It seems as if 2011 will go down as the year of the hack. Between LulzSec and Anonymous a plethora of major sites have been hacked: Sony, Sony Video, the FBI, CIA, Bioware, and many others. Now LulzSec and Anonymous have announced that they will be teaming up to crack government servers and release classified documents.

The popularity of these attacks has given the two hacking groups widespread media coverage. While many gamers are pissed off at the hacking groups for targeting their pastime, many others have romanticized the groups - comparing them to legendary revolutionaries. This cult following is making the act of hacking seem more like an art.

Things are looking pretty grim for website owners - but the truth is there are things you can do.

Okay, okay. I know that things that scroll and whoosh and all that have gone out of style, but that doesn't mean that clients don't WANT them. This code snippet will show you how to create a scrolling pane on your web page that will automatically detect how much content is inside the DIV and make sure the content scrolls nicely in there.

The Edmonton Journal Writer Personality Quiz launched today, and I am excited to see it growing. Overall the project was a smooth one, but not without its challenges.

Now that it has launched I am excited to see that the Journal has been promoting it on their Twitter feed, and they even put together a video on YouTube.

So far the response has been really positive. On the first day of launch the usage stats have been climbing and as far as I can tell there hasn't been a time of day where someone hasn't been using it.

I'm especially excited to have been working with Marty Stanowich on this project. His enthusiasm was infectious, and it has been cool seeing how my app (which is just a cog in his great wheel of promotion) fit into the bigger picture.

Over the last week I have been focusing my efforts on the subject of readability. I recently started working with a new client who was concerned about making sure their pages are concise, readable, and accessible. I guess I should just say, "they want everyone to be able to read their pages".

Since my client's site is meant to be accessed by the general public they wanted to make sure the average reading level was about grade 7. Over the last few years I have worked with the City of Edmonton. I came to realize how important it is to make sure your web content is easy to understand. With a municipality your pages need to strike a delicate balance between answering as many questions as possible and not overwhelming visitors with text.