IE is Being Mean to Me
Reply
Category Archives: Browsers
FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009
During the last year i expanded my plugin usage in Firefox. Some of them being really useful and some of them… well… was not even worth the time spent on installing them.
Here is my hot pick from 2009
This one is for those people who cant get their head around the classic cURL. The fact remains that there are still people who are into development/testing and doesn’t know about cURL and i’m not talking about newbies. So here is one tool that can save your day. Do any HTTP related work with this and i bet you will fall in love with this.
This lets you mess with the HTTP headers and parameters. But the best use of this i have found so far was that it can display the headers in a very neat way, that can be understood easily
This is a form recovery tool. I bet everyone of us has that frustrating moment after filling a form and submitting it, the data is all lost due to some insane wizardry behind the scene that we didn’t know about. Well not anymore. Lazarus helps to recover the form data that was entered and saves the frustration.
Well do i need to describe what this is? In short this can run selected SQL Injection attacks on the fields on a webpage. Great tool identify similar vulnerabilities.
and last but one of my favorite -
Anyone who has worked on regex knows that, it would be great if they could see the regex in action on the test data, on the fly, as they are building it. This plugin is a dream come true.
Trust me you need this plugin.
For the layman, you dont need any of these plugins. But i assure you that the following is a must have for both geeks and non-geeks alike.
For the geeks and the web-developers here is my list –
Firefox ahead of IE
For the first time ever, the percentage of users visiting my sites using Firefox browser has overtaken that of Internet Explorer. See the latest stats from Google Analytics -
Finally people are waking up to realize the Internet Explorer doesn’t give you a good browsing experience.
Alternate Uses for a PSP
The New Look and Year 2009
Phew!!! .. Yes Phew. Its the first word that i chose to start the first post of the new year. Well technically new year was almost a month ago, still from the ‘first post of the year’ point of view, its still new year. Oh crap, that line was awfully jumbled up. Hey but i dont mind that line being like that, i dont want to read through that line again and then rephrase it and make it more vivid. No i dont want to do that.
So what happened? I took my blog to the drawing board. 25th Dec ’08 christmas eve, i decide to redesign this blog. Though the previous design was very simple and required less than 3-4 hrs to come up with, this one took nearly 4 weeks. Shit! that was like a month.
Made a sketch of it on paper, then to photoshop, then back to the layout on paper, back to photoshop. I designed one layout and when i looked at the finished one, i almost puked. Then redesigned the whole thing and here it is the new look.
On paper this is how the design looked like
Then i decided to have the sidebar to the right. The first version on Photoshop looked like this and i hated it
Then i struck the right note with this one.
Then it was the wrestle with stylesheets and upgrading the then current SIM3.0 to this one,which i call SIM4.0. Lets talk about the changes,
1. Latest Twitter updates on the header – i basically took the HTML badge given by twitter and put the code there.
2. Sidebar will now sport the pages with a logo for each. I disabled the widget functionality of the sidebar.
3. The Footer -This is where most of the work went into. I mutated the footer to have 3 columns. Into these columns i can add the widgets. It was quite simple infact once i figured that out.
The main footer file is – footer.php. Each of the 3 columns are again separate php file. The main footer.php calls these files like this -
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/1-footer.php'); ?>
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/2-footer.php'); ?>
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/3-footer.php'); ?>
to make each of these accept widgets, this line was added -
<?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar(3) ) : else : ?>
The ‘dynamic_sidebar(3)’ made it sidebar-3 in the add widgets page. It was joy when i figured this out. I know i could have referred the WordPress manuals. But then i wont get the joy of discovering things.
4. My CSS is split into two. Why? One for all the browsers and one for IE. I officially label IE as a pain. This is what i observed. An image was to the left in Firefox, but to the right in IE. “margin-left:100px” put something in the middle for Firefox and at the page boundary in Internet Explorer
Any way after all that pain, now i have the site up with the new look and it feels GREAT!!!
Happy New Year Guys…
- xxx Jerry -