Hiding CSS from W3C's validators

While trying out a different web font for my portfolio, I noticed that Open Sans caused my site to fail validation whereas Ubuntu did not (issue is on Google's end, but a failure nevertheless). This led me to seek out a way to prevent W3C's CSS validator from parsing Google's stylesheet and I came up with the following code:

$browser = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
if( strpos( $browser, 'W3C_CSS_Validator_' ) === false )
echo( "<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' />" );

Enabling click-to-play in Google Chrome

What is "click-to-play"?

Click-to-play is a feature that allows the browser to defer loading of plug-ins such as Flash and Java on a website until the user clicks on the plug-in.

My experience

After reading an article on Ars Technica about Mozilla's "click-to-play" feature in Firefox, I decided to look into how I could enable a similar feature in Google Chrome. After fiddling with my settings for a few minutes (and a bit of web searching), I can confidently confirm that the feature does indeed work, although not as one would think. Instructional articles dated a couple years back will have you enable a flag (chrome://flags) in addition to changing a setting in chrome://settings and disabling the desired plug-ins in chrome://plugins. First, the click-to-play flag is no longer present in current versions of Chrome. Second, disabling the plug-ins will turn them off completely rather than allowing the desired effect. All you have to do is enable click-to-play in Settings and you are good to go.

Enabling click-to-play

1. Click the wrench icon and click Settings.
2. In Under the Hood, click on Content Settings.
3. Scroll down to Plug-ins and click Click to play.

   

Welcome

I don't normally blog, but I figured I would check out the Blogger integration with Google+. Since this particular blog is named after my portfolio/network site, anything I post here will most likely be tech-related.