Monthly Archives: April 2006

Pastebin clipboard support

I had a feature suggestion to add a “copy to clipboard” link to pastebin.com. This was easy for IE, but I had a hard time getting Firefox to play ball. There’s an article at MozillaZine covering the issue, but I wasn’t able to get the technique to work. If anyone knows how, let me know!

I know clipboard access is a potential security vulnerability, but Firefox has the right idea in explicitly granting sites access to the clipboard rather than IE’s rather dumb “yeah, clipboard, here you go!” approach.

Anyway, for the time being, a bit of javascript during onload will figure out if your browser can do clipboard copies and will insert a “copy to clipboard” link when you’re looking at a post. Seems like a handy feature.

There’s also been a few bug fixes since the release a few days ago.

Download pastebin.tar.gz (130 KB)

Stop Hacking CSS

David Shea (the CSS Zen Gardener) urges web designers to stop CSS hacking or be stopped. Nice article from the fledgling Vitamin website.

CSS Zen Garden inspired me to try and do a better job of CSS and semantic markup, I’m hoping to find enough time to make Geograph a whole lot better in that area too. One thing David’s article mentions is the difficulty of testing, but I find the BrowserCam service invaluable. Not only can it take screen captures of a page on many different OS/browser combinations, you can also remotely access some systems via VNC to play with your site for real. Easier than maintaining your own virtual machines or real test kit!