Blog

  • Make IE6 Understand min-height

    Thu, 02/05/2009 - 16:03 — Mark

    Internet Explorer Icon

    IE6 is the thorn in any standards aware web developers side. I've always been a bit frustrated by IE6's inability to understand min-height, but have usually just forced a height on the container for IE.

    Looks like I gave up too soon because a quick search this morning revealed this gem. The only thing I did differently was include the default min-height in the main stylesheet and loaded in the other two lines using an IE6 only stylesheet.

    Hopefully this knowledge will prove completely useless in a years time when IE6 drops off the map, but until then you can have your min-height and IE6 too.

  • Getting Your Feet Wet with Regular Expressions

    Thu, 01/29/2009 - 13:27 — Mark

    Wrapping your head around regular expressions is a daunting task for a programmer. Many times there is a tendency to just avoid the issue and write lots of code to work your way around an issue that could be easily solved with one line. You could always go out and buy one of the many books on the subject, but I am going to focus on teaching yourself online.

    The first thing you'll need is a way to test out your work. I am a big fan of the Regex Widget for the dashboard by Rob Rohan.

  • Don't Forget the Namespace

    Wed, 01/28/2009 - 14:35 — Mark

    jQuery

    I spent several hours yesterday struggling to figure out why jQuery wasn't working correctly on a site I'm working on.

    On sites that already have a lot of javascript there are usually a few issues with jQuery, but I was stumped on this one.

    Finally a Google search revealed that the $ (dollar sign) namespace was already being used by another set of functions.

    A quick find and replace of $ -> jQuery in my jquery document and everything started working smoothly.

  • The Power of Friendly URLs

    Thu, 12/11/2008 - 14:24 — Mark

    Eat at URLS

    You hear a lot of talk in development circles about the power of Apache, but it's not often that developers of small sites get to leverage this power.

    Those days are over thanks to the combination of Drupal and the contributed module Pathauto.

    One excellent feature in Apache that you often hear about but rarely get a chance to use is mod_rewrite. Part of the reason for the rare use of this feature is the fact that it is hard to set up, and even harder to set up correctly.

  • Typography Rules for Web Developers

    Wed, 08/20/2008 - 17:50 — Mark

    http://flickr.com/photos/jm3/379979781/

    Most web developers don't have any design background, but nevertheless they are forced from time to time to make design decisions on the projects they work on.

    No matter how thorough the designer you work with is, eventually you will have a list, a form, or a dialogue box that doesn't warrant a pesky e-mail to the designer.