Forcing Fonts to Fit with jQuery
Dec
27
2012

I honestly don’t know how I used to code Javascript before jQuery. Though I’ve tried to repress the horrible memories of those days, I still suffer from flashbacks of hunting through obscure alert errors messages to determine which browser was choking on my code… and that was just to do simple menu mouseover animations! Thankfully things have come a very long way in the last few years! We now have free access to excellent Javascript debugging tools such as Firefox Firebug and Chrome Developer Tools, slick APIs such as jQuery that put the focus back on writing powerful code, and an emerging cross-browser convergence towards true standards compliance (though Internet Explorer still lives its own fantasy world where standards are mere suggestions, » read more «

Add get_comments_popup_link to WordPress
Dec
16
2012

WordPress is a great platform for building your own blog, but, as with any open-source code base, it has a few annoyances that makes writing your own custom code harder than should be necessary. One of my biggest complaints has to be the inconsistency with functions that return strings versus output the string via echo. Most major functions in WordPress have echo and string variants. For instance, we can output the title of a WordPress post with: Alternatively, we can store the value of the post title as a string variable with: As I said, most major functions in WordPress follow this pattern— but an annoyingly small set only have their echo variant. This is the case for the function » read more «

New & improved site almost finished
Dec
19
2009

This week saw a flurry of web dev activity as I went back to the drawing board for version 6.0 of TheScubaGeek.com. Version 5.0+ (released early summer 2009) has served me well, but admittedly I’ve had issues with the certain aspects of the layout. The page navigation on the top menu never quite vibed with me, older articles were hard to find, my content was unbalanced relative to my top-tier categories, and the ad section was rendered all but useless by Firefox’s awesome plugin Adblock Plus (which, if you don’t already have it, get it now). And don’t even get me started on the right-aligned misfire of Version 5.0 or the current left-align format of Version 5.5. I wanted the » read more «