This past week Matt and I worked on several new tools to help manage the ever-increasing flood of spam that DZone attracts. I think we achieved a breakthrough on a key issue.

One annoying thing in Firefox 3.5 is the 'missing-close-button' on the single tab. By default. FF3.5 doesn't allow you to close a tab, when there is only one tab is there in the FF window. This article explains how to enable the close functionality even for the single tab also.

What idiot at Microsoft thought this would be a good idea? What group of idiots let it continue for years?

"In this article, we’ll show you a different approach to image optimization, based on how image data is stored in different formats. Let’s start with the JPEG format and a simple technique called the eight-pixel grid."

On the importance of paying attention to small details.

Since the last time I posted browser benchmarks, Google Chrome jumped to version 2, Safari released version 4, Internet Explorer 8 was released, and just yesterday Firefox version 3.5 hit the intertubes. Furthermore, the Dromaeo JavaScript benchmarks have been refined and expanded since then, so it’s high time we update the numbers.

how to implement a jQuery plugin to transform any dropdown into an indexed dropdown (specially useful when you need to deal with large number of options).

404 pages are going to happen whether you like it or not. This article will show how to create a 404 page that is useful for users.

This is not yet another regular expression replacement template engine. The template engine uses PHP itself to render the template. The template itself is very intuitive to people who are already familiar with PHP. There is no extra learning for additional syntax - the template code itself is just plain PHP code. Though I haven't done any benchmark, from my past experience of using it, it is pretty fast - consider that it consists of less than 100 lines of code. Thinking of using Smarty?

I am happy to release another free icon set: RSS Cheese. The set contains 4 high resolution RSS icons that come in four sizes: 512x512, 256x256, 128x128 and 64x64. Icons are completely free and can be used without any restrictions in any type of project inlcuding commercial projects.