Blog about web development by Robert Dawson
Seriously? This is what people search for on my website?
So, essentially, people care about two pages on my website (links 2-5 are the same) and the people who most visit my website (a) have ADHD or ADD and/or (b) subscribe to Lumosity.
Conclusion: Looks like an architectural overhaul is seriously overdue!
If you ever find yourself needing to switch subdomains, such as from beta.mysite.com to www.mysite.com, here is a bookmarklet to make life easier. Because dragging my mouse to the address bar, selecting the entire subdomain, and then tediously typing in a new one is so exhausting!
With this handy bookmarklet, all you have to do is click it and type in the subdomain you want. It's not telepathy, but it's tolerable. To make this bookmarklet, make a new bookmark on any given page and then replace the URL with the following code.
javascript:var env=prompt("Subdomain?","e.g., www");if(env!="e.g., www"){window.location=window.location.href.replace(/http:\/\/(.+?)\.(.+?)\.(.+)/g, "http://"+env+".$2.$3");};
Maybe it's my overbearing electromagnetic influence, but I routinely encounter a problem with the Mac app, Messages, in that, if it doesn't detect an Internet connection, it changes its status to "Offline" and, because I shutdown and opt to restart with the same applications open, the status of Messages remains "Offline" when it opens, even when I try to change it to "Available." Um.
So, to solve this simple but annoying bug for Apple, download the following AppleScript script bundle and add it to your login items so it runs on startup.
Set Messages Status to Available on Startup
Instructions
If you don't feel like downloading the script bundle above, just open the AppleScript Editor application, start a new script, and paste in the following code:
if application "Messages" is not running then
launch application "Messages"
end if
tell application "Messages"
set status to available
end tell
This code converts computed widths for HTML selectors on a web page to their equivalent widths as percentages relative to their immediate parents and displays resulting widths in the console.
This is for responsive design.
Note: This is also a first draft, so feel free to suggest improvements. You can also find and contribute to this on Github.
Good morning, human.
“As the web is becoming ubiquitous, interactive, and multimodal, technology needs to deal increasingly with human factors, including emotions. The specification of Emotion Markup Language 1.0 aims to strike a balance between practical applicability and scientific well-foundedness. The language is conceived as a “plug-in” language suitable for use in three different areas: (1) manual annotation of data; (2) automatic recognition of emotion-related states from user behavior; and (3) generation of emotion-related system behavior.”
Monday through today, I attended the HTML5 Developers Conference at the Palace Hotel in SF and thoroughly enjoyed it! It was highly technical and overwhelmingly detailed and, oh, so much fun! I even made a very short presentation to present to coworkers tomorrow:
I have to take a small swipe at the touch gesture of swiping on mobile devices. Below is a screenshot of an app I installed this morning called doable. It's good! But they use swiping in an in intuitive way, to complete tasks. Tapping on a task takes you to that task's details, where, to add annoyance, you have no option to complete the task.
What would I do? I would increase the size of the outer and inner circles to the left of each task name and let users tap either circles to indicate completion. I would also indicate completion by fading from an intense color to transparent before moving the task down to its next place in the frequency-based hierarchy.
You have a page with information by year. And year headings are linked, like this:
Information under the latest year is shown, while information under previous years is hidden. When a user clicks a year, you want to show that year's information and add a hash value (e.g., #2013) to the URL so that returning to this page will return it to the previous open/close state.
var current_path = location.pathname;
var year_hash = (location.hash.substr(1) != "") ? location.hash.substr(1) : "";
$("h2").on("click", function()
{
location.hash = $(this).text();
});
if ( location.hash.match(/^\#\d{4}$/) )
{
$("h2:first").click();
$("h2:contains(" + year_hash + ")").click();
}
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications
You need to send someone (or do anything with) a list of URLs you have open (in Safari or Chrome on Mac).
Use this Automator workflow script:
on run {input, parameters}
set _urls to {}
tell application "Safari"
repeat with _tab in tabs of window 1
set end of _urls to URL of _tab
end repeat
end tell
set {_tid, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, return}
set the clipboard to _urls as string
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to _tid
return input
end run
Then, just paste wherever you like!
Is it silly to suppose that a future iPad might simply be called Pad? Think about it. If a company can redefine a common verb like "like," isn't it possible to redefine a proper and much less commonly used noun?
Like most developers with a Mac I presume, I love TextMate! One of the things I have often wanted to do is to select text in an application and paste it into TextMate. Thanks to Aaron at 9thport.net, here is a dead-simple solution!
To find and replace in phpMyAdmin, use this:
UPDATE tablename SET fieldname = REPLACE(fieldname, "old", "new");
I've started playing with userstyles.org and, as of this writing, have made two scripts:
I like to think of a user style as a persistent Firebug (for CSS).
You might check out this theme for phpDocumentor. I like it a lot better than the default.
phpdoc -o HTML:Smarty/Evolve:default -d wordpress -t wordpress/docs_evolv
Here are the steps it took for me to get phpDocumentor to create documentation for a WordPress installation.
phpdoc -o HTML:frames:earthli -d wordpress -t wordpress/docs
* I'm using MAMP and my directory is /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/phpdoc/.
** Probably overkill; consider available RAM. For me, 1024M wasn't enough. I kept getting this error:
phpdoc FAILED: Bad environment variable $PHP (set to "/usr/bin/php")
I want to make a task manager for philosophy students, particularly followers of Existentialism, called Blackmine, in which you are given a predefined and unchangeable set of possible steps or actions, none of which resolve anything and all of which lead back to the beginning.
I use Redmine and each issue page contains a field identified as "URL(s) to be edited," which contains URLs related to the issue at hand. Unfortunately, these URLs aren't actually linked! They're just text. And I have been tediously copying and pasting each link, one at a time, into a new tab in my browser.
Well, not anymore! Today, to ease my suffering (and to try something new), I created my first Greasemonkey script to convert those text-only URLs into hyperlinks. I hope it's helpful, as this script could be easily modified to work with any text in any HTML element (thanks so much to jQuery).
To use this script, first install a Greasemonkey-compatible extension in your browser. Greasemonkey has traditionally been primarily used in Firefox, but you can also add Greasemonkey support in Chrome (and probably IE, but why even check?). Then, install my script! And modify to suit your own needs.
Visual or WYSIWYG editors are commonplace now online. So, this morning for fun, I decided to try making one in HTML5.
The HTML file below is a really basic version, not optimized but working. One feature I would like to include is suggested words, for creative writing. The Big Huge Thesaurus looks like a good option.