The
Palm
Civet

as the budding emacs evangelist i’ve become, i decided to put my custom emacs set-up up on github for idea perusing/scoffing at. lots of ideas were taken from defunkt, al3x, and the emac’s wiki. it’s also been a great exercise in getting accustomed with magit, a great emacs mode for git.

my set-up is mainly tailored for ruby, javascript, css, git, and html. i’m on osx, using apple’s carbon emacs package 2010 and inconsolata is my mono-spaced font of choice.

a collection of cached and optimized popular javascript libraries and stylesheets, hosted on github’s fast CDN. think of it as a more extensive, user-contribute-able alternative to google’s libraries API. an excellent resource for the cloud-minded developer.

as a general rule: the fancier the css3 property, the more verbose the syntax. this is double true when rgba color values are thrown in. here’s a convenient gradient editor that auto-generates the necessary css.

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i have been a heavy user of less, the dynamic css processor, for sometime now. it has been an invaluable time-saving and creatively-inspiring tool in my front-end workflow. with less.js, it is easier than ever to get rolling. since less has now been ported to javascript, it can be rendered in the browser - no need to install the gem and watch/render the css file. just include the script and point at your .less file and you are all set =>

<link rel="stylesheet/less" href="/css/main.less" type="text/css">
<script src="/js/less.js" type="text/javascript">

since discovering sinatra, the ruby DSL that feels like rails’ elegant little brother, i’ve been trying to find a use for it in my typical projects. hence, padrino has me really excited. it seems to have almost all the features i could think of needing =>

* agnostic support for orm’s (for me, activerecord or mongomapper)
* support for less, sass, haml, and erb
* typical necessities: html and form tag helpers, mailers, logging, routing
and the kicker:
* a built-in admin generator based on your model’s attributes

padrino definitely has some exciting potential for wicked fast application development.

and so continues the track of making it faster and more convenient to use the fonts you want to use. with this javascript from typekit, you can use any of the fonts in google’s free and extensive font api very easily =>

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1/webfont.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  WebFont.load({
    google: {
      families: ['Droid Sans', 'Droid Serif']
    }
  });
</script>

and, of course, you can use it load fonts from your typekit account.

a nice explanation of how to support html5 audio and flash in the same markup. embedding <object> within <audio> doesn’t work as hoped, due to firefox complaining about MP3 being patent-encumbered. the solution? swap the nesting of the <object> and <audio> tags =>

<object data="/swf/flashplayer.swf?audio=file.mp3">
  <param name="movie" value="/swf/flashplayer.swf?audio=file.mp3" />
  <audio controls src="file.mp3">
    <a href="file.mp3">download</a>
  </audio>
</object>

a neat tool from the fontshop for dynamically test-driving different fonts on live sites.

PIE is a very clever and simple way of bringing some tasty treats of css3 to internet explorer 6-8. here’s an example usage =>

#myElement {
    background: #EEE;
    padding: 2em;
    -moz-border-radius: 1em;
    -webkit-border-radius: 1em;
    border-radius: 1em;
    behavior: url(/ie/PIE.htc);
}

IE will read the non-standards ‘behavior’ attribute, serve up the PIE, and take a look around for sibling css3 attributes and emulate them. PIE currently supports border-radius, box-shadow, border-image, multiple background images, and linear-gradient as background image.

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personal rails development rule #342: don’t check your email while coding.

mailtrap is a super simple mock SMTP server for rails development. it also comes with a mock pop3 server if you want to use it with a GUI like apple mail, but i prefer to just tail the log file in a terminal window. getting up and running with mailtrap is super easy: =>

# install the gem
gem install mailtrap
# start mailtrap
mailtrap start
# tail the log
tail -f /var/tmp/mailtrap.log