Work Locally Working locally means that you have an instance of your web app running on your machine. You edit files directly on your machine, rather than uploading every change to the server. It is tempting to edit files directly on your shared server, but don’t do it! It is a very bad practice and will bite you over and over again if you let it become habit. You may start out thinking of a website »
Go beyond the stacktrace with 2 gems that grant you debugging superpowers. Better Errors Does this screen look familiar? Do you notice anything wrong with this picture? That is correct, that is the default Rails error page and you are absolutely right, it is completely hideous and hurts to look at. It is begging to be improved. By answering these questions you have already proven yourself to »
I have been really getting into writing CoffeeScript lately, so I decided to revisit the jQuery floating sidebar I blogged about a while back. The logic is the same, other than using a named function to increase readability. The code is shrunk from 40 lines to 28 lines (with extra line breaks for readability). More importantly, I believe the code is easier to understand. The basic concept is to create »
I finally got around to implementing a floating sidebar that contains all of my follow links contained in my header. Lots of sites have a floating sidebar, but I wanted mine to be a little different. First, the items in my sidebar come flying out of the header to the sidebar when the user scrolls down past the header, instead of being fixed over on the side. You will also notice a nifty little elastic »
jQuery Masonry is a sweet layout plugin for jQuery. They describe it as “The flip side of CSS floats”. It aligns elements vertically then horizontally, minimizing the vertical gaps between elements of varying heights. I created my own sandbox for playing around with masonry. Like any layout, it has it’s time and place. I would consider this primarily an alternative layout, only to be used when trying »
OK, so we all know how much IE sucks. Well I just stumbled across a neat little trick that makes IE suck less. It’s called Progressive Internet Explorer (PIE). It’s a simple and very effective way to use some advanced CSS features and have them actually work inside of Internet Explorer. PIE supports the following CSS3 features in IE 6-8: border-radius box-shadow border-image multiple background images »