Just what I wanted for the holidays! As previously blogged, I had been having trouble with the latest versions of WordPress because they switched from Latin to UTF-8 character set. I found a fix, which basically said, “Leave it as Latin”. But finally, I found a 1-step UTF-8 Converter Plugin. …
I recently received a comment that said my sprites were breaking in Opera and Safari 2. I don’t have a mac, so I can’t test Safari 2, only 3. Safari 3 works fine. I checked my Google Analytics to see how many people used Opera and it turns out to…
I recently have been working on a new API Browser for jQuery. It’s been a pet project in the back of my mind for some time. I thought I could create a better mousetrap, if only I could get over the programming hump. So finally, last week, I took a…
I was listening to NPR this morning to an interview with Robert Reich. Apparently, Rob Reich uses blogspot for his blog. He was very interesting on the interview. He was talking about how the world has changed in the last 30 years. I didn’t get to the end of the…
I was recently asked: I was wondering if you could tell me if there is a “proper” or generally acceptable way to denote required fields on a form. Label* Field *Label Field Label *Field I don’t think the Form Police will arrest you if you do #2 or #3. However,…
jQuery has announced a new user interface components package called jQuery UI. It is a pretty impressive set of widgets and components to make a rich user interface. It also consolidates alot of various plugins for a consistent development effort. I think it’s an awesome start and will continue to…
I have been frustrated with maintaining the podcast player on Marketo.com. See example on this page. (Click Podcast on the left). The UX was good, in that it zoomed up gracefully and played. However, the pain was on the backend. I had to encode each mp3 as a SWF file…
jQuery just recently released their 1.2 version. This spurred me to get some of my mini-projects done and clean up my cookbook area. I also FINALLY figured out how to Gzip my JavaScript files. There might be an easier way, but here is how I did it. Rename the JavaScript…
I have so many open projects right now. It makes it impossible to finish anything. I think it’s important to start a job and finish it, no matter how small the project is, just to keep your head in the game. I tried that tonight. I completely overhauled and cleaned…
Do not ask for whom the Jets lose. They lose for me. I know it’s just the first game, and they did play the team favored to win the Superbowl, but I was really hoping they would win. The offense and the secondary did ok. But the pass-rush and run-stop…
I am seeing a trend. It seems all the new good software is from Google. Recently, I realized that I read alot of blogs. I was getting annoyed that I had to go to so many different sites to read them, so I finally decided I need a “Feed Aggregator“. …
At first, I thought, “Yeah, that would be nice. Digg for people. Like a digital “Thank You”. I did a quick Google and saw that a company is doing that for some people. The comments at the bottom are incredibly pessimistic. They are screaming Ego! Bad! Lame! So I thought…
The technology is getting better and better. Google is announcing a version of PowerPoint and Wiki software in the next few weeks/months. I think this is a turning point for the industry. I have already started using Google Spreadsheets and have been a paying customer of Picasa. We just switched…
Autocomplete is one of those UI widgets that can revolutionize an application. Jörn Zaefferer has developed a beautiful lightweight version of autocomplete for jQuery. In my Marketo app, I am heavily using Jack Slocum’s EXT autocomplete. Once I introduced it, it really eliminated alot of complexity, not to mention modal…