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As a web developer, the greater part of my job is not creating new apps, but hacking together disparate software packages into Frankensteinian amalgamations that (supposedly) work together seamlessly.  This is universally a headache, as the original authors tend to write code thinking that their app is the only one that will be installed.  WordPress, Vanilla, and Interspire’s Email Marketer are some of the worst offenders that I struggle with regularly.

When coding your own brilliant application, there are a few simple things you can do to avoid potential collisions and headaches later, especially if anyone else will be using your code.  Here are a few areas to pay attention to. (more…)

In Internet Explorer 8, it seems that Scriptaculous / Prototype sometimes miscalculate exactly where to place the autocomplete box. As a result, it will usually not show up at all, since it’s off the screen. The trick here is that it’s calculating a left and top absolute position that are wrong, and then writing them directly to the element as inline styles.

The solution, though a bit of a hack, is to write styles for the div container that use the !important rule, which will override any inline styles. Here’s what the fix should look like:

#my_auto_complete {
position: relative !important;
top: -10px !important;
left: 0px !important;
}


When we redesigned hotelicopter, I had to spend a lot of time cutting up images for a bunch of buttons and boxes. I was using the now-standard Sliding Doors technique, so that we could have flexible boxes. Today, I realized that I could combine this technique with another A List Apart favorite, image sprites, so that you can have sliding doors using only one image. (more…)