Me and my browsers

February 17, 2010 by Eric Richardson

On December 27, 1998,, I decided to check out "Gecko" as a replacement to Netscape Communicator. I liked it.

A touch over 11 years later, my browser situation is less clear. I'm using -- and liking -- Google Chrome as my day-to-day browser, but am stuck with different situations that mean I'm required to use Chrome, Firefox and Safari in any given day. That's less than optimal. — Continue Reading...

Making Life with Facebook Connect Easier

February 11, 2010 by Eric Richardson

I implemented Facebook Connect on blogdowntown in December of 2008 and have pretty much had a love-hate relationship with it ever since. The functionality is great, but the facebook Javascript has consistently been the slowest loading piece of the site.

Today I deployed a code update that moves the site over to Facebook's new open-source connect-js library. It's alpha, it's incomplete, but boy does it feel better to use. — Continue Reading...

Untangling that stylish mess

February 09, 2010 by Eric Richardson

It's amazing how crufty a CSS file can get over time.

I went through blogdowntown main CSS file this evening looking for code that was no longer used on the site. I ended up cutting the file down roughly 250 lines, or 14%.

At the same time I ported the stylesheet over to LESS, a CSS processor that allows you to use fun things like variables and nesting that really should be in the CSS spec itself. — Continue Reading...