Lacy Garrison

The Internet is full of snark, irony, sarcasm, and know-it-alls. Lots of blogs are dedicated to documenting the flaws of human nature. My Parents Were Awesome stands in stark contrast to a lot of its competition because it isn’t degrading the people it documents, but celebrates them in earnest. As much as I enjoy Awkward Family Photos and a whole host of other blogs dedicated to the thrills of schadenfreude, there’s something really great about looking at a beautiful picture of someone else’s family and thinking “Wow, they really were awesome.”

I have been working on a redesign of a website for Equinox.com for a few months now. I recently started coding the redesigned site from scratch. In the process, I have been addressing a lot of cross-browser issues. The code needs to support IE6, IE7, IE8, FF3, and Safari 3.

Today, I finally addressed a bug that had been bothering me for a few days. In IE8, FF3, and Safari 3, the site looks pretty much like this:

Beautiful, right?

Well, the calendar is a <ul> with an <li> for each day. IE6 and IE7 were adding this extra space under each <li> tags.

I changed the background color of the calendar block from black to red to highlight the extra space in this image:

That extra red space was driving me nuts. After doing a few searches, I wasn’t able to find any information or fixes relating to my problem. After experimenting with some different CSS rules, I found changing the display attribute of the <li> to “inline” provided a nice solution. Here’s a quick code sketch:

div.calendar ul li {

display: inline;

}

This allows IE6 & IE7 to render the HTML the same as IE8, FF3, and Safari 3.

This fix apparently doesn’t work in all instances. I found a similar bug, but the above fix didn’t have an effect.

Please don’t delete your blog. Someone might want to read it.

As a web developer, I spend a lot of time mining the Internet for esoteric information about computer programming bugs. I often read blog posts written four or five years ago because Google listed them as relevant to the keywords I searched.

Sometimes it’s hard to find the information I need: I might have trouble articulating the problem or I don’t know that the problem has a cute, succinct name (yes, I’m talking about you Peek-A-Boo bug). I can and have spent hours searching. In those moments, I feel like I’m drowning in a sea of irrelevant information. But then I’ll find a blog post where one person has have written about a similar problem using the same keywords I am searching. It’s like that blogger has thrown me a rope. He or she might unknowingly point me in the direction of a solution.

So please don’t delete your blogs, whether they are about weddings or websites. The information might be old. You might think that your blog is an embarrassing, public reminder of a past project. (Frankly, I have a few.) But you never know; someone might find your blog, read your old posts, and be very happy that you wrote it.

Today I discovered my friend deleted her well-designed, well-written blog last week. It might not be the same as the burning of the Library of Alexander, but it’s a loss just the same and as complete.

In related matters, Sergey Brin wrote in the NYTimes about Google Books and the tragedy of losing books to fires, flooding and other disasters. He argues that Google Books preserves books for our collective good. I think Brin, who has spends his career organizing information, would agree with me about preserving your old blog.

goretexgearcorner.com launched. I worked on this project with the very talented people at Format Studio.

The idea behind goretexgearcorner.com was to create a microsite to provide helpful tips and market products to avid hunters. The main portal to the microsite is a viral widget placed around the Internet.

You can see the widget in context by scrolling really far down fieldandstream.com or outdoorlife.com.

I developed the widget using Adobe Flex 3. This widget is the first SWF I’ve developed in Flex. I have to say I was very impressed with the capabilities of Flex. The Accordion navigation container helped me to create this project quickly. I spent the majority of my development time skinning the widget and smashing bugs.

Speaking of bugs, the widget incorporated Gigya’s Wildfire. Wildfire is a nice little chunk of code that steamlines embedding widgets on a large number of social networking sites; it’s perfect for spreading a viral widget.

However, I had a horrible time working with Wildfire. The documentation is confusing and incomplete. Here are a few tips I learned the hard way.

1. Facebook.com does not allow iframes. You must embed the SWF with embed and object tags.
2. WordPress.com doesn’t allow embed or iframe tags. Gigya doesn’t explain how to put your SWF on WordPress.com well. WordPress recently introduced a tag to support Gigya. You must use WordPress’s [gigya] tag to embed your SWF.
3. Blogger.com allows iframes.
4. Myspace.com allows embed and object tags, but not iframes.

The other buttons may or may not work in the widget. Project timeline didn’t allow for me to test or debug all of them. We set the remaining buttons to the default iframe code and left the other social networks to catch as catch can.