Today was a reminder of how much I can forget. I have been working on a quick little report to help a group of people here at work. Nothing special, but I was adding some nice functionality to make updating things easier.

Basically each result row had 2 check boxes. Where they could check or uncheck either of them and it would update a table in the background. No biggie I thought, of course I had been developing it in Firefox and Chrome and occasionally in IE 8, and everything previous to the check boxes worked fine in all the browsers.

Continue Reading »

I think I have a fairly robust sense of humor, and as a web developer I can show it off sometimes. For anyone who’s built forms you know what I mean, you use a test person to use while validating and working out any bugs in your form. My current favorite is Fargus Munghammer.

Coincidentally, my wife is pregnant. She’s still a ways away from giving birth (July/August), and as such we really haven’t picked out a name yet. We went to our first ultrasound the other day and found out what the baby would be, and as it turns out it will be a boy. I use to just call it “the boy”, but this time I thought I’d go with Fargus Munghammer as a temporary  name holder. There is a problem though;

What should we name the boy?

I told her Fargus, she laughed and said, Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »

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]);
  }
}

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »

Not long ago we bought a new (to us) vehicle to replace an aged commuter. We decided on a lower mileage 2003 Honda Pilot. Not long after I was coming back to work and once I put the car in park noticed that the idle was surging. It would rise and then lower over and over. I was less then thrilled, but I turned to my trusty friend the internet to a site I had recently joined – Piloteers.org. I went about searching for what might be the problem, and wouldn’t you know it there was a post from some time ago talking about it.

I made a quick request of exactly how to do it and got a good response, enough so that I performed the maintenance and got it all squared away. The steps are easy, and I think even for a mechanical novice. You’ll need a few tools and spray, but I think most people will have the tools already, the Throttle Body cleaner they may need to go get.

Continue Reading »