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- The Art and Zen of Writing CSS
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I’ve been writing pure html/css layouts for well over eight years now. While I’ve found best practices in the form of convention and documentation to be useful. They don’t prevent some of my CSS nightmares from reoccurring. They merely make them less painful. My solution is to follow guiding principles in the way I write stylesheets. These principles form a foundation for writing stylesheets that will be easier to work in as the project grows.
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- Getting Started With Encouraged Commentary
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Since interest in this idea has taken off so much I revised the encouraged commentary script so that it would be more flexible for public use. You can toggle on or off pretty much and of the main features.
I’ve explained in depth how to get it setup on your blog/website. Encouraged commentary will work in wordpress, textpattern, moveable type, typo, mephisto, drupal, expression engine, etc.. There is no plugin required. You just have to make some minor changes to the HTML markup in your theme or template files. To get started:
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- Easy Flash Debugging on OSX.
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I recently took on some contract development for another AS3 project and because I wasn’t particularly happy with the way I debugged my flash work in the past I decided to come up with a better solution. Not many traditional flash coders realize that they can view the output from their trace statements on a live compiled SWF. The way you do that is fairly straightforward.
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- I’m Working on a Product.
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Earlier this month I started working on a product. It’s nothing new. It’s pretty basic. It’s going to be really cheap. But I think it will be pretty cool. I’ll post screencasts once I finish more of the javascript. Until then, announcing this is just a tease and motivating factor. I’ve said it; now I need to go forward and finish the first version.
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- Using Presenters in Rails
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Sitting thrugh my first tutorials session at RailsConf we’ve come across an interesting discussion about the philosophy of using the ‘Presenter Pattern’ to refactor code in your applications controller.
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- Blogging is not Technology.
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Last week I was invited to speak at a local NetSquared meeting out in Tempe. Presenting on the topic of blogging forced me to take a step back to look at what I’ve been doing over the past seven years. I realized all of the technological connotations associated to blogging are irrelevant. Blogging is not about the web, rss feeds, or technology. That is just a means to an end. Blogging is about people, it’s about voices, blogging is all about you. Blogging is a medium for distributing both fact and opinion. It’s about discussion and connecting people in a relevant context. The technology just helps run the show.
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- Less Markup Is Better Markup.
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There is a lot of ambiguity when it comes to writing semantic markup in HTML: to what extent should we markup data? How semantically detailed do we need to be? While there is no specific rule of thumb, I will say that the less the better. When writing markup, be as clean as possible without losing meaning. Much like how The Elements of Style emphasizes brevity in writing – a sentence should use as few words as possible without losing it’s meaning – an html document should use as little markup as possible without breaking the context of it’s content.
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- Write HTML That Means Something
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HTML is often overlooked in development projects. Rendering errors and other visual debacles tend to shift a developer’s focus away from HTML’s actual purpose: semantics. It’s been said before but I feel we still need to emphasize the fact that HTML has nothing to do with the visual presentation of the layout we are attempting to create whether it be for the web or any other medium.
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- Utilizing Regular Expressions in AS3
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Regular Expressions are a powerful tool that you can utilize in many different programming languages. After throwing together the little twitter widget at the top of this page – I was informed by Brian Shaler of a major bug that causing it to crash. So while reworking the code to fix it I figured I’d add some much needed functionality as well. You see, just grabbing the feed from twitter does not generate html links for you. You have to parse your feed and wrap any ‘@username’ responses, or ‘http://addresses’ into actual hyperlinks yourself. Here’s how I did it.
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- Simple AJAX Links With Prototype.js
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Getting my head wrapped around Prototype.js has been a difficult process. But today I was faced with the simple challenge of creating links that could load external files into divs embedded onto the page. Nothing fancy but useful nonetheless. Here’s how I did it: