Photo by anda (: There’s an awesome WordPress plugin called Comment Notifier – what it does is add that check box at the bottom of the comments section. If you leave it checked when you add a comment, then it will automatically email you with anyone ease’s comments in the future.

However, it has a slight problem with spam. When spammers leave comments, my combination of Akismet and NoSpamNX do a pretty good job of keeping spam comments of of the site, but not before their (usually fake) email gets added to the Comment Notifier database.

Recently, I realized that my server was trying to send out several hundred failing emails any time someone left a comment. I shot a short feature request (and a small donation) to the Comment Notifier plugin’s author, but then decided that this was one I could take on myself. Here’s how I did it:

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At Sociable Labs, we have hundreds JavaScript unit tests that run on every checkin. They output a JUnit-compatible report that Bamboo can use to track stats and email us if anything failed. Here’s how we do it.

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I often open a new tab in my Terminal to run an Ant task, and often as not I forget to cd into the correct directory first and so I am greeted with this error:

Nathan-Mac:~ nathan$ ant database.start
Buildfile: build.xml does not exist!
Build failed

On my system, there’s only one main project that uses ant, so I almost always intend for ant tasks to be run against that project’s build.xml. So, I created a function that makes ant tasks “just work” no matter what directory I am in.

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I just finished a writeup on the necessary JS changes to support Facebook’s OAuth 2.0 upgrade, and then Hilary did a followup post on the server-side.

The upgrade enabled right now, but it gets forced out on October 1st. These two posts should give you all you need to know to get your site ready for Facebook’s upgrade:

Part 1: JavaScript - JavaScript changes for Facebook’s OAuth 2.0 upgrade

Part 2: PHP / Backend – Server Side changes for Facebook’s OAuth 2.0 upgrade

Also worth noting, there’s a lot of good information on Facebook’s Developer Blog.

Even though I’ve been happily employed with Sociable Labs for a while now, I still get fairly frequent calls and emails from people who want to know if I’m available or I “know someone.” The list of people I know is starting to run short, so this post is intended to remedy that.

If you are an individual Web Designer or Web Developer interested in work, please post a comment below.

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I’ve seen a lot of confusion about this lately, so I thought I’d make a quick writeup to explain how facebook does it. (I’ll also give a quick tip on how you can do it yourself.)

What Facebook Does

Facebook is in a unique position compared to many developers looking to set cross domain cookies: The user visits both facebook.com and the other website. (more…)

I’m working on a project that has a legitimate (non-spammy) reason to need cross-domain cookies, and we settled on flash as a good way to accomplish this.

However, I was surprisingly unable to find any complete library or how-to guide for connecting flash cookies to javascript. So I dusted off my flash skills and built one, and and now you get to enjoy the fruit of my labor:

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Most anti-spam methods used by websites today are annoying at best. They use impossible-to-read captcha images, or they make users jump through some kind of hoop to get the email address instead of just clicking on it. This can mean lost sales and opportunities for you, because each hurdle turns away more users.

This article looks at how to use some simple HTML, CSS, & Javascript to protect your private information without making your guests jump through hoops.

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Nearly every website on the internet uses javascript in some form or fashion. Yet very few people, even those who write it and teach it, have a clear understanding of how javascript works!

Logical Operators are a core part of the language. We’re going to look at what logical operators are, what “truthy” and “falsy” mean, and how to use this to write cleaner, faster and more optimized javascript.

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XSLT is a fairly well-supported technology. It allows you to take any XML file – including RSS – and transform it into a styled HTML document. It’s kind of like CSS on steroids.

Unfortunately, most browsers think they know better and go off and do their own thing on RSS feeds.

We’re going to look at how and which browsers can be brought into line, and how to use XSLT to improve the look of your RSS feed in those browsers.

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