Tim Mahoney

Browsers bug me. Compensating for the differences between them is always a chore, and can consume hours.

Enter Reset CSS and Rebuild CSS.

Eric Meyer basically sets every HTML tag to nothing.

Blueprint basically builds it back up, standardized.

Importing these two files at the top of your CSS, like so:

@import url('styles/reset.css');

@import url('styles/rebuild.css');

basically allows your to start from scratch.

This is not to say it’ll be perfect. However, I’ve noticed far less issues stemming from cross-browser incompatibility when using these tools.

I advocate compiling these 2 sheets with a personal “Master Sheet” that will allow you to start, for example, with consistent Header Tag styles. Personally, I like to set my font-sizes for my header tags the same across all sites I do, so that I know exactly what sizes they will be.

Stuff like this saves me time on every project, either making me more money freelancing, or allowing me to get ahead of projects at work.

I stumbled across a great utility for creating true CSV files. A client had a need for a quote-enclosed CSV file, and Excel for some reason does not do this. Instead, it only encloses those fields that actually have commas in them, so that it doesn’t delimit by that comma. Works fine, but some systems require ALL fields to be quote-enclosed.

Check out the linkage goodness below.. He’s got a few other things on the site that I didn’t check out, but his “Text Write Program” is excellent – just make sure you enable macros. Has a little set up screen and everything!

Smokey Lake Excel Help

Seems like whenever there’s a snowstorm going on, people think that it’s the apocalypse, and insist on going to the supermarket and cleaning the place out. Unbelievable. Do you people not have enough food in your refrigerator for more than a day?

I have installed an interesting application – BlogJet. It’s a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com

That’s the automatic text entered upon opening the trial version of the software, but I’ll give it to them, it seems like a pretty cool software. I’m going to do the trial period and perhaps purchase it at the end if I really like it.

For some reason, this is a pain in the neck to find and I always have to end up copying and pasting some list with extra crap in it. For once and for all, here it is.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m very excited to try this out – I’ve been using Firefox forever on Ubuntu and never really liked the other browsers available. Flash sucks, and I’m very excited to see YouTube leading the way and demoing an HTML5 Video player that you can opt in to try out.

Adobe Flash has been wonderful, but I sincerely hope to see the end of needing Flash anytime someone wants an animation or interactive something-or-another on their site.

When shit that I want to create doesn’t work on your browser, that’s when.

I’m learning about the Document Object Model so that I can build killer web applications. Unfortunately, different browsers will read my code differently, and in many cases, throw massive coronary errors and refuse to work.

If you use Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer <= 6, or any other browser that does not support the traditional event registration model, you’re shit out of luck. This allows me to at least get my web app off the ground before I start worrying about everyone and their mom that uses IE6 going to the site and having it not work. I’ll get it off the ground, then pay someone else to make it work in other crap. In the mean time, when someone goes to the site, they’ll see a blank page with links to browsers that work.

Event Listeners own me.

I’ve been DEATHLY scared of these damn things my entire professional career. Finally, last night, in an attempt to create my first full-on javascript / php / mysql / ajax / blablabla some other web technology, I started to come to terms with the fact that yes, I need to learn it if I want to create some truly awesome web apps.

I’ve “used” them before. Usually, this entails going to someone else’s site that had what I needed to accomplish already completed and there for the download / copy / paste. However, with this new project that’s consuming my mind, I need to learn them. I need to make 100% unique javascript functions in order to accomplish my goals. I think that as I learn this stuff I’ll post here, but most likely I’ll just post some strings of code with a post titled “EUREKA!”

I’ve decided that since CMS Made Simple doesn’t have any of the automatic pinging capabilities that WordPress does that I should migrate over and continue blogging from it instead. I’ve transferred most of my posts over, but not all because those that actually could be wanted by someone are ~10, and the rest is just crap. I feel that part of my professional growth is going to be creating a journal of successes(what few I have), failures(what many I have), trials(shitloads of them), and tribulations(whatever these are).

Moving forward with a good platform is key; I’m going to continue to develop sites with CMSMS but I’m not going to be using it myself on this site. WordPress development is something I’ve been meaning to get in to for a while as well though, so maybe actually having a site to do it on will spur action on my part.

I’ve been meaning to come up with a way to create an Excel library for tasks I do very often; I suppose this will be a good place to start it and update it.

The TRIM function removes spaces from the right and left sides of whatever text you’re processing, like so:

Formula:

=TRIM(A1)

” Hello ” will process to: “Hello”

However, if you want to remove spaces from within a text cell, leaving all other characters / numbers / etc., you need to use the SUBSTITUTE function for simple cases.

Formula

=SUBSTITUTE(A1," ","")

” Hello Thar ” will process to “HelloThar”

First in what will probably be a lot of posts about Excel stuff. I use it WAY too often for text processing.