Futura. To some, the devil’s font. But only because Futura is seen everywhere from public safety signs to advertisements. Heck, it even went to space. Futura is a crisp geometric sans-serif typeface that’s great for headlines. Like many great fonts it isn’t free, but there are some great free Web font alternatives to Futura that just might work for your next Web design.
Gabriel Harper
Gabe is the owner and founder of Intavant, and contributes to Intavant Blog regularly with his expertise in design, development & business.
Articles by Gabriel Harper
Century Gothic is one of the most popular and appealing modern sans-serif fonts. Sadly this gorgeous geometric font doesn’t have a free Web font alternative. Fortunately for us Web designers, there are some great Web fonts similar to Century Gothic that we can fall back on.
WordPress has a handy little function called the_category() which outputs a link to the current post category in the loop. Unfortunately it adds a rel tag that breaks HTML5 validation. Here’s a quick fix for your theme’s functions.php.
When you use the WordPress menu system and wp_nav_menu() function in your theme, menus will by default get wrapped in a <DIV> container. Since wp_nav_menu() displays list items, this ends up outputting invalid HTML. A <DIV> is not allowed as a direct descendant of a <UL> element.
Need some scary Web fonts for your Halloween Web design? There are hundreds of high-quality and free Web fonts from Adobe Edge Web Fonts and Google Web Fonts. You can browse all 500 Adobe fonts on the Edge Web Fonts List. But, since you’re likely to pass on from this Earth before you ever finish browsing every single font, I’ve put together this collection of the ten scariest Web fonts for your Halloween Web designs.
If you’re using GreyBox in an HTML5 document you are likely to receive an error validating your HTML document.
The error looks something like this:
If you tried adding the Facebook Like button to your website and you’re using HTML5, be prepared for invalid markup failures in your HTML validator. The button should still render in browsers, but the XFBML tags are not considered valid HTML5. Thus, when you validate as HTML5, you’ll see validation errors like this:
Recently I had a website that was getting hammered with traffic. Every hit on the website requires multiple MySQL SELECT statements. While SELECTs are typically quite fast, the database in question has several million records. Upgrading hardware isn’t an option for this website right now, and disabling the account is far from the best solution. The situation demanded a way to set a hard limit on MySQL requests for an individual user account.
Once in a while you might run into a suspicious IP address accessing your website. Maybe it’s doing something funny like probing for vulnerabilities, or just spamming the heck out of your server. Being a responsible webmaster, you decide to ban the IP address from your server completely – but how? Using Apache Web server it’s easy to ban a single IP address, ban multiple IP addresses or ban an entire IP range using the .htaccess file.
When launching a new website and making a DNS change, it’s not enough to simply hope everything was done correctly. Here’s a simple trick you can use to test DNS changes on a Windows PC before they ever hit your nameserver.
