15 Steps

Anyone know a better way of installing java on ubuntu lucid than...

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:52:59 +0100

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository “deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner”
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

Better HAML and SASS tmbundles

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:15:55 +0100

http://github.com/handcrafted/handcrafted-haml-textmate-bundle.git

http://github.com/seaofclouds/sass-textmate-bundle.git

Light weight CSS grid system

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:12:42 +0100

This http://www.1kbgrid.com/ looks pretty interesting

Getting started with Clojure and Emacs

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:06:00 +0100

http://emacsformacosx.com/

http://homepage.mac.com/zenitani/emacs-e.html

http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/clojure/Getting_Started_with_Emacs

http://p.hagelb.org/paredit-outline

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PareditCheatsheet

As you may already know Google is now taking into account site...

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 23:28:00 +0100

As you may already know Google is now taking into account site speed amongst the many factors it uses to rank your site. Today I just noticed in the Labs section of the webmasters tools a link to “site performance”. This page will give you stats Google have on your site an indication of weather they believe it is fast or slow.

I have to say I am slightly ashamed that a site I have worked on has an average load time of 1.2 seconds but surprised that this is actually faster than 86% of websites!

Vimperator Quickstart Guide

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 22:14:18 +0100

1. Download

2. Learn some basic shortcuts

o = open url (tab to smart complete)

O = modify current url

t = open url in a new tab

d = close tab

u = undo (as in reopen a tab)

y = copy url to clip board

3. Learn more advance commands by browsing :help

Optimise JQuery with Delegate

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 22:05:03 +0100

Instead of binding an event to every element bind to a common parent and let the event bubble up…

http://api.jquery.com/delegate/

Rack::Auth::Basic keeps challenging you for a password?

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:02:13 +0100

I recently came across a problem where Safari and Chrome wouldn’t remember the Basic Auth password for the admin area of a site I had protected using the Rack middleware. The reason for this? I had blindly copied the example from the Sintra FAQ and was not providing a realm! It wasn’t initially obvious this is set this but a quick check of the definition of use in the source and…

use Rack::Auth::Basic, "your-realm" do |username, password|
  [username, password] == ['username', 'password']
end

I no longer have to keep typing in the password :)

Don't Discount IE6 Just yet...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:08:49 +0000

Recently @pingles and I have been looking into increasing the conversion rate of one of Forward’s many web sites. We started by looking at the data gathered from analytics over the last month or so and this threw up quite a few surprising figures.

From our paid traffic well over 70% of visitors viewed the site using IE and a massive 20% of this was from IE6. This mean that traffic from IE6 was almost comparable to all versions of Firefox, and was twice the total of what Safari and Chrome were able to generate.

Being Mac users, huge internet snobs, and given googles recent announcement we were pretty happy for anyone daring to visit using IE6 to have a less than optimal experience. This attitude lead to around a very ugly version of our site, and a 19% increase in the bounce rate of traffic from this hugely significant source.

It costs the same to send a IE6 user to the site as a l33t Chrome user and they contribute up 4 times the amount of traffic. So from now on I will be spending less time adding rounded corners, shadows and gradient backgrounds and transparency to everything with CSS3 and more time figuring out exactly how IE6 thinks is should code.

Screen commands I keep forgetting...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:08:14 +0000

Create a screen with a name:

screen -S name_of_session

Detach screen and leave running

ctr+a ctrl+d

List

screen -ls

Reattach to screen

screen -r name_of_session

"the designers work should have the clearly intelligible, objective, functional and aesthetic quality..."

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 11:32:57 +0000

“the designers work should have the clearly intelligible, objective, functional and aesthetic quality of mathematical thinking.”

- Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Muller-Brockmann