I have to believe that the developers behind Internet Explorer have good intentions. It might ruin my world view and trust in people if that turned out to not be the case. However, there are instances where they go too far.
In this case, Internet Explorer tries to be “helpful” by automatically setting the link text when you set the href attribute of an anchor tag. I present the details of when this will happen and how you can get around it.
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Posted June 17th, 2010 at 10:30 am in Programming | No Comments
When developing for the web, if there is one browser that will not look correct, it is almost guaranteed to be a version of IE.
This was the case when I recently encountered elements that appeared to have a fixed position when they were not styled in that way. The problem was only visible on IE7 and, as I discovered, was a known bug in IE since version 6.
This article describes two different solutions to this problem.
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Posted June 14th, 2010 at 9:30 am in Programming | 3 Comments
Honeypot captchas are a simple, unobtrusive way to try to combat automated form spam. I packaged some work I did a few years ago using this technique in Ruby on Rails forms and created a gem.
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Posted April 12th, 2010 at 4:10 pm in Ruby on Rails | 7 Comments
Sometimes, Rails queries can get long and complicated. Using named bind variables is an easy way to give some context to the query and, when you need to supply the same value to multiple query conditions, can shorten the query parameters.
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Posted October 1st, 2009 at 9:30 am in Ruby on Rails | No Comments
Cucumber has a relatively new feature that allows you to tag individual scenarios as “should pass” versus “work-in-progress”. Rake tasks are provided that run the two groups of tagged scenarios separately.
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Posted September 30th, 2009 at 9:30 am in Ruby on Rails | No Comments
The Ruby on Rails built-in inflections don’t handle singularizing words like “business” or “address” correctly. Here’s a quick way to make sure it’s handled in your Rails project.
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Posted September 29th, 2009 at 9:30 am in Ruby on Rails | No Comments
Describes a fatal error in Rack v1.0.0 that may need to be patched until a new version is released. If you’re seeing a “invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII” error, then read on!
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Posted September 28th, 2009 at 9:05 pm in Ruby on Rails | No Comments
Social media isn’t all about the numbers and it’s not about pleasing everyone. Stopping worrying so much about who is or isn’t following you, reading your blog posts or friending you on various social networks (that I don’t belong to, btw).
It’s about finding people that are relevant or interesting to you and establishing a relationship. Why sift through all the noise to find the relevant chunks? Remove the noise and begin to see things more clearly.
I describe my current process for keeping things relevant. Are you ready? It’s time to start trimming the fat from your social media diet.
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Posted September 15th, 2009 at 9:00 am in Community | No Comments
Even though there has been a big emphasis lately on building relationships online, it is still important to foster your offline relationships, too. It shouldn’t be about quantity of connections as tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. would train us to believe.
Instead, it should be about the quality of the connections you have with people. Those relationships can be helped by taking time to meet with those people offline and in small groups. I present a specific challenge to you to do just that.
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Posted September 10th, 2009 at 9:00 am in Community | 5 Comments
I was taught a long time ago that giving a proper handshake involved only a few key elements. However, I found this ingrained idea about shaking hands challenged recently by an individual who followed a completely different set of rules for giving a handshake.
Afterward, I took a little time to evaluate my thoughts about it, which I document in this article.
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Posted August 13th, 2009 at 10:00 am in Random | 3 Comments
