Idle Hamster

How is 2012 Going So Far?

2012-04-11T03:44:21+00:00

Uh oh! I just realized I haven't posted anything this year.

You may of noticed a nice coat of paint on this blog. I've been working on a new look for a while and finally got impatient and just launched it without finishing it. So if you see any weirdness its cause I'm still working on it. I haven't implemented a responsive layout yet because I'm researching a bunch of frameworks and techniques. I feel you need to do it by hand first then you can easily see the strengths and weakness of frameworks.

A few weeks ago I attended SXSW. Maybe its because I've been before there before, but this year didn't feel as cool as last year. I attended more technical sessions, but that's mainly because I did see as many inspirational sessions. The parties were crowded and if you weren't a VIP then you pretty much had to wait to get in. I'm not sure I would go again. Maybe I just need to find a super geeky conference instead.

Once again I travelled without a laptop and only my iPad. Its just an awesome device for attending conferences and travelling with. Sure if I needed to do a lot of work there it would of been a pain, but that's not why you go to conferences. Besides I found a decent code editor in Textastic, it's far from free, but it has a DropBox and FTP support.

I almost switched to Chrome earlier in the year, but I still get hung up on its quirks. Not to say Firefox doesn't have its fair share, but I'm used to them. If anyone knows how to give Developer Tools a shortcut or a toolbar icon and how to map command-enter to add www. and .com to url instead of control-enter please let me know. I'm willing to give it another try, although I still think Firefox has a better bookmark and history setup.

Other than that I've been slowly experimenting with new HTML5 technologies. Hopefully some of them will make it up on this blog soon.

Open Graph Video Share

2011-12-30T21:41:53+00:00

I figure I would get one last post in before the end of the year. I’ve been working with Facebook’s Open Graph again trying to share custom videos and just like every other Facebook technology there are a few caveats. The first being if you don’t have an image to go along with your video you won’t see the video player in your news feed. Second you have to make all of the OG links use https otherwise those users won’t see the player. Instead they will be taken to the page with all the OG data. Thirdly, you should set a video width and height meta tag that doesn't cause scrollbars. I've been using the same dimensions as YouTube, 398x224.

jQuery Animation and Overflows

2011-09-07T17:05:04+00:00

Thought I would share a little tip about animating with jQuery that I wasted a good hour on. If you're animating the height of an object, jQuery will automatically set the item's overflow property to hidden. Of course if you have items hanging of the edges like navigation buttons or anything with negative margins this is an undesirable effect. That is unless you add overflow: visible !important to your stylesheet. Problem solved, go back to your lives citizens.

Custom Directory Listings with Htaccess

2011-08-25T15:51:00+00:00

It never ceases to amaze me how incredibly powerful and misunderstood the .htaccess file is to web developers. Most of us never need to crack open that file, but if we do, a quick Google search will give you all the code you need.

Great Resource for Arduino

2011-07-13T17:38:26+00:00

I've been playing around with Arduino for about two weeks now and just a few minutes ago I found a great resource on the web, bildr. There are a ton of blog posts on Arduino and examples on how to connect some of the more popular sensors and components. Check it out if you get a chance.

ShortCircuit is a pretty good resource too.