As some of you may know, in CSS2 it is possible to change the appearance of an element’s cursor by declaring the value of the element’s cursor property. There are various settings for this, e.g. default, crosshair, and pointer (a full list of values and their descriptions is available over at w3schools), but you can also define your own cursor using the url property.

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I finally got around to playing about with the <canvas> element of HTML5 and amongst other things I have written a simple bar chart creator and have written about it over at html5laboratory.

All comments welcome.

I’ve altered my already small homesite to run that bit faster by optimising both my JavaScript and CSS files, and also allowing Google to host the jQuery file.

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I have made a few changes to iandevlin.com, adding a new services section to indicate that I am now also available for hire to do freelance web design and development work.

I do work full-time so my availability might be limited, but it’s best to contact me first to check my workload. But please do get in touch.

A brief list of the web development skills I can offer:

• XHTML
• HTML5
• CSS
• JavaScript
• jQuery and MooTools
• ASP.NET: C# and VB.NET
• Object Oriented PHP
• MySQL
• SQLServer 2005
• IIS
• Apache

With the release of Firefox 3.6, one of the things that was promised was a HTML5 parser. Well it’s here, but the it is turned off by default. Here’s how to enable it.

1. Type about:config in your Firefox address bar
2. Click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button on the warning message that appears (and make sure you adhere to it!)
3. Type html5.enable into the filter bar at the top of the page
4. As you can see it’s currently disabled, so click it to toggle the value to true

There you go, the Firefox HTML5 parser should now be enabled.

The next question is what does it do…

Now that the new year is here, many of us will forget to change the © copyright date on our many websites. I’ve never really been sure why developers don’t always automate this process and therefore not have to worry about it at the change of the year. In this short post I will show you some quick methods of automating this process.

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