How much would you pay for one of these cheat sheets? Personally, I believe £0.00 is a fair price. It seems I may be undervaluing them though - someone (Dr Lance D Chambers JP a.k.a. lance1949) in Australia has decided to start selling them on eBay (screenshot). Without permission, of course. And without the "Available free from ILoveJackDaniels.com" note. Bastard.

They have been posted on other sites before, which is one thing - but conning people into paying for something that someone else produced and distributes for nothing is very very low indeed.

He's not alone in making money from the cheat sheets, but at least this guy is more subtle - he's selling laminating and postage of the cheat sheets.

Thanks to Kevin Futter for letting me know about this.

(Of course, the cheat sheets here are free and always will be.)

Update: It appears he's made a sale! Feel free to forward AU$1.50 on to me when you're ready, Lance.

Another Update: Good news - it seems Lance has ended all of his cheat sheet listings on eBay! Perhaps it was the attention he received from this site and others, or perhaps he had a sudden attack of conscience - either way, he's finally done the right thing.

Interesting to see that eBay themselves failed dismally to do anything, despite at least five people filing separate reports about the listings.

Thanks everyone, for the comments and emails - the support was definitely appreciated!

 

All of the articles and cheat sheets on this site have so far only been created in English. Much as I'd like to offer them in a variety of language, I unfortunately lack the linguistic skills to be able to do so. Fortunately, there are some multilingual saints out there who have taken the time to translate various parts of this site into other languages.

Where translations exist (and I know about them) they are now linked to from the bottom of each article. If you know of a translation I'm missing (or would like to translate something into a different language) please e-mail me.

Update: I've added the "hreflang" attribute to links that point to translations.

 

Andy Budd has just announed the lineup for the 2006 d.Construct web development conference in sunny Brighton. Speakers this year include Simon Willison and Jeffrey Veen, and tickets should be on sale soon!

 

Opera, the revolutionary internet browser, hits version 9 today, with a host of new features - some better than others. I've been using Opera since version 6 and consider its speed and email client to be streets agead of the competition (not to mention tabbed browsing and mouse gestures).

With the addition of a BitTorrent client and Widgets, Opera should be able to make even more headway in the browser market. Their addition of a content-blocker, however, may lose them support of plenty of small-scale web publishers. We shall see.

First impressions are all good so far. If you're using a different browser, I recommend you check out Opera 9. It's free now (until recently it was ad-supported, with an option to pay for a full version without ads), and while it isn't everyone's favourite, it's definitely worth a good look.

 

I've added in some more feeds. As the topics on here tend to be many and varied, and so not necessarily all of interest to everyone, I've added category-specific RSS and Atom feeds. If you visit any category page, you will see links to the feeds at the top.

So, if you wanted to keep up to date with new cheat sheet releases by RSS, you would subscribe to the Cheat Sheets RSS Feed on the Cheat Sheets category page.

 

The Astronomy Picture of the Day turns eleven years old today. It really is a great site, with one new photo every day. They've shown stars being born, shots of Mars, the Earth at night time, the Aurora Borealis and even the occasional observatory. APoD is one of my daily must-reads - thankyou NASA!

 

For the last few months I've had nothing but problems with blog spammers. I have run a few various systems for keeping the spam in check, and most of them have been quite successful. Unfortunately, they require quite a lot of maintenance and updating, so I have changed the comment spam prevention system to use Akismet. So far, it has caught every spam posted to the site with no false positives - excellent.

What I found disturbing, though, was when I visited the Akismet site and took a look at their stats. Apparently "93% of all comments are spam" now, a far higher proportion than I had thought previously. On ILoveJackDaniels.com the figure is about 85%, and rising. So much for the search engines' promise to deal with the problem!

 

Whoops. Sorry. It appears that with the latest redesign I managed to inadvertently turn all feeds off. Thankyou to those who emailed to let me know. I finally had time to track the problem down, and it turned out to be a URL rewriting issue. I'm not sure if it was down to the redesign or moving server, but whichever it was, the problem is now fixed. Sorry for the downtime!

 

How often do you send an email, only to have your world brought crashing down around you in despair when you realise that, despite the fact you said in the email, "I've attached the document", you forgot to actually add the damn thing? If you're anything like me, you do it with startling regularity. There are solutions, though, and I use two - here they both are, for your emailing pleasure.

 

Ben from Binary Moon posted about a great game, Monkey Kick Off. My best? 5946 monkey meters. Can you beat that?

 

Yes folks, it's time for another redesign. Sorry to keep confusing you like this.

The previous incarnation of this site was one of my favourites, when it was sitting in my graphics editor. Once it had been painfully transferred over to HTML and CSS though, it lost whatever it had that made me like it. It also refused to work in Internet Explorer, and as far as I can tell, that is down to a combination of bugs in the browser and my code.

Regardless, I've had enough of V4 of the site, so have put together V5, which hopefully you are now seeing. It's warmer than previous incarnations, and I think better laid out. There's more whitespace, which is always a good thing. There's an updated logo (not vastly different, but a bit closer to the idea I originally had), and there's even a tagline, which is at the bottom of the page because I couldn't make it look good anywhere else. See, this is why I'm not a designer.

Here's a brief rundown of what's new and what's changed:

• Comment Feeds
  Comment feeds are now available for all posts in case you want to keep up to date, in both Atom and RSS formats.
   
• Recent Posts
  Recent Posts are now listed at the bottom of each article. Plenty of people were arriving at the site from direct links to articles, and from the testing I have done it seems clear that those few that want to keep reading would like to know where the newer stuff is.
   
• Front Page
  The front page of the site has had probably the most significant overhaul. It's now usable, which may come as a shock to some.
   
• Topic Navigation
  The topics list in the right hand navbar has been altered too. It's been broken down into sections, and smaller categories have been removed. They're still accessible through the "Articles" page, but these are the categories rarely viewed by browsers.

That's more or less it, though I'm bound to have forgotten to mention something important. All criticism, constructive or otherwise, is much appreciated!

 

During a particularly geeky conversation recently, the topic got around to Web Design Commandments. If I were to come up with them, they might be a little something like this. I'm sure not everyone will agree with these though, so please feel free to add to the list!

1. Thou Shalt Be Damn Careful If Thou Must Use Embedded Audio Or Video.
2. Thow Shalt ensure Designers, Developers And Marketers Work With, Not Against, Each Other.
3. Thou Shalt Not Covet <blink>, <marquee>, JavaScript Slide-Ins, Images Following The Mouse Around Or Other Foul Tags and Effects.
4. Thou Shalt Not Waste The Users' Time Demanding Unnecessary Information.
5. Thou Shalt Not Use Flash For Everything.
6. Thou Shalt Code Using Specifications And Standards.
7. Thou Shalt Structure Thy Site In A Meaningful Way.
8. Thou Shalt Not Confuse The User With Unclear Navigation.
9. Thou Shalt Test Thy Site Extensively.
10. Thou Shalt Give The User What The User Wants.