Why is middle the default vertical align for a table cell?

A little bit of a rant here. Why do HTML table cells default to vertically centering the text? I have never done a design that it looked right for the cells to be vertically aligned to the middle. It seems that top aligned would be the most commonly used and for those [...]

Inserting AddThis.com widget in Simple Machines Forum

After finding the AddThis.com bookmarking widget and installing the WordPress plugin here I decided I needed to add the widget to my photography forum.
What I wanted to make sure would happen is that if a visitor bookmarks a page they bookmark the first page in the thread instead of bookmarking a later page in a [...]

8 Reasons NOT to start a forum

There are thousands and thousands of web forums out there. My guess is that if you’re reading this you’re at least thinking of starting one if you haven’t already. We hear about the reasons to start a forum (fun, branding, marketing, etc) but it’s difficult to find information on why you shouldn’t start a [...]

IIS Error Message - “The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers”

A user of one of my web applications reported that he was getting the error “The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers” after logging in.
After spending several hours Googling for answers I logged in and went to work with the intent of trying each of the few dozen [...]

Comparing MySQL search speed for different column types

Starting work on a new website I wanted to know which type of MySQL column was the fastest to search on. I assume it’s a numeric column, but I really want to know how much of a difference it makes. What I’m working on right now is an options table and it would [...]