Urban Puddle

My HAML adventures continue. This time, I'm documenting how to limit the length of a table or table cell. Usually I'd just do something like

 <td width = "500px">

but with HAML you've got to take a different approach. Fortunately it's not that hard:

 %td{:width => 20}=My cell contents

I had the chance to play around with haml the other day. Those of you who don't know haml might want to check the above link and come back. For the lazy people, it's basically an alternative markup aiming to make the views more readable or "beautiful". Whether it succeeds or not is not the point of this tip. Rather, if you're using haml, and want to create a hidden div, I'm here to show you how to do it.

If you're into testing your websites on lots of different browsers then you probably have a solution for IE6, IE7, Safari, Konqueror and Firefox. If you're using the AMD64 version of Debian or Ubuntu you may also want to add Opera to the mix. Unfortunately, if you go through their website you'll only be offered the i386 build. So what do you do if you want the Opera browser natively on your x86_64 machine?

OMFG!

Allow me to make a bold prediction. Yahoo! will suffer the same fate as Palm Inc. by becoming irrelevant in the next 2 years unless Jerry Yang manages to steer the ship back on course. Why do I say that? What could those two companies possibly have in common? I mean one is clearly an Internet superstar while the other makes crappy hardware.

I recently started playing around with Paypal for one of my sites. The snag is I’m using paypal’s standard html to submit the form but I also need to use a little ruby to save some items to my database. Well, how does one submit two forms with just one button? Read on and I’ll tell you.

Web 2.0. Bask in all it's glory. There are entire style guides out there that teach you what makes a site two point oh, and tutorials to guide you in making buttons, star flashes, and reflections. My greatest fear with all of this is what I'll call the bell bottom effect. Are we going to look back on it and wonder "what were those guys thinking?

Greasemonkey is a fantastic extension for Firefox. Using it you can perform magical things like completely eliminate ads, alter the look of Gmail, or add preview buttons to play MP3's. (Earlier there had been an inline player but it no longer works w/ Firefox 2.0.) Credit where's it's due, here is the original article. Personally, the Google MP3 Player has once again made things much easier for me!

At the moment I run two websites (besides this blog). One, buyindie, uses a fixed layout while the other, railfood, uses a liquid layout. The difference is that the fixed layout stays the same size regardless of how big the browser window is while the liquid layout stretches to accommodate the size of your viewport. I read a bunch of sites each saying that there's no wrong way to go. For simplicity sake I started off in a fixed format but now, I've decided that the wave of the future is in liquid layouts. Here's why.

New segment alert! I've decided to post one solid, quality link for your review. There are lots of great sites like Slashdot, OS News, and Digg out there that bring you tons of information. But I'm going to distill it all away and just present ONE link that you absolutely should take a look at. It may be silly, informative, or thought provoking. But it may not. In any case, why not check it out?

Without further delay, here's today's link:

Getting into good CSS habits

Presented because it never hurts to take a fresh look at CSS!