UX Files

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

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