After reading Phil Haack’s and Jeff Atwood’s posts on having a catastrophic failure of the hard drive hosting their two blogs, I figured it would be a good time to review the backups I have in place for some of my sites. I have been using Mozy for more than a year now and it has worked really well. ... [More]

Last week I saw an article on Ajaxian about Zen Coding which is a way to generate html markup and css from css selectors. Something like div#Dialog>fieldset>ol>li*3>label + a hotkey will create: Code Snippet <div id="Dialog">     <fieldset> ... [More]

I had a really hard time figuring out how to use xVal with forms submitted via Ajax and it took a while on Google to try and figure it. All you have to do is set a submitHandler for the form to use. From the jQuery Validate documentation a submitHandler is a: “Callback for handling the actual su... [More]

Have you noticed the new traversal method in jQuery 1.3+ named “closest?” I hadn’t until a few days ago when it came in pretty handy when I was working on some client side error handling using the jquery.validate plugin. So what does closest do? From the jQuery docs: “Get a set of elements containi... [More]

I have been learning how to use Git for the past couple of days via the book Pragmatic Version Control Using Git. For the project I am using it on, I wanted to create a .gitignore file that excluded certain files and directories from my repository. I first tried to create a .gitignore.txt file and t... [More]

I found a cool trick in a post by Remy Sharp that appends the address of a hyperlink to the end of the link’s text when the page is printed. Unfortunately the trick only works in browsers that support the CSS2 pseudo selector :after. Firefox, Safari, Chrome*, Opera and now IE8 all support the select... [More]

So I knew it would happen at some point. Some handy flash developer would figure out how to get around the security limitation in Flash 10 that requires the System.setClipboard() method (ActionScript) to only be called by an action that originates from a user interaction. Last week I ran across an a... [More]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Cory S.N. LaViska’s new jQuery Alert Dialogs Plugin. Since then I have used it quite a bit and have been really happy with its ease of use and simplicity. At the end of the my first post about the plugin I said I would try and show you a way to setup an alert from... [More]

In a couple of previous posts I have used the pretty cool NicEdit WYSIWYG editor. Today I wanted to show you how you can use its JavaScript API to set the content of the editor’s body to the data of the item you want to edit. Please remember to be careful when accepting html content from users! Dem... [More]

Are you tired of going to DotNetKicks and finding the same stories on the front page for days in a row? Trust me, there is some great content out there that never makes the front page. You just have to look a little deeper. When you do, you can help put some of that great new content in front of the... [More]