Category Archives: Code

Eating My Own Dog Food

Posted on January 3, 2011 by romkey

For a while I’ve been advising people who need simple web sites to use WordPress. Not just people who want to blog, but people who need a very simple site with just a few pages. The reason I’ve been suggesting … Continue reading →

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Whenever I Go Away, I Want to Start Anew…

Posted on May 13, 2009 by romkey

There’s a thrill for me in the initial exploration of an idea, the initial design of a piece of software or web site, and in learning how to use new tools or pieces of software to build the thing that I want to build.

… I don’t hate that part of the work but it isn’t nearly as interesting to me and it’s hard for me to get up the motivation to do it, especially when I have a head full of other ideas to work on. However, getting over that hump and dealing with the issues that arise as a site begins running and getting users, or a piece of software starts to get used by others – that captures my interest again – maybe not quite as much as the initial phase, but there are new problems and there are always unforeseen developments when other people start using a thing that one person has labored over on their own. … I’m sitting in a hotel today having a very nice relaxing day away from home, and thankfully today’s idea for something new is blocked by a lack of good domain names for it (rather than a surplus of self-control). Continue reading →

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Fixing Perl after MacOS X Security Update 2009-001

Posted on February 16, 2009 by romkey

Apple's first security update of 2009 for MacOS X may solve some security issues in the OS but it also seriously breaks Perl by installing old versions of some modules along with Perl. It looks like Perl works okay for things that MacOS X uses it for, but if you do development using it or have installed other modules than what it came bundled with you may find that it no longer works.

…You'll probably need to download it from CPAN by hand as the CPAN shell itself is broken by the update.

The current version (as of the time I'm writing this article) is 1.2301 – you can find it at http://search.cpan.org/~gbarr/IO-1.2301/IO.pm
Continue reading →

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WebDev: jQuery, JSON, IE and Caching

Posted on November 2, 2008 by romkey

When you bookmark a listing the icon changes from a heart with a plus sign to a heart with a minus sign, the count of the number of times the the listing was bookmarked is updated and a message is displayed that confirms the item was bookmarked. … The first thing I tried was to make sure that my server returned a header in the response to tell the client not to cache the results. … GET is meant to be idempotent, no ill effects if it’s repeated (a request to move to position 8 is idempotent; a request to move to the next position is not). … Just add this to your jQuery initialization code: $.postJSON = function(url, data, callback) { $.post(url, data, callback, “json”); Changing my code to use postJSON() instead of getJSON() solved the problem. Continue reading →

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Offline jQuery Documentation for MacOS X

Posted on October 30, 2008 by romkey

I don’t always have reliable online access when I’m coding – in particular, I was on a bus today for a couple of hours and didn’t always have Internet access. There are a couple of dashboard widgets for MacOS X which I found that helped out on the jQuery documentation front. … This widget is designed for browsing… click around in it, but don’t expect to search it. … This widget is designed for searching – if you know what you’re looking for, you can find it quickly. Continue reading →

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