again last night, for another installment of this informal get-together for local developers and creatives. This month there was a definite creative feel as the speakers were from Atto, a Belfast based design partnership. Following the pattern of previous evenings there were two talks, What is Responsible Design and Should I Care? followed by How to Tell Authentic Stories that People Enjoy Telling Other People.
click here to read the rest of this post »refresh belfast – front take control
May 19th, 2009 by John Girvin
I recently attended the second Refresh Belfast event, an informal get-together for local developers and creatives held in the Black Box venue on Hill Street. The evening, organised by local web designer and promoter Andy McMillan, was billed as “The Refresh Belfast Front Takeover” as the speakers on the evening were all from Front, one of Belfast’s best known web design and development companies.
click here to read the rest of this post »sponsorjohn.com launched
May 2nd, 2009 by John Girvin
I’ve recently launched a website to gather donations for some sponsored cycling events that I’m doing in 2009, on behalf of the Royal National Institute of Blind People Northern Ireland (RNIB NI). Built on Codeigniter and the 960 Grid System, sponsorjohn.com uses PayPal to process donation payments and makes extensive use of jQuery for validation, user interface elements and handling AJAX requests.
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