code

FTP Clients & Bookmarks

eric — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:50:43 -0500

I've used many FTP clients over the years like Cyberduck, Transmit, Fetch, YummyFTP, Coda (Yes, Coda is basically Transmit plus a code editor and more) and am looking forward to using Flow, now.

The one thing that bugs me the most about FTP clients apps is the reliance upon their own bookmarking system. Flow is the exception as it can recognize Cyberduck's bookmarks, but you can't import any others that I know of. Coda, Transmit and YummyFTP all use their own system and this is a pain if you want to migrate over or have reason to use multiple client apps.

Is it possible to import Keychain data into any FTP clients? What is your recommended method to migrate from one FTP client to another? Have any tips?

Note: I still use FTP for simple site edits and maintaining smaller websites so this isn't meant to be a post about SVN, Git, SSH, etc.

Backward-Compatible CSS Classes

eric — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:59:50 -0500

It's funny to look back and see what you've learned about CSS and web design, as a whole. Looking back, I know that my first sites were terrible. I didn't know about Doctypes, symantically correct HTML, etc.

For those of us that have forgotten what it is like to be a new web designer, web developer, or on the client side of things, I have provided a list of CSS classes to use as a reminder (in light-hearted jest, of course).

<h1 class="secretary-turned-designer"></h1> <h2 class="use-wherever-there-is-quoted-text"></h2> <h3 class="gosh-awful"></h3> <h4 class="gosh-awful capslock"></h4> <h4 class="gosh-awful use-a-font-that-only-we-have"></h4> <h5 class="because-i-dont-know-the-difference-between-a-header-and-bold-paragraph-text"></h5> <h6 class="i-dont-care-about-symantically-correct-i-just-want-to-use-this-as-the-page-header"></h6>

<p class="retina-burnin hot-pink-text-on-neon-green-background"></p> <p class="retina-burnin bright-blue-text-on-bright-yellow-background"></p> <p class="comic-sans-need-i-say-more"></p> <p class="i-like-frontpage"></p> <p class="how-do-i-edit-this-in-dreamweaver"></p> <p class="do-it-like-microsoft-word-does-it"></p>

<ol class="animated-bullets smiley-faces"></ol> <ul class="lets-use-a-lot-of-asterisks-instead"></ul> <ul class="because-i-think-centered-bullets-look-better"></ul>

<img class="use-logo-secretary-designed" /> <img class="make-logo-bigger" /> <img class="make-photos-of-boss-more-prominent" /> <img class="photos-of-employees display-none" />

<div class="where-is-the-table-drawing-tool"></div> <div class="the-site-looks-bad-in netscape-4-7 ie-4"></div> <div class="i-dont-see-whitespace-because-the-page-background-is-black"></div> <div class="copied-html-from-word-and-the-site-is-now-broken send-angry-email-to-designer"></div> <div class="hired-neighbors-kid"></div> <div class="why-are-css-gallery-sites-laughing-at-us"></div>

CLObject

eric — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 22:59:32 -0600

Conditional Love Object

CLObject (in order to give it an actual name), came about after frustration with getting Suckerfish Dropdowns to work with SWFobject. My Suckerfish dropdowns were behind my Flash animation in IE only. After trying various CSS changes (z-index, absolute positioning, etc), I realized that it might be possible to put conditional comments for IE on the embed tag, but Camino/Firefox/Flock would choke and not show anything at all while Safari and IE were fine.

Beat me to it

I worked for hours trying to get this right and testing things by trial and error (because, sometimes, you just want to figure it out on your own). Then, much later in the day, I come across David Grudl's post about the same thing I was working on so I tried his, but I was getting the HTMLtidy errors with Safari. I just had to simplify the comments a bit and it worked great for me.

After David's post deflated me a bit, which is not surprising since there are tons of smarter people than myself, I guess all I can be accused of is giving it a name (Great. Now I am in marketing?).

I give David Grudl full credit for this, unless someone can prove otherwise, but, either way, I think it is a great method for inserting Flash while still validating.

Even though my findings were almost three months later, I'll explain it here, anyway, but for more indepth information please see David's post

The Code

This code uses Conditional Comments for IE to hide one object from IE while the other is fed only to IE.

For Camino/Firefox/Flock, Opera and Safari

This bit is read as normal by most browsers, except for IE. The "!" tells IE to leave it alone and go on about it's quirky business.

 <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="flash_content.swf" width="500" height="100"> <img src="alternate_image.jpg" width="500" height="100" alt="alternate content" /> </object> 

For IE

This bit is skipped by non-IE browsers. IE reads it and does it's thing.

What I had come up with didn't fix the Eolas issue with Flash content, but David has that covered as well in another post.

I could have just dug deeper for someone else's solution, but I did enjoy the challenge.