Why does everyone these days feel the need to give every release of their software some codename. I can understand that for the case of operating systems for example. A new big release (not just an update) asks for a new name, if not alone for marketing purposes. But today I stopped by the Joomla website and they seemed to have released version 1.0.8. This version has been given the codename “Sunshade”. Why in the world is this necessary? Version 1.0.8 doesn’t sound like it’s the next great version, doesn’t it? Why can’t they just let is simply be 1.0.8?

Note that the version of this post is 0.2.5b. Also known as “butterfly”.

I like it when my desktop looks great. And I like it when I can switch now and then according to my ever changing moods. Bright and colorful on some days, dark and gothic on others.

To give me inspiration I daily take a quick look at http://www.lynucs.org/. This site gathers screenshots of user desktops from operatings systems like linux and BSD. On the main page you can see the latest entries. There are options too to see what desktops rate highest, and I think there are some real beauties in there. And by beauties, I do no just mean the girls on the wallpapers. ;-) If you can’t stand beauty in that sense, leave the babe filter off (you find it at the top of the page).

The site certainly can be improved somewhat as some things seem broken. Nevertheless, I look at it almost daily and hope to discover something nice everytime. If you, as me, like to look at desktop screenshots, check it out.

Sometimes it can be useful to use a div inside another div. Suppose you have a liquid layout with 2 columns, each containing 2 divs on top of each other:

1 2
3 4

Now you like div number 1 and three to have borders on the right side that are exactly in line with each other vertically. Let’s further assume you both gave them a width of 25%. So far, everything is easy. But now comes the difficult part: in div number 1 you would like to use a padding of 5px, while in div number 3 you won’t use padding. The result will be that the right border of div number 1 will be 25%+10px (or 25%+2×5px) from the left, while the border of div number 3 will be 25% from the left.

It would be easy if we could set in your stylesheet “width: 25%+10px” or something like that. But there’s a nice solution we can use for these kind of situations. If you position another div inside div number 1, you can use the padding on that div instead. Div number 1 will have a width of 25%, and the div inside will take that width and work with the padding you assign (to that inside div) in that room.

I admit I didn’t use the terminology right from the start when I first got introduced to HTML. But then again, I wasn’t blogging about it and teaching it to people. Today I noticed someone just doing that. A popular blog teaches some basic HTML but uses terminology wrong. Unfortunately, because the blog seems to be rather popular a lot of people will also confuse elements with tags.

Let me quote what this blogger wrote under the heading “What are HTML tags?”:

The end ones usually have a slash (/) in them which differentiates them from the opening ones and signals to your browser that it is the end. So they will usually have this basic format - < > </ >.

Come back to this example after you read the rest and you’ll be able to tell what’s wrong with it.

First I’ll repeat the title of this post: HTML elements are not tags!

An element typically consists of a start and end tag, with content in between. For example:

<p> HTML elements are not tags</p>

is a paragraph element, with a start tag “<p>”, an end tag “</p>” and content in between them.

Some elements do not have content in them, and we write them using a special tag format with a “/”. For example:

<br />

A start tag can also have some property definition in it. These are the attributes. A commonly used one is the alt attribute:

<img src=”http://www.example.com/image.jpg” alt=”an example image” />

Using these terms correctly often makes things easier. You know what the author is speaking about and there is no confusion. Now look back at the quote. Can you tell what’s wrong with it now?

Some might wonder how people know that their pagerank actually changed on some Google datacenters. Or maybe you are just curious to know what yours is.

If you just want to check your current pagerank in a simple way an option is to install the google toolbar. Allow it to give the pagerank and then you’ll see a green bar on it (or a white bar if there is no pagerank for the given page).

If you want to check your pagerank on all datacenters a nice little tool can be found here.