March 3, 2008

Things That Are Good To Hear

When one is running apache on Windows 2008 for their business:
The Apache Visit to Microsoft Campus: Day One.

Great hall locations: Computing , Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

February 8, 2008

CSS Behaviors vs CSS Expressions

In follow-up to my previous post, one thing that is worth mentioning is behaviors should always be preferred over expressions. Why? Expressions are constantly re-evaluated making slow Internet Explorer even slower.

For example, an expression doing a faux "max-width" would be recalculated hundreds of times when the mouse moves, even though the result would always be the same. The advantage of behaviours is that you can bind them to specific events, page load, window resize, etc, and in doing so reduce cpu load and improve the performance of your site.

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

January 27, 2008

CSS Behaviors Don't Work

I recently found that the behaviours on one of my sites had stopped working in Internet Explorer. I spent some time looking for javascript errors before I realized a server change had ommited the following line from http.conf: AddType text/x-component .htc

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

July 20, 2007

Naughty Children

UPDATE: This appears to have been a bug in Firefox, and has been corrected in v2.0.0.5. There should *not* be a space between the selector, colon and pseudo class name. Please disregard the rest of this post ;-)

Recently I've started using more CSS2 & 3 selectors and properties, including :first-child and :last-child. It's important to remember to include the space before the colon when specifying these.

If you forget the space the css will still work, but only 90% of the time and without any consistency in Firefox 2, which of course makes it interesting trying to figure out why the page looks fine on first load but breaks after pressing F5! :-S

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

June 28, 2007

Firebug for Internet Explorer

I've finally found an equivalent to Firebug for Internet Explorer that actually works. I've been having limited success with the MS Script Editor and Visual Studio, specifically I have to deattach/reattach the debugger after every script error!

Surprisingly considering how much I've googled this, I never found Nikhil Kothari's Web Development Helper until it was recently mentioned on the ieblog. I suspect the problems I've been having are related to me running as limited user account on XP, with things locked down fairly well. So I still need to Runas... an administrator on Internet Explorer to use this extension, but that's just one elevated process and it works great ;-)

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 2 Fraggles

June 13, 2007

Safari 3

Apple have just released Safari 3 Beta for Windows!, which is slightly ironic since I had been spending so much time trying to test stuff on WebKit under Windows recently. This is really good news for web developers, and the mac community in general, since there's now no excuse not to test sites/apps to the same level as we do with Firefox and Internet Explorer—yes, I'm one of the many that can't see the justification of buying a Mac to test sites. Safari 3 can be downloaded from the Apple site, go get it here.

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 1 Fraggles

March 24, 2007

TortoiseSVN Speed Up Tips

Collected from the web and the manual pages:
(updated 5th Feb 2008)

  1. Use FSFS for new repo's, it's faster and works on network shares
  2. Turn off overlays on network drives
  3. Doing a Cleanup of your working copy folders after ftp'ing down into your working copy (same files but different last modified timestamps)
  4. Exclude .svn folders from virus checkers
  5. Disable XP's "zipfolders" shell extension, you're using 7zip anyway right?
    regsvr32 /u %windir%\\system32\\zipfldr.dll
  6. Set your exclusions to omit useless files, archives and any other files that could accidentally get versioned, when they shouldn't.
    *.bak *.zip *.7z Thumbs.db
  7. Check "Don't fetch status for context menu option" on the Look & Feel page

Additional suggestions to help stop Explorer & Open/Save Dialog hangs
Under Settings > Icon Overlays:

  1. Uncheck "Unversioned Files Mark Parent As Modified"
  2. Uncheck everything under "Drive Types"
  3. Under "Include Paths" list only the folders of your working copies, e.g. for c:\projects\wc use c:\projects\wc\*. If you need an icon on "wc" you'll need to use c:\projects\*, but it will then search everything inside projects.
  4. All my working copies are in folders called source, so to generate the list to paste into this box I use the following at the command prompt: dir source /ad /s /b > folderlist.txt and then add the * to the end of each line.

If you're still getting shell lock-ups after trying all the above, commit all your changes to every project, delete every one of your working copies, make new folders and checkout into those. This finally fixed the lockups for me, so I guess working copies made with an older version of subversion were the problem (some of the working copies were first checked out almost 2 years ago).

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

March 19, 2007

Firefox Settings

I'm doing a reinstall on my laptop this week and am saving my firefox config here for future reference ;-)

about:config

  • browser.backspace_action = 1
  • browser.search.suggest.enabled = false
  • browser.startup.page = 0
  • browser.tabs.tabMinWidth = 40
  • browser.urlbar.hideGoButton = true
  • layout.spellcheckDefault = 2
  • network.http.pipelining = true
  • network.http.proxy.pipelining = true
  • network.prefetch-next = false
  • plugin.scan.4xPluginFolder = false
  • plugin.scan.plid.all = false
  • plugin.scan.SunJRE = false
  • plugin.scan.WindowsMediaPlayer = false

userChrome.css

  • #search-container, #searchbar { -moz-box-flex: 200 !important; }

Extensions

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 1 Fraggles

September 11, 2006

JavaScript Performance in Trident (IE)

From the MSDN IE Blog... Most of these are common sense, but it's sometimes good to have a little reminder.

IEBlog: JavaScript Performance Recommendations - Part 1

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

October 28, 2005

Clarity

Just being reading an interesting article on Zombie Copy over at A List Apart. It actually has some very valid points — in an effort to make copy sound good & to make use of that thesaurus, clarity often seems to get lost in a jumble of euphemisms, superlatives and acronyms.

I for one am guilty of this too, the current copy on the my business site contains well... dear I say it, a lot of fluff—written 2-3 years ago when I didn't know better :( Fortunately that site is in the process of a major overhaul, copy included.

The value of clearly saying what you mean can't be underestimated, though it appears it's often forgotten!

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

October 25, 2005

Like An Elephant In Your Backyard

There really is a lot of rublish information out there on the Internet, presented by so called "experts". While researching javascript performance tuning for a current project, I came across these charming nuggets:

Iterating loops backwards (decrementing) is faster than incrementing, and when looping though DOM objects by tagname, it's faster to include the getElementsByTagName is the for loop evaluation statement. I wonder how many people blindly accept this stuff?

Profiling the above coding suggestions in gecko (Firefox) and trident (Internet Explorer 6), showed that in all cases the suggestions resulted in speeds that were either the same or slower. In fact, the getElementsByTagName suggestion under Internet Explorer 6 increased the execution time by 250%, not exactly a performance increase! lol.

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

March 24, 2005

Ghostbusters, Inspector Gadget & Firefox

I recently started using the Venkman JavaScript Debugger for Firefox (and other Mozilla based browsers), named after Peter Venkman from the 1984 movie Ghostbusters.

Well having used javascript alert boxes and such like for debugging for years, I have to say this thing is absolutely brilliant.

Especially the ability to watch variable values change as the code executes. Extremely useful for tracking down those niggling coding logic errors—the ones that execute fine but just don't work!

Also of invaluable help is Firefox's DOM Inspector. I had looked at this when I first installed Firefox, but didn't realise it would update the tree to reflect changes made with DHTML—oops! The current project I'm working on creates large amounts of elements dynamically, so this is great for tracking down dodgy object creation/nesting.

However it doesn't help when the problem is actually a bug in Firefox itself (1.0.1), arrrgggh. In this case moving a DIV to be the first child node, made the second child [it's sibling, also a DIV] lose its margins. The problem doesn't occur in the latest Firefox nightly or Internet Explorer, frustrating...

Debugging In Internet Explorer

Having tried the Microsoft Script Debugger and found it to be a flying piece of sh*t, I discovered the link below describing the MS Script Editor; a very capable javascript debugger for Internet Explorer. Very useful when you're debugging a msie specific code fork, especially since IE's default error messages are most completely useless...

Javascript Debugging using the MS Script Editor

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 1 Fraggles