Web Development

Using third party application websites (browsershots, for example), VirtualMachines, or a full blown Macintosh to test your websites in Safari's WebKit rendering engine while you code on Windows? FRET NO MORE! Apple has released the Beta 3 of their browser, Safari, with a release for Microsoft Windows' users...get this...using the OSX theme and style, as well as OSX embedded fonts! Although it's still pretty buggy, the fact that it's on the horizon and will have less bugs than Swift (as it's corporation-based, rather than single developer based), I'm extremely happy! Plus, it'd be interesting to see how Apple's font rendering compares to Microsoft's. It's a pretty small download to boot!

Although I've only tried this once (directly after installing) and had a problem with the embedded fonts not showing up, I should probably log off or restart the computer to see if changes are needed to take effect first. Either way, this'll make testing much, much nicer.

Now let's just hope it's not the MacIE5 episode, but in reverse.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I completely reinstalled this blog software from scratch. There were some issues I was having with the continuous upgrading that needed to be purged from the database, but I was unaware which settings were causing problems, so...to be sure it all worked, I did a fresh install and manually inserted all of the posts/comments information back in. The largest problem that was fixed was that email addresses are no longer listed with comment authors as was the case with the last few upgrades. It wasn't listed as an actual email, but many harvesters can still read the barely obfuscated name [at] example [dot] com type of email...and that bothered me to no end.

"So why didn't you do this sooner?!"
I had moderately modified the theme I was using at the time for certain functionality and I knew that if I cleaned everything out, I would lose all those modifications again, so I've been testing some plugins I created to carry these changes over from theme to theme, rather than modifying them all the time. In other words, I needed to finish working on the plugins before doing this -- sorry about that!

I'm currently using one of the famous Andreas Viklund themes which was ported to Serendipity; I may, at some point in time, update the CSS to be a semi-fluid layout rather than fixed. Also, I should be releasing one of my plugins once I fix some CSS specific issues (a markup plugin, dp.SyntaxHighlighter, a JavaScript-based alternative to GeSHi).

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

It's interesting how you'll sometimes find things accidentally that you really needed to know only a few days before, but still helps now! I love great timing.

Thanks to Kevin Yank over at Sitepoint, and his News Wire linkage, I was re-introduced to the BUTTON element; that all-forgotten element that was used a long time ago in certain JavaScript ONLY enabled pages. This element has certain characteristics that make it much more versatile than the standard submit button of an INPUT element. You'll be better off reading on the source than listening to me blab:
Styling the Button Element

Also, if anyone's even slightly interested in OpenID (and if you're a developer, you should be), you'll want to check out Dan Webb's introductory article in to implementing OpenID in your own applications. (Update...) In terms of PHP, Sara Goleman also pointed out some more cool stuff, although I like the discussion in the comments better.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

If you're unfamiliar with hasLayout and IE's CSS difficulties surrounding this mysterious camel-cased word, you'll want to read the article that covers the majority of it all. If there's one thing I dislike about Internet Explorer...ok, I probably honestly couldn't choose just one thing about IE that disturbed me, but when dealing with CSS, IE's internal hasLayout property is definitely one of those that I never remember to be aware of. Recently, I had a problem with list-items that were not being properly styled. The problem? After getting help on a forum, someone suggested hasLayout; stunned, bewildered, and in denial (both that it could solve the problem, and that I had forgotten about hasLayout itself), after 20 seconds, I found the problem, and the one who helped was right.

Well, ok...so how do we set the hasLayout property to true? There are a number of different ways.

Continue reading "IE and hasLayout without Setting Dimensions"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

What do you do when you have less than 2 years before your 10-year highschool reunion, never had a 5-year reunion, and then realize that you won't have one unless someone who traditionally does not set one up takes the initiative?

I've decided to create a website meeting place for just such an occasion. I, unlike many people I know, actually thoroughly enjoyed highschool! I do have a basic idea of what would be needed, but I'd still like to know what people might find useful. So, to my beloved readers, friends, and whomever else may come across this blog entry...

• What would you want in a reunion site?
• What would be most important to you?
• What type of information would you want to know about your old classmates?
• Are there any reunion websites (specific to a graduating class) that you can link me to (to check out the competitors)? This does not include classmates.com or reunion.com...

Please, feel free to comment!

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski