Creating web pages that are accessible for people with disabilities is also a step in the right direction for making your site user-friendly for the rest of your audience. Observing your work from a different perspective will give you insights on how you can improve. For instance, what does your page look like when style sheets or images are disabled? What will your site sound like when read by screen reading software? How does the page look when loaded on a mobile device? There are a few simple things everyone can do to avoid acessability problems.
Accessibility: A Few Things Everyone Should Do
April 14th, 2009 by Mister McRuby Chop vs Chomp
April 14th, 2009 by jareddWhen you receive user input from textareas or console input you may get some newline characters. One way to remove newline characters is the String#chop method, it will remove any trailing newline or carriage return characters “\r\n”. But it’s tricky. Because here it works like it’s suppose to.
full_name = "My Name is Jared\r\n" full_name.chop! # => "My Name is Jared" |
Now if you run chop and there are no newline characters.
puts full_name #=> "My Name is Jared" full_name.chop! #=> "My Name is Jare" |
Disaster Strikes!
That’s why there is chomp.
puts full_name #=> "My Name is Jared\r\n" full_name.chomp! #=> "My Name is Jared" full_name.chomp! #=> "My Name is Jared" |
So chomp is our recommended way of removing trailing newline characters.
The Fundamental Rule of Computing
April 13th, 2009 by jareddI have created my own fundamental rule of computing. And I call it “The Fundamental Rule of Computing”
And it consists of three parts:
Backup everything. Backup everything to an offsite location. Backup everything to another offsite location. |
Test One Cucumber Feature File at a Time
April 10th, 2009 by Chris GunnelsTo most this may sound commonplace. (definition 2).
So I was banging my head for a hour to find out how to test one feature file at a time. If you don’t know how to do this yet then you’ll want to follow along, if you do, then just read another post and make a good comment!
If this sounds like you:
“I have multiple cucumber feature files in the features folder within my app, I want to test one of those files and not all of them at once, but don’t know how.”
Then you’re in for a treat.
Interactive Ruby With Tab Completion
April 10th, 2009 by Aaron MurphyYield to the Ruby Master
April 9th, 2009 by justinAfter a time of much outer influence and inner struggle, I, a self-proclaimed Microsoft fanboy, decided to abandon everything I’ve known for the last 6 years as a .NET developer and sample the sweet simplicity and sheer power that is Ruby on Rails.
One of the first things I learned while working on my first Rails project was the use of Ruby’s yield statement. Coming from C#, I expected the yield statement to act a bit differently than it does in Ruby. Basically, the yield statement is provided as a way to ease the creation of iterators. It gives control to a user-specified block from within a method’s body.
Usability: The Least You Can Do
April 9th, 2009 by Mister McI recently read the very likable and popular book Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. I think it should be required reading for anyone who does anything with web design and development or software. The author’s examples are clear, authoritative, and presented with humor, which makes cruising through this book enjoyable and interesting. I can’t tell you how many “Head Slappers” (to borrow Krug’s usage of the cliché) I experienced while reading. So many of his ideas seem obvious, but are not common place yet.
Tutorial: How to install/setup Cucumber
April 9th, 2009 by Alan Carl MitchellThis tutorial assumes that you have ruby, rails, and mysql installed on your machine, and doesn’t explain too much about Cucumber and will mostly show you a quick way to get it working. A lot of material is borrowed from this tutorial on setting up RSpec and Factory Girl. It may be useful to look over first, but not necessary.
PowerDNS With Empty CNAME = Fail!
April 7th, 2009 by Aaron MurphyJust used up my morning trying to resolve an MX record problem. We were not getting our email through our new Google Apps account. I tried to send from Gmail to myself and it worked. I tried to send to someone else in our domain, and got a “550 550 Unrouteable address (state 14)” error.
Social Networks and Posting Effective Comments
April 8th, 2009 by Brandon ButtarsRead the rest of this entry »
Tags: blogging, commenting, smo
Posted in Marketing | 17 Comments »