bybjorn.com | Bjørn Børresen – freelance web developer

When implementing script.aculo.us’ AJAX In Place Editor for a project I’m currently working on, I ran into some character encoding problems. My PHP framework uses ISO-8859-1, while the ajax script was submitting UTF-8 to my server. Reading the wiki documentation, I discovered that this was a ‘known feature’: The form data is sent encoded in [...]

There’s an ancient fable that tells of a frog that falls into a pail of milk. Unable to scramble out, the creature trashes around, seemingly drowning. Eventually however, his frantic struggles turn the milk into butter – and he hops away. Until now, that fable has been a good metaphor of my struggle with the [...]

In his latest Alertbox column Jakob Nielsen (you know, the usability guru) writes: I worry that search engines are sucking out too much of the Web’s value, acting as leeches on companies that create the very source materials the search engines index. He argues that people are using the search engines as ‘answer engines‘, and [...]

Or, 24 ways that is. If you’re were sleeping through december month, or maybe too busy handling your mother-in-law, you might have missed 24ways, the ajax/web2.0 advent calendar. The idea is simple; every day they would release a new ajax/web related article. The articles are written by different authors, who are probably considered experts in [...]

This is a first .. I’ve gotten lots of spam over the years, but this is the first “domain renewal”-like notice I’ve gotten from a false source. It’s got my domain name, in addition to the real domain registrant info (my name, address, etc.).. It looks like a bill, an annual fee that needs to [...]

Most of the time I’m pretty proud to call myself a Java programmer. When people ask me what programming language I work with, I usually answer Java even though I’ve probably been doing more PHP5 than Java lately. But every now and then I get a question from a client asking where he or she [...]

I finally updated the design on the phpODP page. It looks so much better now – not strange, considering the old design was, well – old. And even when it was new it wasn’t all that great. Have a look at it here.

SVN is a version system that replaces CVS (cause it’s better). I’ve been using it for quite a while, and have been kind of addicted to it. Since I haven’t yet set up my own server at home, I started looking around for SVN hosting – when I found this one which is free. I [...]

When ordering from Amazon you get to choose between grouping items into as few shipments as possible, or shipping when the items become available. Of course, the first method (shipping all items in one shipment) is the cheapest – both for you and for Amazon. Here’s how I was able to get the items shipped [...]

Going from a PR7 to nil I should know what it feels like to be the coolest kid in class one day, and the geek back in the corner the next. I’m glad my income doesn’t rely on Google traffic, cause if it did I’d be in it deep. Here’s the story: I’ve created a [...]