In my opinion fantastic news from the BBC today, as they announce that Internet Explorer has a massive security flaw, which could allow hackers to control your machine and steal passwords.

Read the article from the BBC; Internet Explorer security alert

What does this all mean? Well, if a hacker can gain control of your PC, he can install any software he likes, you won’t necessarily see this happening. An example of the software they might install is a key press tracker, which will log any key strokes you make on the keyboard. Therefore the next time you log onto your internet banking, type in your username and password, the hacker would recieve these details, and therefore have access to your money.

It is reported that the major Anti Virus companies are also warning their customers about this lack of security that Internet Explorer provides, and the fact that they cannot protect you against such attacks, their suggestion is to use another browser.

I thought I would take this opportunity to provide my readers with a list of SAFE browsers, this list is of free web browsers, they all behave the same, they all show you the internet. They are just all safe.

• Mozilla Firefox
• Apple Safari
• Opera
• Google Chrome
• Flock (Mozilla Based)

If you are using Internet Explorer of any kind, you should think about upgrading to a safer browser, you will find your web experience much better too, there are many flaws with the way Microsoft display web sites, which whilst it may not make much sense of difference to the way you see the web, for designers and developers its a nightmare to bring you consistancy when delivering web sites to IE.

Microsoft say they are looking at releasing a patch for Internet Explorer 7, but have warned there will be no support for IE6 or below, so if you, or any one you know are still using this relic of a browser, its about time they upgraded to a safer better browser, if not at least upgrade to IE7 once Microsoft have fixed their security flaw.

Congratulations and prayers go out to my close friend and his wife Paul and Ruth Leverett, with the birth of their baby girl this morning.

Born at 4:00am Thursday 11 December 2008. Wieghing in at 5lbs4 she was born six weeks early, and is currently (at the time of me writing this post) in an incubator with assistance with breathing.

Rachael and I will be keeping the family in our prayers, and I kindly ask you to also.

Paul Leverett is the Bass and backing vocalist for pop band Electralyte, who recently produced and released their latest album, available now for £12.

A quick search of the internet on how best to use H1 elements on a page, will give you an inconclusive answer on the subject. This is simply my views on the matter, and perhaps another spanner in the works. All the same, I dont think this debate will ever go away, unless that is W3C publish more light on the correct usage.

On my search, I came across an article from Andy Budd who I beleive rightly so points out that if a sidebar contains information differing from the main content of a page, should it be any less important for the reader? He also explains how an experienced screenreader may have all the level one headings read aloud, as this would accurately give the description of the content for that page. If only one top level heading was used, for example for the title of the web site, the user may naturally assume that the page does not contain the content he is looking for.

This said, suppose a blog overview page. Many different chapters of the web site on one page. Are the titles of those ‘documents’ less important than the title of the web page? Think of this, a comment from Andy’s site asks us to see the following document;

See http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/Use_h1_for_Title "<h1> is the HTML element for the first-level heading of a document"

Therefore if you are looking at multiple documents (blog posts) within one page, surely you should be using first level headings for each document. Equating to multiple heading ones on one page.

Whilst thinking about a project for a musician I am currently designing for, I came accross a potential problem for those novices to HTML that wouldn’t have a clue about how to add a YouTube video into a Content Management website.

So I got to work on creating a plugin for my beloved CMS Dreamscape.

So here it is. My second Dreamscape CMS plugin, YouTube. If you would like a preview of the plugin in action, well check out below, the video showing is simply from an anchor/link of the YouTube video. You can even set the height and width options within the Preferences menu on Dreamscape.

My attention was drawn away today, (it didnt take much) from a recent Plurk post by Siobhan, about how you can turn Twitter posts into bling bling.

Intrugued, I checked out the link, and was impressed. What a great use of the Twitter network, to help Twitter users earn money, by, twittering!

I highly recommend the service and suggest you find out more for yourself by visiting Be A Magpie, and start Twittering like you have never Twittered before!

Have fun, and see you there.

Oh and dont foget to follow me, or add me as a friend on Twitter!

For a long time now I have been using Inquisitor for Safari, a plugin for the Apple web browser which displays suggestions and provides autocompletion for your searches right in your browser.

Inquisitor speeds up your searches like no other. Start typing and websites appear instantly, along with suggestions to help refine your search.

Inquisitor understands you, learning and tailoring your results as you search. You can also add more search engines with customized keyboard shortcuts.

Inquisitor is fast, smart, flexible and free! (Extract from Inquisitor)

I thought when David Watanabe’s inquisitor was acquired by Yahoo!, we might all see the downslide of the clever plugin, but Yahoo! have pulled a great product out of the hat with compatibility for both Firefox and Internet Explorer, keeping the same look and feel originally designed by David Watanabe.

So what are you waiting for download Inquisitor now.

A while ago Twitter was reported to be the most down site on the internet, with more maintenance downtime you could shake a stick at.

Fortunately Twitter seem to have resolved this issue now, though it is not without its faults. But now it seems my new favourite social networking site seems to be headed in the same direction, of the feared downtime. Plurks consistant errors of 503 pages and "something went wrong" pages are beginning to bug me.

They have had the site working, what are they doing to cause these error messages, or who on earth are they using for their hosting? Obviously a company who cannot cope with the grand scale of things.

Lets hope the owners of Plurk can pick up the slack before people start to move on?

If you are anything like me, you have been starting to use the great features listed in the CSS3 directive. Taking advantage of such psuedo classes as :last-child, and nth-child().

Unfortunately Microsoft have not been too intelligent about adding the CSS directives into its browser, inlike the Mozilla based browsers and Safari. Before today I was frustrated with having to make work arounds for IE7 let alone IE6. In many cases I have ignored IE6 functionality, and ignored the users still using an unsafe, outdated browser.

But today, Dean Edwards has changed all that. I have discovered his unobtrusive javascript for compatibility of IE5 through IE8 with the new CSS3 directive.

Dean has built two scripts to alter the workings of IE, one specifically for IE7 which upgrades MSIE5-6 to be compatible with MSIE7, and highlights some key functionality in the latest CSS directives.

And probably my script of choice called IE8.js, which I will provide the download location of here, for my use and yours.

To get Internet Explorer behaving like a standards compliant browser simply include the script in the following fashion:

<! — [if lt IE 8]>
<script src="http://ie7-js.googlecode.com/svn/version/2.0(beta3)/IE8.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<![endif] — >

To fix transparent PNG images, including background images, you need to name any such images with the *-trans.png suffix. Unfortunately, the transparent background image cannot be tiled (repeated) using background-repeat. Nor can it be positioned using background-position.

You can download the script from Google SVN, as far as I can tell, Dean Edwards script does not affect any other javascript libraries. If you find any descrepencies with that please let me know.

Dean Edwards you are freakin awsome!

A good friend of mine made a discovery about where her hits for images were coming from, and I would like to share my utter disbelief and discust at the rudeness of some people.

The website tutorialdirectory.net (please pardon me for not linking) is copying interlectual property from Letters To You Tutorials, not only is the website in question copying content, but he has not even had the time to save his own images, or alter links, just simply copy and paste the source code by the looks of things.

This complete disregard for someones hard work and time is unpardonable. Tutorial Directory should be blacklisted. Or perhaps I shall share his Stumble Upon profile, as it seems to be the only way to send the perpetrator a message.

I can only assume that the theif is trying to earn some money from his Google adverts, so those with static IP’s should just click click click, this will cause Google to think that he is clicking his own adverts and blacklist him!!

I just think this stealing is rude and inappropriate on the web today.

After some time of using this fix, I thought it about time to post it somewhere I can always find it, and offer you some of my knowledge about the ClearFix class.

Applied to any element, it is guaranteed to clear that element beneath or away from its parent elements, preceeding it.

/*
P.I.E. FLOAT CLEARING ----------------------------
See http://www.positioniseverything.net/easyclearing.html
and http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200603/new_clearing_method_needed_for_ie7/
*/
.clearfix:after {
content: ".";
display: block;
clear: both;
visibility: hidden;
line-height: 0;
height: 0;
}
.clearfix {
display: inline-block;
}
html[xmlns] .clearfix {
display: block;
}
* html .clearfix {
height: 1%;
}

Have fun and enjoy.