NickC's blog

We're working on a new community-driven website and one of the required features is the ability for users to crop and scale an uploaded image live in their browser.

When you run a web server on your personal machine, you can access your web documents a few ways: using http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1, virtual hosts (http://whatever), and the internal IP of the machine. Unless you are directly plugged into the internet, the internal IP is the address the router provides. The format is usually 192.168.0.xxx, where the xxx is unique to each computer.

I just released a new version of my png compression software for Mac OSX.

What's new? Not much. I changed the name from the incredibly lame PngOptimizer to PngThing and got a new icon courtesy FastIcon.com.

PngThing.dmg (1.78mb)

Here are some development tips and tricks I've found useful over the years.

On a recent project, I ran into an issue where the main navigation needed to be centered and flexible enough to add and remove menu items through a CMS. For those of you not familiar with CSS, this creates an immediate problem: you can not center a block element without first knowing its width. The normal technique is to use auto left and right margins (margin: 0 auto), that are then calculated based off the element's width. But what happens when you don't know the width of the element?

I'll be the first to say I love Javascript. I have two big Javascript books to my right to prove it. It's one of the greatest things about the web two-point-oh! movement (yes, I hate that term). And I love milk. But I will also be the first to say I hate how some people misuse Javascript.

Recently I've started optimizing my PNG images. In most cases, I can get file sizes smaller than GIFs, and if I'm real lucky cut 24-bit PNGs in half.

There are a few optimizing programs out there, but none of them do what I really want. Previously I was using PNGpong, a dashboard widget, but I'm not a fan of Dashboard (I know, I know) and wanted a program that I could simply drag a folder onto and not have to worry about selecting fifteen different PNGs.

By default search inputs are notoriously ugly. Just look at what they are: a plain text input. But Apple had the great idea to make a search widget for Safari that looks like this:

This is probably nothing new, it's been around for quite a while, but the code used to create the field (input type "search" instead of "text") does not validate and only works in Safari. So what happens when you like the search field and what to use it on other browsers?

There's been a lot of talk going around lately about CSS bar graphs. Just go to delicious and type in "css graphs" and you'll find hundreds of links to Apples to Oranges post "CSS for Bar Graphs." There's even a rails plugin based on that post.