InfoSauce: Category General

No longer updating

Tim — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 09:49:00 -0700

This blog is no longer being updated.

Read up on our founders’ pursuits at Revel in Rails and timocracy. You can also see any open source work (such as Rails plugins) at Google Code.

Email us.

OMG WTF SWEET! An IDE for automated in-browser testing with Selenium

Tim — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 08:08:00 -0800

I had been meaning to try out Selenium already as a way of automating that final, hardest step to do so to in the testing process, the actual in-browser client use. It sounds like it might finally be what I’ve been looking for, but I didn’t know if I’d ever get around to it.

Now, there is an IDE to automate Selenium testing. This could be the coolest thing for web development since sliced bread or tabbed browsing.

From: http://ajaxian.com/archives/selenium-ide-07-released

Difficulties updating Typo - migration 21

Tim — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 07:51:00 -0800

First off, a quick reminder kids, always back-up your DB before updating.

I somehow seemed to run amuck of “this bug”http://www.typosphere.org/trac/ticket/454, when updating typo, to see if I could get Movable Type API working again, to use w.bloggar to make my next post, to have some control over the trackback ping to the article, since I don’t know the current status of trackbacks in Typo. Well maybe it would have been quicker to check on that…. Of course, then I’d still be stuck updating.

Anyways, somehow I got a wedged update, and for a while it looked like all comments were going to be down the drain. As I’m busy working on actual paying projects, I had to leave our blog in limbo for a bit. Thankfully, a post to the existing ticket got a reply that made it quick in easy to fix. The answer was obvious – go comment out the parts of the migration that are failing (the problem was trying to re-add a column that already had been).

Multiple file upload and the abuse of buzzwords

Tim — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 06:59:00 -0700

Stickman has posted a cool DOM-scripted multiple form upload and, of course, through no fault of his, commentors are assumming it must be AJAX, since it’s on the web and it’s new and cool. PPK has talked about this issue before but it looks like calling everything “AJAX” really is spreading to even geek bloggers watching web development (it’s only in the talkbacks, so far) who you would hope would be Marketing-ese proof.

Now, we’ve got nothing against AJAX, it’s a great technique that we like using, as appropriate, but this is DOM-scripting pure and simple. AJAX-like technologies have to do with how you handle the round trip to the server without reloading the page and, in this context, would look more like this (thanks to one of the other posters for the link). AJAX could be added onto Stickman’s work to just refresh the part of the page handling the upload, and something similar is used by Basecamp, already, to get around the multiple file upload another way.

Personally, I think what Stickman is doing is far cooler than AJAX, as he’s getting around a more fundamental browser limitation. What you can do with the HTML form upload control is severely restricted in browsers, largely for security reasons. For too long it’s been a basic assumption in web development that you might as well not try to do anything fancy with the form upload widget, since it’s fairly locked down. In fact, it’s still possible for the browser implementors to decide that hiding the widget is a potential security risk, and then this technique goes out the window. Until then, though, it’s useful to have in the toolbox, and even if it gets locked-out by some browsers in the future, it still gets us thinking about how to work around those limitations again.

Generally, I think the Basecamp approach of actually doing it through AJAX (similar to the “this” link above) would often be a better choice, as it allows more granular feedback and control. For instance they confirm each upload and then allow you to re-label it prior to sending a message off. This also avoids having to wait for one massive upload at the end, which might kill your whole message, instead of just the individual upload. Regardless, Stickman’s approach is still cool.

Sketchy Design Choices: A+ Moments

Erin Moore — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 16:53:00 -0700

Have you ever visited A+ Moments? It’s a blog devoted to web development and life in Serbia. We link to it in our sidebar. Take a look

The guy who writes this blog seems to be a very nice and very smart young man.

But really, does he need to have a supine woman plastered all over the site? Every time I visit, I feel like I’m visiting a cheap phone dating service.

It bugs me that we link to this; if it makes me uncomfortable, then I’m sure it makes other people feel the same way. But the guy has a lot of great things to say, so the link stands.

What do you think?

Spaces in typo categories cause problems

Tim — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 16:05:00 -0700

For those others of you using typo, beware: http://typo.leetsoft.com/trac/ticket/249

I noticed that our side-bar category links were working fine, but that links at the bottom of the article weren’t, so I went digging and found that in Typo’s ticketing system. It sounds like a fix was applied, then reverted. So until it’s finally resolved, I guess it’s either leave the links in at the bottom of the article broken, or don’t use spaces (neither of which appeals).

Welcome to our Blog

Tim — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 00:45:00 -0700

We’ve been doing cool stuff on the web for years with no where to post about it, but now welcome to our blog. After watching all the cool developments of the last year or two and discussing them on other people’s blogs I thought “why not have a blog of our own?”

This is on our our .org domain because it’s not strictly limited to our commercial business. We’ll be putting up pages soon for scripts/code/techniques we consider worth sharing, as well as posting our thoughts on happenings in the standards and web development worlds.

We won’t neccessarily open up all our code, because we have some incredibly awesome subscription-based services, ala Basecamp, coming up (I’m just bursting to tell everyone about them, if you couldn’t tell, but soon… soon….) but we’ll have cool stuff like the unobtrusive DOM-scripted image scroller, the graphical header generator, and other general-use libraries/utilities we’ve been working on.