Not to be outdone by Apple’s recent launch of their HTML5 playground, Google has launched their own HTML5 Developer Resource site called HTML5Rocks.com.

The site has some useful tutorials and an interactive sandbox, but for the time-impaired, they also have an excellent presentation that shows you quickly what is new and different. As with most things Google, it’s not the prettiest site, but it gets the job done. Check it out.

If you’ve been considering buying a MapTechnica Tile Set (c’mon, you know I’m talking about you), you now have a risk-free way to try a sample tile set to see if it will work for your map project.

I created a special tile set that contains the Rhode Island tile set and supporting data, along with sample files that help you get going quickly. For more details, visit the Free 5-Digit ZIP Code Sample Set Information page over at MapTechnica.

Apple has just launched an effort to support more widespread adoption of HTML5 in the developer community. This page showcases a bunch of cutting-edge demos, and this page digs into the demos more deeply and provides more resources to learn how to develop features using HTML5.

Standards aren’t add-ons to the web. They are the web. And you can start using them today.

I try to use this site for positive tips, tricks & posts about web development. No, really. I do. But every now and then I come across a site so horrible, so incomprehensibly broken, that I just need to call them out by name: Dish Network.

Dish Network’s website is an unmitigated disaster of usability and UI. Clearly born out of some corporate design committee, this customer goodwill-burning, will-to-live-sapping site employs some of the worst design and UI practices out there. In the end, they violate the number one rule in business: Never make it hard for a customer to give you money. But along the way, they put up every conceivable obstacle to achieving even the most simple task possible.

For starters, they use Flash-based logins. I personally believe that Flash-based logins are evil and pointless. They block accessibility and prevent use of password managers like 1Password. But in this case, it’s especially bad because there is no fall-back if you don’t have Flash installed. No Flash? You’re screwed. iPhone/iPad users? Fuck you. Users who have plug-ins disabled? Bitez moi. ClickToFlash users? Sit on it.

Next up: Mac users, you must not exist. Inexplicably, the site is very broken in all three major browsers on the Mac. Images fail to load. Accessibility support is inconsistent or outright broken. Every Flash-based button is broken because the sans font is different on the Mac and nobody at Dish bothered to check. I’m sure it works in IE6, though.

But here’s the ultimate kicker: You cannot do anything on this piece of shit site with regard to your bill. After logging in, all your account options are locked out (you know this because the broken button labels are a slightly darker shade of gray than they normally are). So all roads lead to the account profile page. After some trial and error, you have to figure out on your own that you must scroll to the bottom and re-enter all your login credentials (keeping in mind that you’re *already* logged in). First they kick you in the left nut by making it look like you’re resetting your account with an entirely new password. Then they finish the job with a Flash-based form that uses a different password validator than the main Flash-based form. Even if you wanted to enter a new password, you can’t reset your account because the form won’t validate your existing password. This effectively locks you out of the account and prevents further changes, online bill pay, auto-payment setup or any other means of managing your account. So if you happened to, say, use an exclamation mark in your password, you’re done. Game over. Pack it up. Go home. Or should I say, “Go home!”

The site has been this way for the two+ years I’ve been a customer. It’s a good thing I enjoy their HD programming or I would have kicked them to the long ago. I won’t pretend that someone at Dish will read this post and suddenly make the necessary changes, but it sure does feel good to rant.

Time to step up onto my organic soap box.

If your spouse is like mine, you have been empowered with the awesome responsibility of entering the HGTV Dream Home and Green Home Give-Aways day after day, year after year.

Until this latest contest, it hasn’t been a problem. At the start of each contest, I set up an Automator workflow to run each night and I’m done.

Until, that is, Scripps decided to resort to some serious douchebaggery with their latest Green Home Give-Away.

Violation #1) Use of non-standard form elements. Specifically, they override standard functionality of their select menus, input and radio buttons.

The result: accessibility is tossed out the window. Typical highlight cues are overridden and omitted, leaving it nearly impossible to navigate the form using keyboard commands.

(Egregious) Violation #2) with some JavaScript tom-foolery, the entry form requires that you manually scroll down, down, down, down, down past all the superfluous offers to get to…once again… a non-standard button element (see #1 above).

Now some of you will say that I shouldn’t be writing an Automator script to mimic human behavior and that I’m depriving Scripps of my precious eyeballs. I would argue that during the hour or so it took me to set up the script (attempted to do so in this latest case), each and every brand impression is well and truly burned into both retinas and that daily impressions no longer matter. I would also argue against the implicit assumption that the Marketeers over at Scripps have a right, moral or otherwise, to my mindshare. But this would be missing the point.

Using non-standard elements and throwing accessibility out the window with the explicit intent to force the visitor into a particular action is web usability at its worst. There are cleaner, standards-compliant methods to accomplish their (dubious) goals without leaving visually impaired users in the dust.

Bottom line: the project managers making the decisions at Scripps should be ashamed of themselves. Here’s to hoping they don’t make the same mistake for the next contest.

Lots going on over at my side-project, MapTechnica, lately. In addition to the US 5-Digit Zip Code Maps and US County Boundary Maps, I’ve just turned on City maps.

Looking back, I should have started with these given how cool they turned out to be.  In truth, though, I didn’t realize the data and shapefiles for the cities were in the vast Tiger/Line database since the US Census Bureau calls them “places,” not “cities.” Oh, well.

Serendipitously, the city boundaries work amazingly well with the city labels and information already embedded in the Google Map layer, so the effect is a truly additive mapping product without the need for map markers.

I’m still working on productizing the tile set and database, but that should be up in the next few days.  In the mean time, head over to the free US Cities Boundary Map Tool and play around.  As always, I’d love any feedback you might have.

By default, the root account is disabled in OS X. If you are a developer new to the platform, you will be needing to access many things that are available only with root access. This tutorial walks you through the process of enabling the root account in Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6).

NOTE: This guide is specific to enabling root access on Snow Leopard, (10.6). To learn how to enable root access on Tiger (10.4), follow these instructions instead. To learn how to enable root access in Leopard (10.5), follow these instructions.

Enabling Root in Snow Leopard 10.6:

1. Choose Apple menu > System Preferences and click Accounts
2. Click Login Options
3. Click either Edit or Join in the Network Account Server section
4. Click Open Directory Utility
5. Click the lock icon to unlock it, and then enter your administrator name and password
6. Choose Edit > Enable Root User, and then enter a root password in the Password and Verify fields

Now, you are set to access protected areas of the system via the terminal.

If you have any dynamic sites that can display the same information through a variety of URLs (e.g. “somepage.php?category=cats&story=123″ vs. “somepage.php?story=123&category=cats”), Google has provided a way for you to avoid the duplicate content issue by providing a “preferred link.”

Basically, you add a special link tag to the head of your page:

When Google finds duplicate content, it will transfer the page ranks and index data to your preferred link.

Clap your hands and say yeah. You’re done.

Head on over to the Google Webmasters Central Blog for details on this tip.

Recommended reading:

This article provides a solid overview of the relatively new vector for attack that hijacks your open redirect URLs.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Open redirect URLs: Is your site being abused?

No one wants malware or spammy URLs inserted onto their domain, which is why we all try to follow good security practices. But what if there were a way for spammers to take advantage of your site, without ever setting a virtual foot in your server?

There is, by abusing open redirect URLs.

(via @goatlady‘s tweet:) For the next 14 days, one of SitePoint’s most popular books, “The Art & Science Of CSS,” is available to download for FREE.

The promotion is designed to get you to follow SitePoint on Twitter, but you can enter your favorite spam catching email address to get the download for free, too.

Click here: Twitaway Free Offer

[NOTE:] In fact, at the moment, the email signup is the only way to get the download link. Twitter spanked SitePoint for sending too many DMs with links, so following them won’t do you any good at this point (unless you just want good karma points).