Tom Mollerus' Weblog

When I asked him to articulate the central doctrine of his foreign policy, he said, “The single objective of keeping America safe is best served when people in other nations are secure and feel invested.”

That’s either profound or vacuous, depending on your point of view.

If I had to pick one of Brooks' two labels for the statement I'd call it profound, but I don't know if it qualifies because the idea is so damn sensible. I wish more politicians would make it part of their policy.

Block-level elements treat multiple elements on the page as a single block, putting them all in one rectangular area (think <div>, <table>, and <blockquote>). Inline elements-- and this is the part that's easy to remember-- aren't treated as a block; instead, they fall within lines (ie, "in line") and can go next to other inline elements (think <span>, <a>, and <img>).

One thing to remember is that block elements cannot go inside inline elements.

Here's a graphic showing an example of how ClearType improves the look and legibility of text:

Be sure to check out the other Windows XP PowerToys, too, especially the Alt-Tab replacement.

People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?

It’s time we learned the answers to these and other questions about web design.

The one anomaly that I do notice is that the scheduler log shows this particular task being rescheduled and then being executed, which happens with no other task. Does anyone have any tips or prior experience they can share?

• Distributing emails to a dynamic, user-defined list of recipients;
• Handling unsubscribe requests and subsequent feedback;
• Auto-responding to support requests to let the user know their email has been received;
• Parsing email campaign bouncebacks and marking hard bounces as bad email addresses, and;
• Adding senders to a newsletter recipient list.

Fortunately, PHP fits nicely into the role of a scripting language which can talk to your application databases (to get user data), generate emails, and be called as a command-line interface by your mail program. That's the most important part-- many web languages support reading and sending emails and talking to your database, but few are accessible both as application servers and as command-line programs. I'll explain how to write such a script next.

After having this happen to me several times, I finally woke up and smelled the coffee-- I went and set up Subversion as a version-control system for all of our web files. What a lifesaver! I will never, ever do web work without saving changes to Subversion (SVN) again.

If you've never used a version control system before, I can't encourage you enough to start. There's no longer any valid excuse not to use it:

• Using version control will be too hard to do, with checking files out, checking them in, and resolving conflicts.
  That may be what it's like to use Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe product, but SVN solves all of those problems, and makes it so easy to save changes. With SVN, you check out a copy of all of the files in the project, then edit them as you wish and save changes as you wish. There are no locks-- you can save your changes any time you like. If another developer happens to have saved changes to the same file, SVN will automatically merge the changes for you. If your changes directly conflict with those of the other developer (meaning that you've changed the same lines), SVN will let you know that you need to perform the merge yourself.
  
• I'm the only developer working with these files. Why would I need version control if I can't overwrite my own changes?
  True, you can't unknowingly overwrite your own changes. But certainly there have been and will be times that you wish you could revert to an earlier version of a page that had a better layout or lacked a certain bug. Unless you're using version control, you can't get those versions back.
  
• My web site just isn't important enough to merit version control-- it's only HTML, after all.
  When Subversion is easy to use and free, there's no good reason not to use it. And there's no site that's not going to run into the issue of needing to revert to a previous version of one page or another. Even with an HTML-only site, you may want to revert to an earlier version of your design, your CSS, your HTML, or most likely, your content.
  

I realized that I had better start updating the web site I work on, for several reasons: I should update my skills; I could make the site more modern; and, I could make the site's presentation code lighter and faster. So, I'll write about my experiences as I go in this blog.

But now I think I've found the solution. I just don't force my daughter gets to school on time on any particular morning. I'm not going to complain at her or send her off to get socks on. I relax in the kitchen and perhaps softly remind her of what time it is, since she doesn't look at the clock. But it's up to her when we leave. She got a tardy slip the first time I did it, which she didn't like a bit. But now I'm more relaxed in the morning and so is she. I wonder why I didn't do it earlier.

I think that for development positions, though, it's a little easier to really see how well they know their stuff: I just give them a test where they have to write code samples. And while I require them to write their own code from scratch, I don't expect people to come up with every solution themselves. During the test, I let people look up whatever they'd like from reference books or the web. After all, it's what I do all day. All I care about, in the end, is that they can create good code in good time-- it doesn't matter to me whether they think it up themselves or look it up somewhere else.

Click on the image below if you want to download the full-sized version.

@media print {
	.hideFromPrinter {
		display: none;
	}
}

Then I assigned the hideFromPrinter class to each and every image tag for those blue corners... but I'm sure that I didn't find them all.

But now I know about attribute selectors, and the task of hiding those rounded corners during print view becomes much easier. I just added a new clause to my @media print section, like so:

@media print {
	.hideFromPrinter {
		display: none;
	}

	img[src^='/images/blue_corners/'] {
		display: none;
	}
}

There you have it! All of the blue corners, whose src attributes start with "/images/blue_corners/", no longer show up in print view. This works across the whole site just from 3 lines added to my stylesheet instead of adding code to every image tag.

Have you ever gotten into a discussion (or perhaps even an argument) with a colleague or client over the effectiveness of one particular feature of your web application? Goodness knows I have. The good news is that if you can both agree that the end goal is to serve your site's users, then there's a solution: A/B split testing.