http://www.borism.net Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:40:33 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We recently released a feature that allows our users receive a text message if a bus they are awaiting is running late. It's all pretty simple, we take the output of this form and run a little excel macro to convert the entered data into email addresses. We then email ... http://www.borism.net/2009/08/24/text-messages-easy-peasy/ A common web development concern is the www subdomain. Do you host at http://www.site.com or http://site.com? Which ever you choose you want to be sure that visitors who type in the other get re-directed properly. If you use IIS you can setup a new website to do such a permanent ... http://www.borism.net/2009/08/21/write-yourself-a-merry-little-url-re-writer/ We sure love our wufoo around here, and one thing we've been using more and more is smart routing for our entries. For example, when someone fills out a lead form we want to route the entry to the appropriate sales person based on the state of the inquiry. Wufoo doesn't ... http://www.borism.net/2009/08/06/add-smart-routing-to-wufoo-with-gmail/ We recently completed work on AuPairVideos.com. The site went from concept to launch in just over a month, in part thanks to its lightweight single-page design. We ended up writing ~150 lines of code in each layer: 152 lines of HTML 165 lines of CSS 159 lines of JavaScript 147 lines of PHP 88 lines ... http://www.borism.net/2009/07/14/web-apps-in-150-lines-or-less/ Tools such as Quick Ribbon are great for generating simple and effective ribbons such as this one: A small problem though is the potential to block content underneath the ribbon transparency area. For example, that "About Us" link is obscured by the large square ribbon image. A simple workaround is to split ... http://www.borism.net/2009/07/14/unabtrusive-ribbons/ If you've never played with Yahoo Pipes, you should. The innovative interface alone is worth it. Here's a simple yahoo pipes example: lets say that you have a blog that you want to syndicate differently to different audiences (for example we have a Tumblr blog and we want to exclude ... http://www.borism.net/2009/04/13/a-simple-use-case-for-yahoo-pipes/ If you've ever setup an SSL certificate you know that its a hassle. Renewing your SSL certificate is likewise un-intuitive and takes more steps than it should. It turns out that paying for a certificate renewal does not automatically renew the certificate you have installed, you actually have to install ... http://www.borism.net/2009/03/26/renewing-your-ssl-certificate-harder-than-it-should-be/ IE8 came out today. Along the way Microsoft fixed a bunch or rendering bugs, which is great, but you might run into problems of you previously used conditional comments such as: The trouble is that IE8 will still read that patches-ie.css file and apply some styles that may no longer be ... http://www.borism.net/2009/03/19/anti-ie8-css-hack/ TiddlyWiki is an awesome reusable non-linear personal web notebook. That's a lot of words. Keyword is awesome. There have been a number of server-side implementations of TiddlyWiki that allow you to save data to a server (as opposed to locally as TiddlyWiki does by default). PHPTiddlyWiki is a good simple ... http://www.borism.net/2009/03/18/server-side-tiddlywiki-with-php-easy/ Turns out that it's actually fairly easy to create a simple static Facebook application to display some data without needing to work with the Facebook API or any back-end code at all. For example, take a look at the World Map Tab on our Facebook Page. This tab was created ... http://www.borism.net/2009/03/11/create-a-simple-facebook-application-without-using-the-facebook-api/