Mark Dorison; Tumbl'd

3 weeks ago

1 month ago

Updated Florida Gators 2010 Football Calendar

I have updated my Florida Gators Football calendar for the 2010 season. If you add this calendar as a subscription in any calendaring program that supports the iCal standard (iCal, Google Calendar, Outlook, etc) it will update itself on a regular basis with game times and channels when these become available! Florida Gators 2010 Football Calendar.

2 months ago

Optimizing Multiple Domains for Google Using Apache's mod_rewrite

If you own more than one domain but point them all to the same site, a portion of your virtual host file may look something like this:


<VirtualHost *:80>
 
   ServerName maindomain.com 
 
   ServerAlias www.maindomain.com alternatedomain.com
 
</VirtualHost>

The problem here is that Google sees the same content being served on multiple domains and will knock down your search ranking as a result. The way to remedy the situation is to utilize Apache’s mod_rewrite so that a 301 request pushes the user to your main url. The only caveat being that no matter which domain you type into the browser url bar, it will then be rewritten to the main domain. Here is an example of the code below that you can add to your virtual host file:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.maindomain.com|alternatedomain.com) [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://maindomain.com$1 [R=301,L]

Save the file, restart Apache, and your alternate domains should then be rewritten to your main domain, your Google ranking preserved, and all is right with the world.

2 months ago

Siberian Hudson in Central Park

Notes: 8 / 2 months ago from emilbjorklund

Handy TextMate tips for working with HTML & CSS

emilbjorklund:

I use TextMate a lot when doing web development, and I absolutely love it. Some of my friends and colleagues also use TextMate, and I get questions like “what was that thing you did with the thing with the text” sometimes. Here, I thought I would document some of the ones I use most frequently.

Creating tag pairs

To create a tag without having to type those pesky angle-brackets and other thingamabobs, there are a few ways to go about it. First, if you find that you already opened the tag “manually”, you can always close a tag by pressing ⌘ (cmd), ⌥ (alt) and “.”. Secondly, you can open a pair of opening and closing tags by using ctrl and “<”. That gives you a default tag of “<p></p>”, which you can then either just change into whatever you want by typing the tag name, and the closing tag automatically changes, or you can tab into the middle if you’re happy with creating a p-tag (same goes for when you have changed it, press tab to jump into the tag).

This way of creating a tag pair allows you to type in attributes before tabbing into creating the content of the element. There is a second way to use this command, and that is to type the name of the tag first (like for instance “li”) and then hit ctrl and “<”, that will give you opening and closing tags and the cursor placed inside straight away.

If you already have a piece of content (a line of text or other HTML elements) that you need to wrap in a pair of tags, you can use ctrl, ⇧ (shift) and “w”. Too bad it doesn’t reindent your code for you, but you can’t win all the time…

Working with selections

Speaking of wrapping stuff, one really useful command when wrapping text with “<a>”-tags is to use ctrl, ⇧(shift) and “L”. That means the text you selected becomes a link, and as an added bonus, the contents of your clipboard gets inserted as the value of the href-attribute. Pretty handy, eh? When I create dummy links on a page, I just copy a hash-character (#) and then just zoom through the text, adding links where necessary. You can also use the same command without selecting text, which gives you an empty “<a>”-tag, then just tab into entering the link text when you’re done with the attributes.

TextMate also has the lovely quality of being able to select text over specific columns as well as multiple lines. This means you can make a selection of a specific part of multiple lines and enter text into this spot on all lines, simultaneously. The easiest way of doing this is to hold the ⌥ (alt) key while selecting an area with the mouse. Try creating a few lines of empty space, select a column across all lines and type “<li><a href=”#”>List item</a></li>” - Hey presto, a list with multiple dummy items in one fell swoop! If you’re not a mouse user, you can enter this multiple-row-editing mode by creating a few empty lines, selecting them (by holding ⇧ (shift) and using the arrow keys) and then pressing ⌘ (cmd) + ⌥ (alt) + “a”.

Element specific stuff

There’s also an abunance of element-specific commands to use. When creating a new HTML document, you can either use one of the templates that ship with TextMate, but if you prefer to do everything “by hand”, try typing for example “doctype” followed by pressing tab (and then hit the number key for the option you want), or why not “head” + tab? There are too many of these to go through, but apart from the above mentioned “doctype” and “head” shortcuts, try tabbing after typing “form” or “table”. That gives you some default scaffolding instead of the tedious work of typing out everything in these elements by hand.

You don’t do the math

When editing CSS, I don’t use as many shortcuts, I find that they mostly slow me down. A couple of things worth noting is that most properties can be tab-completed, if you’re unsure of spelling or syntax. Try typing “background” followed by a tab, for example: that will give you a couple of choices for background properties.

One thing that is quite handy, though, is the built in math bundle: you can do calculations of measurements inline! Say that you’re trying to calculate the em-size of a particular piece of text, and you want it to harmonize with the vertical rythm of the page. You need a line height of 18px for text set in 14px, in ems. Just type “line-height: 18/14em;”, select the “18/14” part and press ctrl + ⇧ + “C”, which gives you a couple of options for calculating a value. Choose “evaluate and replace expression” (no. 2) and you’re good to go!

Finally, it’s also worth mentioning in this context that all of the defaults for what happens for a specific command is easily customized via Bundle Editor, accessed via Bundles - Bundle Editor - Show Bundle Editor (there’s even a keyboard shortcut for that: ⌘ + ⌥ + ctrl + “B”).

Happy coding!

Notes: 2 / 2 months ago

Great name. Great business card.

3 months ago from mccarron

Repair a Non-booting Mac after Linux Install

mccarron:

While at NSCoder Schaumburg last night I installed Ubuntu 9.10 to a USB stick attached to my MacBook Pro. I mistakenly didn’t check the bootloader installation settings, as I thought it was safe since I was installing to the USB stick. That was a bad idea, because I rebooted to a find the dreaded Question Mark Folder on my screen.

This basically means the system can’t find a disk to boot from. In this case, Ubuntu removed the expected EFI boot code and replaced it with their own code. My data was all there, just the drive wasn’t bootable. Also since I wasn’t at home I had no boot disk on hand to fix the problem. Luckily fellow NSCoder Kevin Mitchell had his Mac OS X Snow Leopard disk with him.

I figured it would be fixed with a simple “Disk Repair” command in Disk Utility, or a simple command line to restore the boot code to normal. But after trying various methods to repair the system, I was getting no where. I was worried I’d have to re-image the drive once I got home. So I started to Google around as I knew a solution had to be out there. I eventually found this article on macosxhints.com that had a simple solution that worked flawlessly! A simple resizing of the Mac’s HFS partition will reset the EFI boot code.

Run Disk Utility and click on your internal hard disk (the disk itself, not the partition under it).

Then click on the Partition tab. If you move the triangular slider that adjusts the partition up and then back to where it was, the “Apply” button becomes active (it starts greyed out).

You can now click “Apply,” and the partition will be left alone, but the bootloader will be recreated.

This tip saved the day for me, so I figured I’d share it. As I hope it is a tip that someone can use in the future themselves.

Notes: 614 / 3 months ago from juliaroy (originally from thedailywhat)

The snuggie on steroids

juliaroy:

I am strangely really into this thing…

giannii:

I can use this right now. I’d wear socks though.

thedailywhat:

What hath Snuggie wrought?

[via.]

3 months ago

"I don’t want to hear that the son of a [bleep] can’t throw,” an Alabama coach told me later. “Every time he needed to make a big throw against us, he made it. There really isn’t anyone else like him."

- Alabama Coach on Tim Tebow

3 months ago