David Ruppert

Several times over the years I’ve decided I need to move on from Homesite. Homesite had become an afterthought long before it was acquired by Acromedia . . or Macrodobe . . or whatever it is these days.

Every time I try to find something new, I’ll download one . . play around with the trial version and find something that’s a total deal-breaker for me. I tried Notepad++, but didn’t download the Explorer plug-in initially . . and subsequently spent an HOUR looking the safety blanket of my file browser docked to the left side of the window.

I also tried e Text Editor, meehh . . . not that impressed. It didn’t auto-complete tags. Again, deal-breaker for me. It just wasn’t as user-friendly as I’d hoped. I’d assumed that it was just a matter of me using Homesite exclusively over the past 10 years . . and really not wanting to learn anything new.

Another faaaaairly significant downside to e Text Editor was the fact that it crashed 4 times in the first 8 hours of use. I’ve got enough crap on my machine that crashes . . I don’t need to add the most commonly used application to that list.

One feature that was a must was being able to reassign keyboard shortcuts. Lets face it, that goes a long way in helping me with the transition. Five years ago I set up Ctrl+P as the shortcut for <p> [by the way, who's printing out code anyway?]. I need that back. If every time I hit Ctrl+P it brings up the print dialog box . . I’m frustrated.

Next, and seemingly obvious, I need a file explorer docked somewhere on my window. What I ended up finding . . and loving . . was HTMLPad 2008. HTMLPad 2008 not only has a built in file explorer . . but just about everything else . . and somehow it’s all easy to find.

HTMLPad 2008 must have been influenced by Homesite, because right off the bat, I don’t feel lost. In fact, it feels like Homesite, but with more helpful tools.

For example, there’s an Inspector [much like Visual Studio]. Not completely sold that I’ll use that much . . but I’m interested in its capabilities.

Next, much like Homesite’s Snippets, HTMLPadd 2008 has a Library. Short code snippets with the ability to edit or delete existing ones and create new ones.

Next, a multiple item clipboard. I remember the introduction of this feature in Office, but this one seems more usable. Can’t quite explain that one yet, but that’s the case.

One thing that Homesite never had . . and I ALWAYS wanted was block selection. In fact in certain scenarios I’d be willing to open up the resource hog known as Visual Studio just to be able to block select something.

Built in HTML Validator . . SVN integration . . built in preview in IE or Firefox. I could really go on. I’m really embarrassed that I’m sooo happy to find a capable, feature-rich, inexpensive text editor.

I’m able to change to an updated text editor without spending an inordinate amount of time relearning the way I’ve been writing code for the better part of the past decade.

I’ve only had this gem for a couple of days, so I’m apprehensive that the shine might wear off, but as of right now, I’m ecstatic to pay $35 for a top notch html editor.

At least visit the site. There’s plenty of information about features and what’s new, including more than enough screenshots to get the idea.

*Nerd alert: this post concerns only the slightest percentage of dorks out there. If your eyes start to glaze over at terms like charset, move along. There’s nothing for you to see here.  Heavy nerdery is about to ensue.

I was having the toughest time simply copy and pasting international characters from an existing live site to my new locally run site. No matter what I did, the characters would not display correctly . . in my text editor, or browser.

My charset for the page was already set to utf-8:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Finally, I came across a site that will convert those tricky characters in to their numerical values, solving my problem.

View original post on Pinyin.info

I’m saving it here for future use.

Ok, simply using this as a code toolbox again, I don’t want to misplace some of these links.

I spent the better part of a day trying to get Thickbox to work with some existing [and fairly outdated] style switching code. In an attempt to avoid a typical, blow my top, crap on everyone outbursts, I decided to try something else.

While searching around the little interweb for Thickbox issues, I found a post on a forum about Greybox.

After taking a couple of minutes to drop in the code, it worked like a champ. So . . I’m keeping it.

No knock on Thickbox, just simply didn’t have time to troubleshoot anymore. Greybox seems to provide about the same result [and of course it validates], but instead of linking to a url with a querystring of variables and adding a class of “thickbox”, you simply link to the page with ‘ rel=”gb_page_center[520, 500]“‘ in your anchor tag. This is for linking to html documents . . it’s slightly different to create an image gallery like Lightbox JS has mastered.

Plus, it’s about 10kb less than Thickbox simply because of the absence of the jQuery library.

Lightbox 2

Thickbox 3.1

GreyBox v5.53

A buddy of mine noticed that firebug recently stopped showing anchor styles when inspecting links. Typically he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but in this case . . much to my chagrin, he was right.

Well since this was clearly an immediate issue for him . . and I was busy with actual work he did some research and found that this was a bug in Firebug. [Huh, what are the chances?]

According to this article about Firebug not displaying anchor styles, there is a bug that the beta version [Firebug 1.1] fixes. I’ve downloaded the beta version and things seem to be working swimmingly.

I ran across a problem at the office a few days ago where a client was complaining about my Son of Suckerfish menus sticking open on a particular page in IE7. The issue was only happening on pages they had created, using templates that we had delivered, so of course I initially assume they’d done something wrong . . you know . . cause I’m judgmental like that.

Turns out that, without the below css update, if you click in an input field on a page using Suckerfish, then open the menus, they will not automatically close on mouse out.

This particular client page triggered an onfocus for the login box [currently very popular . . and annoying in my opinion] once the page loaded. So, without doing anything, the menus would stick open every time.

The simple fix consists of the following addition to your CSS:


#menu li:hover, #menu li.hover {
   position: static;
}


The fix has been around for a while, but I only recently ran into this problem. For more information on the problem, visit Matthew Ratzloff’s explanation at his blog on Built from source below:

Son of Suckerfish fix for IE7

Firefox lately has been throwing me into a complete fit. It seems two or three times a day my laptop locks up and is totally unusable. Once I can get the Task Manager to finally load. I see the culprit. The same one every time. Firefox.

I never hear any complaints from my cohorts here in the office, so I assumed it was something specific to my machine, setup, extension selection . . . something. But after doing a little searching this morning, it appears I’m not the only one with a problem. This thread started in 2004 with version 1 of the product, but is currently 23 pages long and has had a post as recent as a few hours ago.

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