Designoplasty Web Design and Development Blog

Amazon: grep WordPress is a great example of why open source is important. When I’m working on something and I have a question about a WordPress API, I Google for what I need. What I usually find is either API documentation on the WordPress website, or a discussion on the WordPress [...]

Now that I have a few blogs and kind of a standard way of doing things, I’m figuring out what adds time to posting and what are repetitive tasks. For me, probably the biggest thing is adding images. I like to add images to every post, but it takes forever. I have to: find the image upload it [...]

Today I ran into an issue that seems to have been plaguing a number of WordPress coders. I had turned a list generated by wp_list_categories() into a set of pull down menus using jQuery. The problem is that wp_list_categories() puts title attributes in all the anchor tags. This means that the browser pops up tooltips [...]

Oh my gosh. What a crazy trip. I was in the middle of writing another post and all I wanted was to find out how to list the users on Mac OS X version 10.5. I’m not going to waste any time, here it is: dscl localhost -list /Local/Default/Users Here’s the explanation. As you may know, and [...]

I don’t know when it was that I learned about sed and awk. But even through my Microsoft days, when I needed to do something with text files, I looked to these utilities. You may not know this, but Microsoft actually has versions of most of the basic UNIX utilities that [...]

There is one thing that I use in CSS quite frequently, and it doesn’t make sense to me at all. It’s this: overflow: hidden; Those of you who are familiar know the most common purpose of this style. It is to get blocks next to floating blocks to keep their width constant instead of flowing around the [...]

Today I learned jQuery. It was intense. I was at Starbucks. The first code I saw I was like, “What?” I still don’t understand exactly how they do it, but I get the syntax. $(…) The builder pattern is also very interesting. I was able to get a nice fading pull down menu working today. It even fades in [...]

Recently I’ve been working on rather large project for a client. This project has a number of tasks. For each of these tasks I can usually find a plugin that doesn’t quite do what I want but is related. At that point I have the option of making the project fit around the plugin, altering [...]

Ever since the news went Twitter crazy everyone is flocking to it. I get the most ridiculous pseudo-spam followers now. I hope some of them do well, they are just normal joes trying something new to get more business. In a way, it’s kind of sweet. In a way, it’s annoying. But that’s Twitter. Did [...]