Boowhoo bloggin

So bloggin is not my foray... neither is updating my website. Some time back I paid a gal to write content for this here website. She was paid $150 cash money upfront. A Few weeks went by and I never heard back from her again. All to sad if you ask me. I have decided to take on the task myself with some fairly ambitious plans to redesign and develop the site. In the meantime do enjoy the stale content and rather well aged portfolio pieces.

Not an everyday task...

Over the years I have acquired a heaping pile of black and white eps files. I love them... they are simple little pieces of art, easy to re-purpose for all kinds of designs. However finding a file that would fit a design was never so easy. Each file was stored away into multiple subfolders having a numeric naming convention which repeated by folder. There were close to 500 or so folders with about 12-50 files per folders. Since all file names were numeric the only one way to find what you were looking for was browsing with adobe bridge. Clicking in and out of folder just became a pain.

Ruby on Rails Complex Forms Demo App

This is news to me… and right in time. Jeff Dean posted a sample app on git hub which explores various examples of complex html forms that involve multiple models with complex associations. Espically helpful if your hoping to work with checkboxes or radio buttons.

http://github.com/zilkey/complex_forms_demo_app/tree/master

IE7 Option Tag width

Ever notice in ie7 the option tag width will not match the size of the select element? There really is no good way around this other than fooling the element to spread eagle and back. The script below will do all that for you… Unobtrusively condensed in a singleton pattern.

Ruby on Rails Ajax free of Helpers

My experience with rails has been new and delightful, save working with the front end. Rails comes packed with helper methods some that write quick and cool Ajax methods. They follow rails conventions and do not require a strong grasp of JavaScript to get in motion.

However, if you are a stickler for standards and have a passion for valid clean markup… these helpers can leave a bit to be desired. I have been in the habit of binding js events directly to elements over the element itself. It pleases me to see markup free of inline styling, event handlers and inline js scripts. The simpler and more descriptive the markup the better.