Monthly Archives: June 2012

BlogBuzz June 30, 2012

Stripe

Accepting Credit Cards Online With Stripe

Historically, processing monetary transactions online has been a major pain. Conniving financial institutions would force you to pay tons of extra fees, requiring merchant accounts and other junk. Then Stripe came along, bringing some sanity to the e-commerce world. With Stripe, you get a…

An Apple

Commonly Misused Proverbs

It’s interesting how commonly-used aphorisms eventually become used in a context opposite to their actual meaning. One particularly egregious example is the phrase “it’s just a few bad apples,” frequently used to defend a group or organization from the actions of a few. Variations…

Proxying Web APIs with NGINX

Here’s a cool thing I bet you didn’t know could be done with the NGINX server: proxying APIs from web services. Why would you want to do that? Well, for starters, you can avoid running into cross-domain scripting issues. Your client-side JavaScript can query…

BlogBuzz June 16, 2012

WordPress Post Thumbnails: Migrating from Custom Fields to the Featured Image API

I had post thumbnails on this blog a long time before the feature became a part of the WordPress core. Some of you out there may have, too. The technique that was generally used before the friendly “Featured Image” box, and its associated theme…

Animating a CSS Sprite With JavaScript

Take a look at this demo, and guess how the animation is achieved. It’s not an animated GIF. It’s a PNG sprite that is brought to life with a little bit of JavaScript. The sprite image is a long strip containing each frame of…