I just wanted to take a minute to introduce my first WordPress plugin, WordPress HTTPS. When viewing a public WordPress page via HTTPS, sometimes images, JavaScript, and CSS files that are loaded on the page are not always loaded via HTTPS. This is primarily due to the way in which many WordPress plugin developers code the paths to these elements. My plugin takes care of all elements that are loaded on an HTTPS page and ensure that they are loaded over HTTPS.
If you have any questions or comments, please let me know. The plugin was only released a couple of days ago, so I’m looking for feedback and suggestions.
Today while working on a site, I ran into a really frustrating bug in IE7. While trying to stack absolutely positioned elements on a website, IE7 would not pay attention to z-index what-so-ever. The solution to this problem was to change the z-index of the parent element of what you want to display on top to a z-index higher than that of what you are trying to display underneath. I have no idea why this is the case, but since we’ll be supporting IE7 for a long time to come, it’s something that web developers need to be aware of.
I found a pretty good example of this bug in this article – Squish the Internet Explorer Z-Index Bug | Brenelz Web Design Solutions
I’ll be updating this article shortly with an example of my own.
About 1.6 billion people use the Internet every day. Out of all of those people, about 70% of them use Google as their preferred search engine. My question for you is a simple one: What would happen if Google ceased to exist? This thought came to me today when a Google outage brought the Internet to a crawl.
I’m sure the first answer that comes to mind is “Omg, the world would implode!” Well, I’m here to tell you that the world probably wouldn’t implode, but it would have serious repercussions. Almost every major website on the Internet relies on Google in some way. Many sites receive almost all of their traffic directly from Google searches while other use Google services such as Gmail or Adsense for their business. If something critical happened to Google, what would these businesses do? What would the end-users do? What would we all do?
Today some of us caught a small glimpse of what the Internet would be like if Google suddenly disappeared. Every website that used any Google service almost completely shut down because the external scripts hosted on Google’s servers were inaccessible (this site included). I personally found myself lost and confused. My Gmail was down and Google was down so I couldn’t ‘Google’ what the problem was. I couldn’t get on Google Talk to ask any other web heads what was wrong either. I tried using Live Search and Yahoo to no avail. My only savior was ‘poor man’s email‘, Twitter. Twitter was running rampant with people twittering about the Google outage.
On that note, I think the answer is clear as to what we would do without Google: Twitter.