A really nice jQuery UI theme that doesn’t look terrible like the default ones do.
Rethinking hidden password fields
Time tracking app Freckle does a pretty nifty thing when it asks you to enter a password. It displays it in plain text.
But see that little checkbox underneath it? Check that, and you get what you’re used to.
Pretty cool. People have been trying for ages to figure out a way to enter passwords that’s secure and usable at the same time…this is the first time I’ve seen anyone say “hey, let’s just make it text!” Makes sense, since it’s probably pretty rare that you type your password with somebody behind you.
Outlook 2007 screws up spacing where page breaks would appear
We were testing an HTML newsletter and a certain element was moved way down below where it in Outlook should be for no apparent reason. After some debugging, we realized that Outlook screws things up right where a page break would be when printing it.
If you’re having a weird spacing issue in HTML emails in Outlook 2007, try printing your email. If the spacing issue is right where the page breaks, you can be pretty sure that this is the problem. It appears that Outlook has a bug where page breaks screw up formatting even when just looking at it on screen (which should have nothing to do with page breaks).
So to fix it, we need to tell Outlook to break the page right BEFORE the issue when printing, using style="page-break-before: always". For example, if the issue is right on a certain table row, then make that <tr> into:
<tr style="page-break-before: always">
Worked for me.
Priss - a CSS print framework
You maybe have heard of Hartija or perhaps even used it at some point. I use it all the time, but noticed that maintenance on it had pretty much halted.
Therefore, like I tend to do, I forked it into Priss.
If you’re looking for a best practices print stylesheet, Priss is the way to go. Feel free to give it a whirl.
By the way, the name is a cheesy mashup of “Print” and “CSS” …please pretend it was named something cooler.
Some test HTML for Drupal themes
It’s all too common that you hand a Drupal site off to a client, only to realize that the WYSIWYG threw in a common element (such as a blockquote perhaps) that should work look beautiful, but it looks like crap because you never tested it.
As an attempt to solve that, I gathered a crap-ton of markup to be used to test your Drupal theme. It includes both regular HTML elements (pretty much every one you can think of), as well as Drupal-specific stuff (such as tabs and status messages). The purpose of this markup is that you can copy and paste into a node and you have your very own markup tester.
Even though it’s just a single file, I went ahead and put it on GitHub with my other pet projects.
Make link href’s visible when printing
This is one of those things that I would expect everybody to be doing by now but nobody really is.
One of the annoyances of printing is that when you print out a webpage, you can see the links but you have no idea where any of them go to. Quick fix: stick the following rules in your print stylesheet and the link’s href will be appended after it in parenthesis:
I have no idea where I first found this, so apologies to whoever first came up with it.
Alphabetization is a lazy designer’s out — it tells me that the design team isn’t interested in finding out what users are really doing on the site.
Developers can do their work without designers, put it out there, and the end result is that it will be, particularly to the eyes of designers, poorly designed. For the purposes of the developer, the poorly designed aspect may not be all that important, for any number of reasons. But for the designer, this becomes critical.
And the converse isn’t true. The designer can’t go out there and make improvements to the codebase without the help of the developer. Design isn’t as easy to abstract and make into reusable components the way code can. Designers, in general, have less to contribute not because they do less, but because the volume of work that designers do isn’t reusable. There’s no point to contributing non-reusable work. That isn’t what open source does.
