Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

What’s so awesome about Sublime Text?

Everything! Sublime Text lives up to its name — working in this editor truly is sublime. Far better for me than Notepad++. Jeffrey Way of Nettuts+ has put together a great series of video tutorials that show you how to use all the power of this amazing application. But here’s the highlights from my perspective. […]

Posted by Curtis Gibby on February 18th, 2013

Filed under Programming, Work | 1 Comment »

Like using a shotgun to kill a fly

For years, I’ve been using programs to replace small snippets of text in my programming. I type `z and the program outputs cd /var/replicate/Replicate/trunk/app and hits enter for me. This is much faster than typing out the whole path (even with Bash tab completion), or password, or chunk of code (whatever I happen to have […]

Posted by Curtis Gibby on November 15th, 2012

Filed under Programming, Work | No Comments »

HTML5 form inputs in CakePHP 1.2

At work, we’re building out a mobile version of our replicated sites.  As anyone who’s used an iPhone or Android browser to fill out a web form knows… using an iPhone or Android browser to fill out a web form is really annoying, and it’s best to make things as user-friendly as possible.  That’s why […]

Posted by Curtis Gibby on July 28th, 2011

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Tweaking Firefox tab colors, part 2 (The Firefox 4 edition)

Just when I got used to my new tab colors described in my previous post, Firefox 4 was released and broke what I’d done.  I could still see a teeny difference between my green, yellow, and red tabs — a 2-pixel strip at the top of each of them.  But most of the tab was […]

Posted by Curtis Gibby on March 31st, 2011

Filed under Programming | 2 Comments »

Creating on-the-fly MP3 playlists on the NMT

All I wanted was a way to quickly and easily get some music going on my nice home theater through my Popcorn Hour, preferably with a “shuffle” option — start it up and let it run. I built a custom PHP script to do just that.

Posted by Curtis Gibby on March 1st, 2011

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CSS woes at eBay

I don’t generally pay a ton of attention to web typography, but I must have it on my mind after building a new backend for our replicated sites.  I spotted this on an eBay order confirmation screen this morning: Yes, that’s three different fonts for three different headers… on the same page.

Posted by Curtis Gibby on January 14th, 2011

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Different tab colors for different contexts

As a web developer, I may have ten tabs open, each of which could be from any of my environments, and each of which may look identical until you click into it to see the actual URL. So I spent a lot of time clicking back and forth between them trying to find the other page I’d been working on, until I found out how to change the tab color based on which domain it was on.

Posted by Curtis Gibby on December 16th, 2010

Filed under Cool Web Stuff, Programming | 3 Comments »

Syncing Stylish userstyles with Dropbox

The one gripe I had with Stylish is that it doesn’t automatically let you sync your styles across computers. But then I came up with the idea of keeping userstyles synced up via Dropbox, and now it works great! I’ll show you how to do it here.

Posted by Curtis Gibby on August 24th, 2010

Filed under Programming | 5 Comments »

Maximizing font size in FPDF

At work, I use the excellent FPDF library to write PDF files.  But I couldn’t find any way to automatically make the text as large as possible to fit into a given space.  So I wrote the following function to stick into the FPDF class.  It’ll take a given text string and a width, incrementally […]

Posted by Curtis Gibby on June 22nd, 2010

Filed under Programming, Work | 5 Comments »

My reaction to Google Font Directory: “Meh.”

I’ve been interested in web fonts for a while now, so I was rather excited when the Google Font Directory was released last month. Am I the only one who’s not really impressed with it?

Posted by Curtis Gibby on June 16th, 2010

Filed under Cool Web Stuff, Programming | No Comments »