Web Development

The title of this post is a bit misleading; I was trying to stuff it for SEO keywords without it being too long.

I ran into an issue with regard to the CSS property of "overflow" that I had set to "auto". When I set some test text of about 100 or so continuous "Hello " words, the scroll bars worked just fine. I then tweaked my node's height, and text and continued, but... The scroll bars weren't showing up, and my text was outside the bounds of the box (and therefore clipped)! Oh no! Tragedy of tragedies!

Through a little experimentation (in the end, this took me about 30 minutes to track down, and then test in all the browsers), I was able to determine what the problem was.

Continue reading "Browsers and minimum CSS overflow on Windows XP"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

So here I was trying to do some work on my domains this weekend and into today, thinking that my host had problems with the server on the weekend... "Oh, it's up again today," I thought...so I proceeded to try to login again today. Well, apparently I forgot my password somehow and so I locked myself out from my own websites from two separate IP ranges. Awesome! At least my own place isn't blacklisted (visited my parents this weekend and was at work earlier today during my lunch break).

Ha! Oops... I still don't know what my password is for cPanel, but the regular account login still works.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I spent more than half the day today (24 hour day) thinking and trying to find a way to get a mod_rewrite call to work properly. I felt so dumb, retarded, and plain uneducated in my attempts. I left work a little bit early so I could concentrate (no distractions, no phone calls, no "how do I send an attachment", no nothing). Even after that, I kept running into a stumbling roadblock. My friend was trying his hardest to help me out (no idea why other than possibly a sheer curiosity - it's now almost 1:00am).

What I wanted to do:
http://example.com/contacts/form/recipients/bKozlowski/
...transformed to...
http://example.com/contacts/form/index.php?contact=bkozlowski

Sounds easy, right? Yeah, I thought so too when I first started. I tried every iteration of something that looked so darned simple and could only be done just so many ways... The eventual problem?

I needed to use: RewriteBase /
I have no idea what this directive does. I have no idea why my pattern now matches and works. The RewriteLog really wasn't helpful at all except to tell me that it wasn't working...something I could have figured out without a log, obviously. Anyway, if anyone really cares, the following is the actual end result:

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^/?(contact)/([A-Z_@\.]+)/$ contact/form/index\.php?$1=$2 [NC,PT,L]

I both love and loathe mod_rewrite.

(Special thanks to the people over at SitePoint Forums for their immediate response!)

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

For the new website I've been developing and finishing up some "final touches" on the design to make the experience just a little bit better (before I can delve into the out-dated content after launch), one of the last things that was needed was to speed up the efficiency and download of assets - this included CSS and JavaScript files for the most part. I made the sIFR flash files as small as possible and my PNG images were compressed (and fixed for IE color rendering) using PNGGauntlet (which uses PNGOut). Until I can figure out ETags, a proper time for an Expires header, and GZip to work on CSS/JS files on our hosted server, this should suffice. It loads amazingly quick on my iPod Touch.

Continue reading "Compare your Minimized JavaScript"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I know I've read this article about 10 times over, and yet I always seem to keep forgetting about it. Everyone always suggests, "in order to keep a floated image from floating over its containing box, add a 1px DIV, or BR tag that uses a style of clear:both". This is what I always remember, simply because it's the most prevalent solution.

However, thanks to my CSS love in Paul O'Brien at SitePoint, there's a much, much simpler solution. Apply overflow:auto; to the containing element. That's all there is to it. I love that man!

Source: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/02/26/simple-clearing-of-floats/

Continue reading "Simple Solution for Encapsulating a Floated Image"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski