“Creative people romanticize mistakes and process. But there is no process if you don’t start. No one crumples a blank sheet of paper.” – Frank Chimero, How to Have an Idea
Tag Archives: howto
How to use @font-face to avoid faux-italic and bold browser styles
Did you know that if you declare a custom font using @font-face, the browser will try to fake the bold and italic styles if it can’t find them? This is a clever little feature that avoids a scenario where a … Keep reading
How to Add Theme Settings for Drupal 7
You know that list of checkboxes on the theme settings page that let you turn on and off parts of the theme like the logo or slogan? Well, you can add your own options to that list really easily in … Keep reading
How to Change the Content-Type Meta Tag in Drupal
I’m working on an HTML5 theme for Drupal 7 right now, and I needed to change the meta content-type tag. By default it looks like this: <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />, and I needed the updated HTML5 version: <meta charset=”utf-8″ … Keep reading
How to use jQuery to open external links in a new window
A common request from clients is to open all external links on their website in a new browser window. (Leave aside for now whether this is a good idea or not, and just assume that you need to do it.) … Keep reading
How to use jQuery to target CSS at older browsers
On a recent project where I had to support Firefox 3.6, 3.0 and 2.0, I had to find a way to target a specific version of the browser due to differences in the rendering engine. It turns out the easiest … Keep reading
jQuery Slide-Down Language Selector
A site I worked on recently had an international link, and when the user clicked on it, the whole page was supposed to slide down and reveal a language picker. I found some jQuery to slide the page down, but … Keep reading
jQuery Popup Footnotes
A recent site I worked on had footnote references throughout the body copy, and a corresponding list of footnotes at the bottom of the page. That’s easy enough to mark up, but the client also wanted the footnote to display … Keep reading
How to Hire a Front-End Web Developer
The following is an email exchange I had with a friend at another company about a year ago. We were talking about the best way to go about hiring a front-end developer, and I was sharing some tips from our … Keep reading
Five iPhone Tips
I recently got an iPhone, and like any good geek, immediately started banging my head against things I didn’t know how to do. If you’ve had an iPhone for awhile now, you probably already know these, but if you’re a … Keep reading
How to Convert Your Old WordPress Database to UTF8
When I upgraded my WordPress installation recently, I ran into a chracter encoding problem. Long story short, it turns out that older WordPress installations like mine tend to have been created in latin1, but the data is actually being saved … Keep reading
How to Avoid Paragraph Gaps when Using Superscript and Subscript
Frequently, when I see a webpage with superscript or subscript text, I see associated gaps in the paragraph. This is caused because the default way browsers render super and subscript text is to add enough vertical space in the paragraph … Keep reading
How to Convert from Community Server 2007 to WordPress
It’s safe to say that no one at Pop Art was ever really happy with Community Server. We selected it as a platform for a variety of reasons, some of which turned out to be based on faulty assumptions. Once … Keep reading
How to Become a General
There was a brand-new second lieutenant who was very ambitious and wanted to be a general. So one night at the officer’s club the young officer spotted this old general sitting at the bar. So he went up and said, … Keep reading
How to Get Your Most Recent Twitter Posts Using PHP with Caching
When we started redesigning the Pop Art blog, one of the chief requirements was to integrate everyone’s Twitter feeds into the site. In addition to the Pop Art Twitter feed in the sidebar, we wanted to add individual twitter feeds … Keep reading
The Rules of Monster Movies
In the October 2004 issue of Wired, there was an article about these guys who work for the SciFi channel whose job is to screen monster movies to decide which ones get aired. Long story short, they decided they could … Keep reading
Moving from LiveJournal to WordPress
I’m working on a new site for a local author, and one of the things she wanted was to move her blog from LiveJournal to WordPress. I did a bit of research, and found out that there are a few … Keep reading
How to Make VirtualPC and Synergy Get Along
Recently, I installed VirtualPC on my XP box so that I could still test IE6 after installing IE7. However, I immediately ran into a problem. There is some sort of conflict between the mouse emulation being done in the VirtualPC … Keep reading
How to Search for This and Not That Using TextWrangler
I’ve been doing a ton of search-and-replace operations at my job lately, and one of the worst ones I did had to do with searching for the word “Comfort.” Unfortunately, this word is absurdly common on this site, and I … Keep reading