Michi Knows

Welcome. This is my technical blog. If you are a LAMP web developer with an interest in business this is the blog for you.

Here, you will find 100% original articles related to one of two things: IT news or programming. I try to write as many good programming articles as I can, but as you can imagine, it is very hard coming up with original programming posts day after day. As such, the majority of the time, I cover IT business news. I try to refrain from simply summarizing, and I rarely post an article if I can’t find an interesting observation to make. For you programmers, I write about JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL the most. If you want to learn more about me as a person, click here. I try to post at least one article a day on weekdays.

You’ll notice this site uses a couple of JavaScript effects that are entirely unnecessary. While I don’t regularly add effects such as these for commercial sites I do, I thought it would be an interesting challenge. For example, the right two navigation links on top of my home page use "AJAX" (loads content without refreshing the page). But to make things more interesting, I added conditions to the project:

1. The AJAX links had to work without javascript
2. The content would not be duplicated (no ajax-only versions of a page)
3. The site must be XHTML 1.0 compliant
4. There must be no Javascript markup inside the content except in the footer and header as include files
5. Must integrate with the blog
6. Must work in the latest versions of Opera, Firefox, and IE and look nearly if not exactly identical
7. No tables for layout placement

Any seasoned web developer knows these requirements are rediculously hard to meet — especially getting AJAX functionality without marking up the links. =) This was a fun challenge. I will eventually document how these obstacles were overcome and update this page. I plan to buy a Mac soon, but until then, I’m afraid I can’t be certain if Mac browsers are supported. I made the tough decision that this site would require javascript. While many commercial entities always have non-javascript versions of their content, I think we’re getting to that point where Javascript is becoming an integral ‘net technology that is pretty much as standard as HTML tags. As such, since this is a personal site, Javascript is "required." However, as condition #1 said above the site is fully functional without Javascript (although PNG images break in IE).

Article 1: Designing without Javascript
Article 2: A Brand New Way to Hide Your Email Address