Fivetwelve

For a fun new project, Fivetwelve have launched a brand new URL shortener.

Introducing ftw.gd – the URL shortener with a fun twist.

If you’re familiar with the technical babble of “leet speak”, with slang such as “ftw”, you will like ftw.gd. It’s a great new URL shortener that is free for everyone to use for sharing short links on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It also has a bit of a fun twist on it.

So the next time you need to shorten a URL for your tweets, give ftw.gd a try.

Again, this is more a note to myself, but I find the best function to preload images with jQuery is the following:

jQuery.preloadImages = function() {
     for(var i = 0; i<arguments.length; i++)
    {
          jQuery("<img>").attr("src", arguments[i]);
    }
}

This accepts X amount of arguments and can be called like the following:

$.preloadImages("/static/img/loadinganimation.gif", "/static/img/throbber.gif");

Why would you want to do this? Simple – if you’re using any “loading animations” on your site, with animated GIFs, you may find that on first activation on certain browsers the GIF is missing. If you preload it using a function like this one, your problem is solved.

Credit to this function goes to bloggingdeveloper.com.

So I thought I would break away from the usual “very technical” programming tutorials and today write something that bears a bit more relevance to the average UK household – broadband ISPs.

This subject is something I feel quite strongly about, as I’m obviously just not an everyday Internet user. Occasionally I game online, I regularly stream HD media via services such as iPlayer and I’m always browsing countless pages as well as maintaining websites via services such as FTP. Therefore I feel a reliable broadband service is pretty much the bread and butter for me – almost as important as something like running water and electricity. So forgive me if this article waffles on a bit. (more…)