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Automating our kids soccer season schedules

It's that time of year, when AYSO kicks off for a 10-week season and you fill your Saturdays with soccer, snacks, and socializing. We have two kids playing for the first time this

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
3 min read

Hosting Ghost 2.0 blog on Heroku

There are a few tutorials on hosting a Ghost blog on Heroku, but I could not find any for the latest Ghost 2.0 update.  I was able to get it working (including

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
2 min read

Generating CSS sprites for Rails with retina support - from Ruby

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Christmas Card Address Lists using Google Apps Script and Google Docs

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
2 min read

SMACSS Workshop Notes #CSSDevConf

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
5 min read

Notes from #CSSDevConf 2015

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
9 min read
javascript

Recursive Collection in Backbone Model

I'm working on a project that is using Browserify modules with Backbone. I will share more details on the full setup and build process I have working, but for today I wanted to

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read
rails

Tips on Upgrade to Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan

Make sure to install Xcode 7.x (7.0.1 at the time of this writing) via the Mac App Store Install El Capitan via Mac App store Ensure Xcode command line tools

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
2 min read

Capybara / Poltergeist tests for Twitter Typeahead search

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Hacking the Amazon Dash Button - Mac OS X Yosemite tutorial

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
2 min read
jquery

Javascript Tests for TextComplete plugin

In a recent project I needed a auto complete plugin that worked in a textarea, and only based on certain keywords / context. What I found was the jQuery TextComplete plugin, which is awesome!

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Trying out Ghost blogging platform now

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Firefox 22 changes embed tag behavior (at least with Quicktime plugin for audio playback)

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Hello New Blog

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Goleta Water Online Portal - UI Fail

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
3 min read

Installing therubyracer 0.10.1 on OS X Mountain Lion

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Get selected value from radio button group using jQuery

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:<

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Rails functional tests - unexpected 406 responses

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_

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

How to Unit Test a custom Rails Form Builder

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Detect if object is empty in JavaScript

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Usability fail: similar dialogs, different actions

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
2 min read

Website fail: invalid data

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

IE9 Flash not rendering when wmode is set to opaque or transparent

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Detect a click outside a DOM element

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

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read

Quickly set a timer on your computer

This is mostly for my own reference, but others may find it useful:If you have QuickSilver on your Mac, you can set a timer that will put large text on your screen

  • Nick Burwell
    Nick Burwell
1 min read
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