Skip the prelude and show me the steps!
Prelude:
I have an amazing iMac at work. unfortunately, I spend most of my time on the Windows side of the Boot Camp, since I develop mostly Windows Based software. This requires quite some tweaks, since I can’t really develop and test properly if I’m not on a server based operating system.
I started with XP on the boot camp, but after a short (and annoying) period I understood that I had to install Windows 2003 server.
Just reconnected to the blog after a small vacation only to see that the entire layout looked awful. For some unknown reason, not only did http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/ block my javascript, images and css files, they deleted my user as well.
Oh well, back to the drawing board..
Until I’ve resolved the issue, I’ve reverted the blog to the current simple theme..
Erik
As a part of the redesign I’m doing for my github site, I wanted to add a comic image of myself (inspired by @addyosmani and @davidwalshblog’s great avatars)
First, as always, lazy part of me tried some shortcuts.
I googled “cartoonize me”, and spent some time with the Simpsonize me without any good results.
After a while I found a rather cool site called befunky, which allows you to upload an image and do several sorts of effects on it, one being the cartoon effect, which I wanted..
When enhancing dynamic pages (no matter the server side language behind), jQuery is more than helpful.
Especially since there’s loads of jQuery plugins out there, saving so much time and effort.
When using javascripts in reoccurring user controls, controlling the added javascripts and css files from the server language is possible (to prevent duplicate loading), but in many cases adds bloated and hard to maintain code.
Keeping the includes only in the markup is easier to maintain (IMHO), however might cause unneeded http requests to your scripts and css files, especially if you have a page with multiple reoccurring user controls.
About two weeks ago I found out about an amazing free service that github has called github pages.
This service allows you to host a static web site per public project you have on github, in addition to a site for your account (E.g. http://accountname.github.com).
Besides having wizards that create the site for you (although I haven’t used that yet), github offers another very nice feature:
Github automatically process submits to the site via Jekyll, which is a simple yet amazingly efficient static site/blog creator.
Phil Haack totally surprised with the announcement of the first preview release of ASP.NET MVC 2.
I’ve been using ASP.NET MVC (1) very since the third preview was released and I’ve really enjoyed the the experience.
IMHO, WebForms was never really fitted to the web platform, having a to complicated life cycle, and abusing the POST method in a way it was really not meant to do.
I do think WebForms was a great way to get WinForm developers up and doing web development quickly,
on the other hand, it grew a generation of Drag and Drop developers that had no idea what a POST really is (I know, I used to be one :D).
[UPDATE - Version released 1.0]
Similar to those “utilicous” moments are the “I got to write a jQuery plugin that does this” moments..
Had one of those a while ago, and the results were the jQuery Print
Element Plugin.
For those of you that are not familiar with jQuery, I mentioned
it previously in an early post.
Well, as per the title, it sends a jQuery selected element to the printer.
I had another one of those “utilicous” moments again.
I ran into a familiar problem that I’ve met before:
I had a site written in ANSI encoding (default behavior by Visual Studio BTW) , with some localized Hebrew content. The default settings if the web site in IIS were indeed ANSI for reading the files, and UTF-8 for displaying the files.
Peaches, everything was working fine..
Then I had to move the site to a different server..
Every now and then I get to a point where I need to do some repetitious and most likely boring task.
This point usually leads to 3 possible options
I Google for a utility that saves me the time for doing the task automatically.
I can’t find any workaround, while banging my head, I slowly do the exhausting task.
I write a small utility that does the task for me.
Lately I’ve been having some serious set downs at my work, a certain chain of small and unfortunate events of the kind that really leaves you totally without any steam or motivation.
A small prelude:
I consider myself a very motivated person who puts a lot of effort and time into my professional life, and in most cases I enjoy giving more than is expected.
I started as a technical support in the company I work in, and thanks to the open minded people at my company, I moved up to R&D after a while, which in my mind was totally amazing.