Ubuntu

As a web devloper you tend to wear a lot of hats. In this case it is a Linux admin – and I use that term very very loosely. It was always about installing the latest version of Ubuntu and once it was installed sitting there and going “now what” and then I was format and install windows.

In my current job, all the web servers were running on Windows with IIS. While this isn’t necessarily bad, it’s very limiting and for things like mod-rewrite just not happening. So I convinced them to let me at least run Apache on windows which was great, but then I got greedy.

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In my mind, I can hear the them to Picture Pages playing in the background – because I want to remind you that in my quest to be a better web developer (and share with the world) I started this “toolbox” so I could keep a cataloged stockpile of simple easy to use tricks to make my life easier – plus I wanted to share…

This is documented somewhere on TinyMCE’s site, but it’s may not be easy to find. It’s simple little trick that I use as a helper to a simple image manager to go along with TinyMCE (since you have to pay for an image manager).

In my day to day life, it seems like I need a backend to every site I build, no one wants simple pages anymore. So I end up with a lot of forms, which have a lot of textareas in them. I like using TinyMCE as the wysiwyg editor for those textareas. This also calls for adding images and TinyMCE charges for the built in feature above using a url for an image. This presented me with a problem, I have end users who aren’t savvy enough to upload images (FTP) and then get the url to add the image to the editor, but they want images.

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I thought I’d start a new Category called “Toolbox”, specifically for what I use on a daily basis for web development. These are snippets, functions, cheats, etc that anyone can use and make my life as a web developer that much easier…

This installment is something I’ve been using lately to preload images so they don’t spit out the alt text…Mostly it seems to happen when I’m doing something with ajax.

I found this snippet at Matt Farina’s blog.

This is the code (I just made a js file out of it and include it when necessary).

jQuery.preloadImages = function()
{
  for(var i = 0; i<arguments.length;i++) {
      jQuery("<img>").attr("src", arguments[i]);
  }
}

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So who caught this show the othe night? While I’m old enough to remember the original, and sadly have watched episodes of the series recently, I thought I’d give it a whirl. It was decent, something to fill the void, but man could it be any more transparent?
The who bit on universal health care, using the media, and youth groups wasn’t very discrete – even though I liked that. I’ve noticed lately a lot of picks at the Obama adminstration lately on tv and I think it’s pretty awesome.
I’ll continue to watch for no othe reason then it having some Firefly actors on it -as long as it stays interesting to…

While it seems like a bad idea to try and post a full length post from your iPhone or iPod, I think using it to post shorter side posts might be whre this application shines.

It’s that time of year again! The snap is in the air, the leaves are changing, and it’s time once again to make apple cider. For the past 3 years we’ve gotten together with my wife’s family to participate in making as much apple cider as we can with as many apples as we can get. It’s an all day event, which usually last into the dark of the evening. This year was no exception.

The Shredenator

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It’s no secret – well if you’ve been listening to me for the past few days, that I’ve been upset with GoDaddy’s free web hosting. I have a side project for a client, and it needed an admin back end done – something to edit the pages, nothing crazy or too difficult and since I love JQuery, I add in some eye candy because it makes it easier to use.

Well as I’m cruising along, certain things that I’m use to doing a certain way just aren’t working. I narrowed down what I thought the problem was and it points right to the stupid ad banner that GoDaddy uses – well more to the point the mechanism they employ to add it to the pages.

It goes as far as attaching to an AJAX request reponse. So when you send your request and you get back a nice little JSON object back, it has some iframe crap stuck to the end of it. It really through me for a loop for awhile. Luckily Scott (and old coworker and friend of mine) got me pointed in the right direction.

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When I got married, my wife brought along some recipes. One of those was for a dish called Swiss Cheese Chicken. It really was just a good, simple dish – and  I love it. Last night was one of those nights that I actually had some time to cook dinner – I love cooking, no doubt about it, I do love it.

In fact I remember one time, I had just started dating this girl – but she had been asked out to some school dance before we started going out. No biggie, but here’s the catch. She asked if I would cook them dinner – I said “Sure!”, because I love cooking. At any rate, as I digress here…

So moving on to the actual dish. The prep time varies because if you have frozen pork chops then they’ll take awhile to defrost – I don’t like to use the microwave to defrost, because it can cook edges and turn out gross, I like to let them sit on the counter or if I’m pressed for time use hot water to thaw.

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The Project

In one of my projects, I thought it would be cool to have a drop down select box trigger a slide down for the results, then slide up and slide back down when a new choice was selected. Seemed pretty easy, but when I got into it, it wasn’t as easy as I thought at first. But in all reality it turned out to be super easy.

I did some digging around to figure out how to tell if my div container (the one that would hold all the results) was visible or not, maybe I should just read the entire JQuery documentation – HA! Instead I turned to google and found that you can check for :hidden.

$("#div-id").is(":hidden");

So I can base my logic on that, if it’s hidden do this or if it’s not do this…

That was perfect, now it was just a matter of having it do exactly what I wanted. So if the div wasn’t hidden, I needed to hide then show it again with the new results. Or if it was hidden, show the results. Continue Reading »

So it’s Saturday night, and I’m feeling alright. But I’m bored, and I’ve been kind of coped up too long in the house. Then came the critical question “What should we have for dinner?”. I hate that question, because it’s generally at the point where I’m hungry and ready to just call it and go somewhere for food that makes me and the family ill or that we could make for a whole lot cheaper (yes, I’m pretty addicted to going out to eat, even with all it’s pit falls and side effects).

My wife suggested Lasagna – and I do love it, but it takes so long and I didn’t think we had all the ingredients for a yummy batch, but really when has having the right ingredients ever stopped me? So here we go, the relatively quick and easy lasagna…

I started with what I had for noodles, turns out we had a box of over ready noodles – that means no boiling. I used 9 noodles for 3 layers and started by laying down 3 on the bottom of a 13×9. This brings up an issue (and it goes right along with hot dogs and buns – you know, too many hotdogs, not enough buns so you end up buying more buns when you don’t need them, Why can’t they make a normalized noodle size? Too short for a 13×9 but too big for a 9×9, what gives!!!)

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