Creating subdomains and custom server names with MAMP
My server of choice is Apache, but I’m no web administrator, so I use MAMP a great quick install Apache, MySQL and PHP stack. Recently I have found the need for local subdomains like dev.localhost. With a local subdomain you can more accurately simulate your live environment because you can link absolutely to the root of your server. These simple directions are specific to the MAMP configuration, but the same steps can be used on any Apache WAMP and LAMP setups with the exception of the location of the configuration file, so lets get started.
jQuery: How to get links to work in toggled or dynamic content
jQuery still never ceases to amaze me. The developers of this fantastic library seem to have thought of everything, and the only real challenge for us end users is hunting through the API. Recently I was tasked with creating slide out toggle boxes that had links embedded within them. The problem was that the animation would be triggered before the links, thus rending them useless. Luckily like many things with jQuery the fix is simple and I will demonstrate with two examples.
jQuery and Fancybox: How to automatically set the height of an iframe lightbox
Fancybox is a pretty cool lightbox plugin for jQuery that I have been using for awhile now. It’s got a great feature set, looks good, and for the most part it just works out of the box. There is however one thing that was mind numbingly hard to figure out, and that was how to automatically set the height of an iframe lightbox. Fancybox has this functionality built in for inline content via the autoDimensions key, which is set to true by default. Unfortunately this is not the case for iframes. After some hair pulling I managed to piece together an auto height solution for Fancybox iframes, but this technique could also be used without Fancybox to find the height of any iframe.
Google Maps api and iPad/iPhone zoom and scale issues when orientation is changed
I recently bought an iPad and I’m absolutely loving it. It also happened to coincide with an exciting project that I’m working on that requires the Google maps API to work on an iPad. The project required a full screen map, but when switching from landscape to portrait or vice versa the zoom level would be off. The Google maps controls would also be off the page, page graphics were also blurry due to being zoomed, even the Google Map itself was blurry. After much tweaking, fiddling and scratching my head, the fix turned out to be quite simple to fix.
My newest website
Over the past few months I have been working on a new project. I really wanted to try something different, something I personally enjoy. I find writing about anything you are not actually passionate about can be a real drag, so with that in mind, I picked a topic I knew I could write well for, get excited about and stay motivated for. With that said it’s time to reveal my newest website ThemePassion.
IE6 is dead! … No really, I mean it this time!
How many times have we heard that IE6 is dead or even it’s funeral announced? The fact of the matter is that IE6 is not dead until your clients say so, or you just stop taking on clients who demand support for it. As with so many web projects, it’s often not your choice anyway, but we can still try and nudge them along with a decision to axe IE6. Charging more money, removing fantastic features from your mockups, or showing clients web stats are some methods that can be used to steer people away from this ancient browser. Google has also added one more tool to our arsenal and I recently got to use it on a project that was self destructing in IE6.
Philanthropy in Kenya
The company I work for, Ariad, is currently undertaking something fantastic that I feel deserves attention. Ariad has always given a lot to philanthropic causes in the past, but this is probably one of the biggest contributions we’ve made to date. Two years ago Ariad formed a partnership with Free the Children and donated $40,000 to support infrastructure development in rural Kenya. This is amazing on it’s own, but this year the company helped send 10 employees to visit Kenya to see first-hand our donations at work. While they are there, they will help build a school, visit local communities and end with a safari in the Maasai Mara.
Before they left I was pretty excited to help set up a blog so they could document their adventures in Kenya while they were actually there, and the experience still fresh in their minds. So far the stories have been nothing short of amazing and I’m proud to work for a company involved in this kind of philanthropic work. You can find out more, and follow their adventures on our Kenya Blog.
Clearing the jQuery animation queue
Ever see sites where a jQuery animation happens over and over when you rollover or click it multiple times. It’s almost as if the animations are stacking on top of one another in a queue and executing one by one, and guess what? That’s exactly what’s happening. Not to worry though, there is a simple and easy way to fix this.
3 easy methods to create dotted or dashed lines in Photoshop
Dotted or dashed lines can be a great design element and easy to achieve with a bit of CSS, but creating a lot of them in Photoshop mockups can be time consuming and frustrating. There are 3 simple ways to create dotted or dashed lines in Photoshop. The first one is the way a lot of people probably do it and that’s by doing it with the pencil tool dot by dot and then duplicating the layer. This is slow but there are ways to speed up the process. The 2nd method is achieved by using the brush palette spacing settings. The 3rd method is uses custom patterns. This tutorial will cover all three methods with the Mac/Windows shortcut keys needed to speed up the process.
Firebug for IE
Tonight I stumbled across Firebug Lite and was ecstatic to find that all the features I use the most are available not just for IE, but pretty much any modern browser. There are other debuggers out there, but I know a lot of people really love Firebug. This fantastic tool really lets you get under the hood and see what’s going on, it’s saved me countless hours, but what would save me even more time and effort is if it was available for the browser where 95% my problems occur; Internet Explorer. Firebug was also number one on my post “14 killer web design and development tools for the Mac“.
