In this post,I am going to write about OpenShift, which is Red hat’s free, auto-scaling Platform as a Service (PaaS) for applications. OpenShift to me is very similar to Google’s app engine in some ways,but openshift’s offerings are quite diverse, for instance support for ruby, php, Perl, node.js, etc.. Openshift is not like a traditional VPS hosting , although once registered with them, user does get a shell access,but its quite limited , instead OpenShift has a concept of gears and cartridges.

Here I demonstrate the process of Basic Authentication in web.py python web framework. There is a proof of concept article provided in the main site,however I just thought doing the same via an attribute might be a cleaner solution. HTTP Basic authentication implementation is one of the easiest ways to secure web pages because it doesn’t require cookies, session handling, or the development of login pages. Rather, HTTP Basic authentication uses static headers which means that no handshakes have to be done in anticipation,however the n the credentials are passed as plain-text and could be intercepted.

When css3 arrived, one of the goodies that I found was, the inclusion of Drop Shadow effect, namely **Box Shadow *and Text Shadow. Here I present a cross browser utility css class which can be used for a drop shadow effect, without any image. .shadow { / For IE 8 / -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength=4, Direction=135, Color='#000000')"; / For IE 5.5 - 7 */ filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength=4, Direction=135, Color='#000000'); -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 4px #000; -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 4px #000; box-shadow: 3px 3px 4px #000; } For cross browser text shadow effect ,I found a nice article here.

When I started programming and had to begin designing my first user interface in HTML, I was always puzzled as to why are all visual elements in HTML rectangular. I soon learned that in those days if one would want a circle to be drawn on a page, then the only way possible was using an image, the same was true for drawing elements with rounded corners. Thankfully HTML5/CSS3 guys were listening and the latest css3 standard supports defining the corner radius of a circle, this can be used to make an element look like a circle too if you want.

Css has a very useful property called Opacity, which basically is a measure of transparency of an element. All modern browsers Yes yes even IE has support for it. In most browsers the value is between 0 minimum [transparent] i.e not visible to 1 maximum [opaque] i.e. completely visible In IE the value is between 0 and 100 ,don’t ask why they just like to make us unhappy. Here I present a helper css class which will work in all browsers.