Thinking back over all the new music I discovered this past year, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite albums (in no particular order). Not all of these were released in the past year, it’s just that I’ve discovered them in the past year. They’re are amazing albums I can listen to over and over again. If you haven’t heard anything on this list, go get it right now!
There’s links to download music after the jump, and there’s even some free stuff too!
Compressing your javascript and CSS is a easy way to save bandwidth and make a site’s download and performance feel a bit snappier. There’s lots of tools to allow you to do this, but from my research it seems that Yahoo!‘s YUI compressor is the overall best. Sure there’s others out there like JSmin and Dean Edward’s packer, but YUI offers a higher compression ratio, it also works with CSS files, and it’ won’t obfuscate your code.
Compressors work by removing all comments and whitespace (line breaks), and in some cases they will actually analyze your code and shrink variable names. Using compression can result in up to a 60% decrease in file size! So lets get started in learning how to use the YUI compressor!
A long time ago I wrote a small plugin for Mootools to resize textareas on the fly, which I simply called Textarea resizer. It was only compatible with Mootools 1.11, and since then Mootools 1.2 has been released and I’ve switched to jQuery for all the stuff I do.
Last night I was asked to take some pictures fo a special music event at Seven22. Right before everything started I was setting up my equipment and the glass completely fell out of my Nikkor 18-135mm lens! I needed this lens to shoot with tonight, and everything was starting in about 5 minutes, so my quick fix was to just screw on my UV filter on top of the glass to hold it in place. That seemed to work fine as a temporary solution and the pictures turned out alright, but clearly this isn't a permanent solution!
I decided to inspect things closer, and it turns out that this glass is actually threaded inside the lens casing. Somehow from all kinds of screwing and unscrewing of lens filters and hoods, this must have loosened the threading on the glass. I carefully put everything back together and screwed it back in using a microfiber cloth. Everything seems to be back to normal. What a relief!
Recently I needed a way to click a button and add a new row to a table with an animation using jQuery for people to add new data for a section. Simple right? Well I set up my table with a blank row at the bottom that I hid with CSS, and then when I press a button it clones that row it and puts it at the top with a .slideDown() animation. Here's the code I used:
Looks pretty straightforward right? Well it works, but it doesn't seem to render correctly. Here's a demo of this in action to see what I mean.
Turns out that for most jQuery animations when they complete, the display CSS property is set to display:block;. Normally that's all fine and good, but a table row has to be set to display:table-row;. I can't edit how that animation finishes since it's part of jQuery, so now what?
Well someone on the jQuery Google Group had the great idea to just fill each table cell with a <div>, put all the contents I needed in there, and simply apply the .slideDown() animations to that <div> since by default they are set to display:block; anyway. Brilliant! Basically we never animate the table row itself, only the elements inside it.
I put together a pretty full featured demo with some other cool jQuery tricks I've been learning recently, so take a look and I hope this will help someone else out.
I'm about to head out for a get together at church, and we're all supposed to bring something to eat. Before I go, I just wanted to share my recipe for pizza dip.
I signed up for yet one more social network, Open Source Food, which is basically a recipe sharing site. View my profile here.
Wow, several months since my last entry, so it's about time I wrote something here.
I've moved to Pensacola and I've had lots of new things to do and try since my move. This is a list of those things and why I like them.
I'll be talking about:
Today I decided to finally sign up for Evernote since it's finally out of private beta. Basically it's a way to organize and keep all kinds of things you come across all day. There's a desktop app as well as a web app that allows you to add a new note to evernote. The feature I'll probably use the most is mobile uploads where I can take a picture of soemthing and upload it right to the site via MMS on my phone. Evernote will even do some OCR on images and try and pull out text it see's in the images. Incredibly useful.
It’s been a while since my last post, and that’s due to life being crazy! Derek got married and I was in the wedding, and I quit my job at CYber SYtes because I got a better offer from AppRiver. Taking this job unfortunately meant for me that I had to move to Pensacola!
Check out this video from Chad Pugh. He spent 40 hours in Illustrator and took a screenshot every 5 seconds while creating this amazing drawing he calls "Science Machine."
