Boggle The Mind

Bing! New search engine or Ned Ryerson catchphrase?

Jeff L — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:12:21 +0000

So Microsoft just launched a new engine, Bing. Unfortunately, thanks to Josh Porter’s recent tweet, I can’t help but think of Ned Ryerson’s big scene in Groundhog Day. So, for any other folks who are having the same problem, I’ve created this mp3 to give you a quick Ned Ryerson fix.

(or download)

And for those that have checked out Bing’s travel search, is it just me or did they completely rip off Kayak?

Dynamically setting the height of an iframe

Jeff L — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 03:38:39 +0000

This is reposted from blog.pixelmedia.com.

Recently, we had a situation that required us to pull in some content from one server to another using an iframe. Generally, this is something we would try to avoid, but we needed to pull some data from a new .NET application into a legacy ColdFusion application.

Unfortunately, the height of the page being pulled in would vary wildly. This led to a fairly disappointing experience where the page was either far too long, or content in the iframe was cut off and the user had to scroll within the iframe to see everything.

We came up with what we thought might be an interesting solution. If the page loading inside of the iframe (the child page) could calculate its height, and somehow let the parent page know, the parent page should be able to reset the height of the iframe.

With a little inspiration, we came up with a pretty neat solution that we’d like to share. Our solution requires that you have the ability to edit the code of both the parent and child pages.

The child page being loaded into the iframe will simply reset the location of the parent page, and include a hash with the height of itself.

We’re using jQuery here to easily get the height of the tag.

On the parent page that includes the iframe, we’ll again use jQuery and write a small function that gets the height from the hash in the URL, and uses that to reset the height of the iframe.

function setHeight() { var newHeight = parseInt(location.hash.substring(1)) + 50; $('#hashFrame').attr('height', newHeight); }

We ran into a bit of an issue: the page we were loading was taking a few seconds to load, and we didn’t want to set our height on the iframe until the content within the iframe had finished loading (and it had a chance to set the proper height to the url hash).

More jQuery to the rescue! The jQuery .load() method allowed us to call our setHeight() function after the iframe had finished loading.

$('#hashFrame').load( function() { setHeight(); });

Putting it all together gave us a great way to use our new application inside our legacy application, and make it faily seamless to the end user.

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Hello world!

Jeff L — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 02:55:54 +0000

Hello world, indeed! That’s the title of the default post that came with new shiny new Wordpress install. Indeed, I’ve made the switch from Nucleus CMS to Wordpress, and moved it to a shared server, rather than something in my basement.

Nucleus CMS was great for what I needed at the time. I wanted to see if I could get something open source set up on a computer at home and use it to host a blog. I even tried Wordpress at the time, but because I was hosting on a Windows machine, the Wordpress install had some issues. If I recall, I also tried Textpattern, but Nucleus was the only one that managed to fully install and work properly using PHP on IIS.

50 some posts later, I realized that if I had any inclination of continuing I couldn’t keep going with the same system and same hosting environment. Unfortunately, I’m lazy. Yes, a procrastinator. So, I stopped writing and never did anything to set myself up anywhere else.

Well, I’ll cut myself a little slack. It’s not like I’ve been sitting around doing nothing this past year…

We had a baby!

And built a house.

However, it’s a new year and it’s time to stop the excuses. Recently inspired by Douglas Bowman’s new design, I figured I’d get off my ass and at least get myself set up on the current hotness of Wordpress.

Now, I’m new to Wordpress, so it might be a bit of a mess around here for a while. I managed to get all my old posts imported (sorry for spamming your feed readers with that…) by generating an RSS feed with all of the old posts out of Nucleus. I’ve lost comments, but I’m ok with that—I’m not sure comments will be the method of feedback here anyway.

So yeah, anyway, the point here was simply to apologize for the RSS spamming and let the few of you out there know that I’m still alive, and with any luck I might be more active around here. And if I’m not, I’ll leave you with one more reminder as to the likely reason why:

And I’m totally cool with that.

SxSW ‘08, less than a week away!

Jeff L — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 04:22:46 +0000

After missing it last year, I’ll be back at SxSW Interactive this year. I’ll be flying into town Friday and flying out the following Wednesday. If you’re in town, hit me up and let’s get a beer. Feel free to follow me on Twitter and I’ll try to stay up to date with where I’m heading.

I’m looking forward to regrouping with friends I met last time, and meeting a lot of new folks this year as well!

So….what's going on?

Jeff L — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 03:16:35 +0000

So I haven’t posted anything here for quite a while. I’ve been researching hosting companies as I want to get this up on a real host. I’ll probably end up switching blog engines to Wordpress as well, as most hosts I’m looking at have one click installs for it, and it seems to have a much more active community than Nucleus. I’ve had this for about 2 years now, and it’s upgraded from v3.22 to v3.24. Disappointing to say the least.

So with any luck I’ll get off my ass and find a good host soon (I’m looking at Dreamhost - any other suggestions?) and I’ll have a fancy new site. Goal is to get it up and running before the new year.

There’s some other stuff going on in life lately, but we’ll leave that for another time. I’ll leave you with a recent photo from my Flickr stream.

Flooding

Jeff L — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:35:51 +0000

Thanks to the crazy New England weather

I had some server issues and had to take the site down the past day. However, the worst of the storm seems to have passed and we are back in business for a few more hours. Enjoy the rain.

Remix MIX 07

Jeff L — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 04:11:59 +0000

Just a congratulations to Ian Muir for his REMIX design “Horror Flick” that won him a trip to the MIX ‘07 conference!

Take it off, it's Naked Day!

Jeff L — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 14:07:06 +0000

That’s right, it’s here again….CSS Naked Day! It’s the second annual naked day this year, and according to Dustin’s list, there are about 1500 sites losing their CSS for the day.

So have a drink, get some courage, take it off, and come on in! The water’s great!

An Event Apart Boston '07

Jeff L — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 02:45:04 +0000

So last week I had the privilege of attending An Event Apart Boston. Aside from the traffic driving into Boston both mornings, the event was definitely a success. While I had seen a few of the speakers at SxSWi ‘06, I got to see quite a few new speakers as well.

While I was familiar with much of the content presented, there were a few new tidbits that came out over the course of the two days, and some nice refresher stuff as well.

I did get a chance to talk to Eric Meyer after his presentation about the future of CSS with IE7. He had shown a new hack to target CSS for IE7 only:

*+html body {}

This is similar to the hack which targeted IE6:

* html body {}

While the IE6 hack made it seem like there was another element wrapped around the tag, the hack for IE7 makes it seem that there is an element before the tag. This made a bit more sense to me, as there would generally be a DOCTYPE first thing in the code. I asked Eric his thoughts on this, and while he said that it certainly shouldn’t be the DOCTYPE that triggers the hack (because it’s SGML, not an HTML element), he really wasn’t sure.

I did finally get a chance to test my theory, and sure enough, if you remove the DOCTYPE the new *+html hack no longer works in IE7. Gotta love MS bugs!

Anyway, I would certainly recommend checking out An Event Apart if it comes to your city, or even if it just comes to a city you’d like an excuse to go see.

New Hampshire sunset

Jeff L — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 04:00:26 +0000

We’ve been having some fantastic sunsets here in New Hampshire lately, I had to share one.