Displaying articles with tag html

Styling File Inputs with CSS and the DOM

Posted by paul, Wed Sep 12 10:58:00 UTC 2007

Here is a nice little way to style those ugly file inputs:
File inputs (<input type="file" />) are the bane of beautiful form design. No rendering engine provides the granular control over their presentation designers desire. This simple, three-part progressive enhancement provides the markup, CSS, and JavaScript to address the long-standing irritation.

0 comments | Filed Under: | Tags: htmlHTML

Fire bug 1.0 is out as a beta.

Posted by paul, Thu Jan 04 00:32:00 UTC 2007

If you dont have it yet you can download it here. Go ahead. I'll wait.

If you haven't had a chance to use it yet, i can tell you that is has added years to my life by reducing stress and frustration. No more wondering why things don't line up, or what CSS classes are affecting that text. Just click inspect, click on the HTML element you want to find out about, and up comes the HTML and CSS for that DOM element. It shows what styles are applied to that element, and even the line number in the CSS file. You can even see what css style are being overwritten or edit the HTML and CSS in place.



Beyond that, it lets you view all http requests and responses, making Ajax debugging a breeze.



One of my new best friends is the net tab. It lest you see every http request and how long it takes to load in a nice time line. It then breaks things down into request for JS, CSS, images, HTML, flash files. I cant tell you how much time and money has been wasted trying to optimize code and database calls. Looking at one of our larger, and slower sites, I can see the the HTML is taking ~300ms, while it is taking close to 10 seconds to load the whole page. Where does that time come from? 3 seconds come from loading 11 CSS files, and 5 seconds are spent loading javascript files. that, combined with the flash and images on the site equals one sluggish site. I have made some modification to the the Drupal system as well as the default template so as to load all CSS and javascript files in line with the HTML. This bumped up the time to load the HTML page to ~350 ms, but dropped the time to load JS and CSS to under 1 sec! Now thats some low hanging performance fruit. I saved second of time on every page load with having to set up memcached, or MySQL replication. *Shutter*

0 comments | Filed Under: | Tags: html

The Grid & OneMain.com

Posted by paul, Sun Dec 31 17:00:00 UTC 2006

I began working at The Grip, a regional ISP based in San Luis Obispo as a customer service representative. The Grid was then purchased by OneMain.com. Now a part of Earthlink, OneMain.com was one of the 10 largest ISP's in the country. I developed various intranet application used in OneMain.com call centers. I also worked as a Customer Service Lead, and as a manager in the Sales Department. Site: OneMain.com
Technologies: Perl, PHP, HTML, MySQL

0 comments | Filed Under: Portfolio | Tags: htmlHTML