UX Files

Inspired by my multi-month journey battling my local ISP to finally get reliable internet while working from homeMore people than ever are working from home these days. Even if you don't work full

There is a nice Ruby gem that allows for automatic CSS Sprite generation: Sprite Factory. It has lots of ways to configure it, and allows for output that works with the Rails asset

My wife and I send out Christmas cards every year. And every year it is a pain to consolidate and update our mailing address list, not to mention then have it in the

While at CSSDevConf 2015, I also took a workshop from Jonathan Snook. He helped lead the Yahoo! Mail redesign and works at Shopify as a lead front-end engineer. He developed the SMACSS philosophy

I attended CSSDevConf last week, on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA. The location was very cool and unique, and the content I thought was excellent. I came back very fired up

In fixing an escaping bug in a Twitter Typeahead search component we have, I put in some capybara tests. I wanted to not only assert the presence of the search box, but also

So there has been a lot of buzz lately regarding hacking the Dash button. My friend and coworker, who is a real American hero, wrote a post just yesterday summarizing his genius pizza-dash

So OctoPress was fine and all.. and I like that it was all in markdown (which makes it nice when doing tech-heavy posts with code blocks). But I also almost never posted once

Firefox 22 does not support an embed tag with a "hidden" attribute. Even if the "hidden" attribute is set to false (hidden="false"). This worked fine in

I'm moving away from blogger. (Yes, I was using blogger. It was free, they managed the hosting and it was just one less thing to think about.) But I wanted more control over

My water company finally enabled electronic billing & payments.  I'm excited as it's the last paper bill I had to deal with (of course I still just paid online using free Chase

I was having trouble installing 0.10.1 version of therubyracer on Mountain Lion, because it depends on libv8 3.3.10.4.  This is running Ruby 1.8.7.  Upgrading

I always forget the correct way to get the currently selected value of a radio button group. I'm documenting it here so I can hopefully finally remember it!Suppose the following markup:<

Fun discovery today of confusing behavior with Rails functional test framework (at least version 2.3.4): ### controller ### def create comment = Comment.create!(:name => params[:name]) @result = { :id => comment.id } respond_

I recently created my first custom Rails builder.  It was very easy to do.First, create a class that inherits from ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder and then you can either write your

I recently ran across a scenario where a function of mine was returning an Object (also known as a hash in other languages such as Ruby), and I wanted to check in the

Since Flash 10, the upgrade experience is fairly streamlined, but the dialogs that appear have tripped me up on multiple occasions.  And yes, I stress multiple, because they have a point release

It's no secret that I do not like Cox Communications.  I am not a fan of monopolies in any industry (don't get me started about text message "packages" and voice plans

I have a Windows 7 64-bit installation, with IE9 and the latest version of Flash (10.3.181.34) installed.  I was not able to view most flash in webpages, even the

It's too bad that Javascript / DOM events do not give you a hook for detecting when there is a click outside of an element. One way you can do this is to listen