Blogs about code

Quick and Dirty Mobile Friendly Updates.

Here are a few quick and dirty upgrades to make your site more usable on mobile and small-screen devices. (Your site is already standards based, right? Good.)

Throw these in your head:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
<meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="True">
<meta name="MobileOptimized" content="320">

And this in your stylesheet:

html { -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; }

This will give your users pretty good usability on their mobile devices (even when changing orientation on iOS devices) without downloading the whole jQuery library.

PHP Current Year.

Here's a quick PHP snippet which will get the current year (from the PHP server) and display it along with a copyright symbol.

$currYear = date("Y");
echo "© " . $currYear;

Now you can finally stop updating your website's footer every January.

HTML5 Default Types.

You've typed <script type="text/javascript" src="foo.js"></script> about a million times. But when have you ever needed to use a type other than text/javascript for a script tag?

HTML5 understands. It assumes a default type="text/javascript" for <script> tags. It also assumes type="text/css" for <link rel="stylesheet"> and <style> tags.

For more cool HTML5 features, check out The three levels of HTML5 usage by Mathias Bynens.

10 Things I Love About Sublime Text 2.

I've recently fallen in love with a new text editor for all my coding needs - Sublime Text 2. Here are 10 things I love about Sublime Text 2:

1. ST2 doesn't make me set up projects; I can just edit the file I need. But if you need to manage code projects, ST2 can do it.
2. The mini-map. No more scroll-scroll-scroll to get to one section in the super-long file. Just click the appropriate section in the Minimap (on the far right side) and ST2 scrolls right there.
3. Control + / to comment the currently selected text. (Or un-comment it, if it's is commented.) If nothing is selected, it comments / uncomments the current line of code. It's context-sensitive - HMTL, CSS and JS all get the right comments.
4. ST2's code folding is similar to Dreamweaver's code collapsing, but there's more. When text is selected, press Control + Shift + [ to fold that block of code out of view. Use Control + Shift + ] to unfold.
5. When you mouse over the line numbers (in the gutter, little triangles appear for each element. Click that triangle to fold the whole element.
6. No more using the mouse to select lines of text - Control + L will select the current line. (Subsequent presses of L while holding Control will select lines further down.)
7. Control + Shift + A will select the current tag.
8. It's fast - super fast. There's no splash screen and no loading time, even on my poor old Macbook Air.
9. F6 to enable / disable spell check. Sometimes you want it, sometimes you don't.
10. ST2 has a very user friendly license. You can download a trial-version (nags are the only thing it does). If you buy, you the individual can install your copy on any of your machines - work PC, home PC, laptop, whatever. You also get to use any version of ST2 - it's available for Windows, OSX, and Linux.

Quick And Easy CSS Targeting.

I have been a staunch staunch supporter of conditional comments as the best way to send different CSS to different versions of Internet Explorer. I found that the other options - selector-based CSS rules - were just too hack-y. I was going to have to see a very persuasive technique for me to consider it.

Here it is:

#myelement
  { color: #999; /* shows in all browsers */
    *color: #999; /* notice the * for IE7 and below */
    _color: #999; /* notice the _ for IE6 and below */
}

The above code is lifted directly from http://briancray.com/2009/04/16/target-ie6-and-ie7-with-only-1-extra-character-in-your-css/.

These are still hacks, so there's always the possibility that the browser vendor could fix the bug that these hacks exploit, or that a new browser will react oddly to this code. For a short term site or a quick and dirty build, I might be willing to take that chance.

I think I'll stick with conditional comments for my larger endeavors. I'm willing to subject the IE6/7 users to the hit of an extra HTTP request.