Web Development

When the Saratoga Springs Public Library website was redesigned, although I used a static width (set to something like 720px wide) for the content area, I intended for it to be easily resized with supporting browsers. I made sure to set everything (else) to size with EMs in CSS (similar to percentage).

...an issue with the top navigation cropped up on some computers that I could not identify, nor could I figure out how to solve. For 95% of browsers I tested, and 100% with a vanilla install of Windows, everything worked fine. For those others, the navigation links at the top of our site just didn't seem to align. I thought it might have something to do with DPI or visual settings, but I had no idea how to accommodate for that.

Well I completely accidentally ran in to William Kolean's solution of fixing this issue with Microsoft's CSS expression engine. As the issue was only seen in Internet Explorer (and I already had an IE-specific stylesheet to fix tiny issues), this was a perfect solution, and I put it in to use (just now, actually). I can verify that it worked (on my first and only test) so I'm quite happy. I thought I'd post this for my own records, and to help others too.

http://www.williamkolean.com/williamblog/?p=18
Thanks, William!

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I was creating a replicated PDF form in HTML/CSS for work today and needed to get a portion of the form (signature field) to rest at the bottom of the page, whichever page it was. This was easily accomplished in CSS-friendly browsers by using position:fixed; bottom:0; ... however, IE6 does not support the "fixed" position with CSS. Not good...not all of our staff members in the building have been upgraded to use IE7 - most have, a couple have not.

Stu Nichols has found a way to "trick" IE6 in to allowing something almost entirely the same by way of using another CSS bug. It's a bit hackish, but it's not an actual hack. I used IE's conditional CSS to make sure it didn't mess up any other browser's rendering, but the link (and demo) is below in case anyone else needs the same functionality.

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/layouts/fixed.html

Ironically enough, this doesn't seem to work in Safari for Windows properly (haven't tried it with my Apple). Thankfully for me, I don't need to cope with that issue for this form on our intranet. I imagine it's actually a bug in the browser's rendering (only for print, it works just fine for online display).

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

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