Monthly Archives: July 2009

Rounding Corners on Websites

July 09, 2009   Paul Norman   2 Comments

There are many many ways to do this floating around, here is just another that I have used in the past. It uses one large image file (which will be cached after the first use) and focuses on simplification of HTML markup.

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Optimising Your Site’s CSS, JavaScript, Images and Server Settings

July 09, 2009   Paul Norman   No comments

The speed at which a site loads these days is becoming less of an issue, but still I occasionally visit a site where I think “wow, that’s slow!” and look at the requests it is making in Firebug to see what on earth is going on. Often it’s a simple case of loads and loads of individual requests being made for js files, css files and (large) images. We can do something about this!

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Using Google to Calculate Driving Distance / Time in PHP

July 09, 2009   Paul Norman   44 Comments

A common problem for programmers is to calculate the straight line distance between two points given coordinates (lon / lat or easting / northing) and is trivial to solve. A less simple task is calculating the road distance between two addresses / postcodes / sets of coordinates.

But, as usual, Google can do this with ease and while it does not allow this functionality for every country in it’s API it is very simple to scrape the required information from their html service that they provide to everyone.

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