[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.
My fiance happened to googlestubmle upon this site:
http://my.ort.org.il/rehovot/thing/
It’s the first “official” web site I created back in high school, using FrontPage (!).
I find it rather ironic that the “It will be ready in a week.” status is still there :)
Viewing the (hideous) source, you see plenty of unneeded tables, countless in-line styling and javascript..
Well, needless to say, IE4 was targeted as the default browser..
Here’s a small snippet used for achieving a mouseover image swap:
Went from this :
To the one you are[no longer] seeing now..
There are a lot of good resources out there about how to customize your blog.
Furthermore, there are plenty of nice widgets and templates, saving you both time and effort.
Instead of using these prebuilt resources, I wanted to learn a bit more, mainly about the Blogger API’s and capabilities, and of course enjoy some jQuery action.
I’ve been to wanting to learn and use Test Driven Development for quite some time now.
I’ve read tons of blogs, even a really nice free ebook (see here).
Unlike other new (to me) frameworks and technologies that I’ve been interested in before, I find starting to use and implementing TDD extremely hard.
It just didn’t feel right.
At first I thought, well, this might simply not be my cup of tea, but then it got me thinking, why would that be so?
Ok, here goes the first post..
My name is Erik, and I’ll be blogging about … well I don’t know yet.
I guess most of my posts will be about programming, and my attempts to becoming a better programmer..
One of the thing’s I enjoy the most is learning new things that I find helpful.
Through this blog I hope to be able to share such useful information with you…