January 2012
1 post
Changing terminal colors for Webfaction SSH... →
I was trying to figure out how to change the color of directory names in Terminal.app when I SSH into my Webfaction server. Fortunately it was as simple as copying /etc/DIR_COLORS to ~/.dir_colors, then changing DIR 01;34 to DIR 01;37 in that file. I think the white color is much more readable in Mac OS X terminal compared to the blue.
September 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Using Charles Proxy with Google Chrome on Mac OS X
I’ve been using Charles Proxy to test on a development environment before pushing new front-end code to the environment itself. However, I wasn’t able to get it to work in Google Chrome “out of the box”. It turns out that Google Chrome uses the operating system’s proxy settings, so you actually have to alter the built-in Mac OS X proxy settings for it to work.
...
4 tags
Internet Explorer 7 redraw fix with JavaScript
Twice now I’ve run across a problem with Internet Explorer 7 (and sometimes 8) having problems redrawing HTML when modifying the class on an element that contains several children. Usually I’m trying to swap a class to apply styles for a “grid view” of products or a “list view” of products. The simplest solution I’ve found is mentioned in the comments of...
August 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Usability notes about Fifth Third's signup forms
I was recently helping my mother sign up for online banking with Fifth Third bank. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any screenshots of the experience (I didn’t want to interrupt her progress to take any), but I did make some mental notes of some usability issues:
The “secret questions” offered for password recovery were almost all ”favorite” questions (i.e....
2 tags
“If you show something that looks like an error message in order to market...”
– James Reffell (in Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski)
2 tags
Mapping a domain and "www" subdomain to tumblr...
Follow the instructions for a custom domain on tumblr, but make sure you leave off the “www” if you want your tumblelog to be your main site. I pointed the A record for “michaelehead.com” to the tumblr IP address for “michaelehead.com” (the @ address) and “www.michaelehead.com” so that both would direct users here.
A farewell to re-inventing the blog
I’m a web developer. As a web developer, I like to tinker with technology, try things out for myself, and try to build things myself. Well, as far as blogs go, I’ve decided to let tumblr handle all of that for me. I’m letting go of the reins completely—not even dealing with Wordpress. Let the folks at tumblr deal with integration with Twitter, or Facebook, or Google+, or...