supersonic feet

Vitamin does link to some good stuff. Latest in the list is an article on Digital Web Magazine by Aaron Gustafson about the poor, neglected button form element. I have to admit I am one who’d seen the dodgy uses years ago and ended up ignoring it well before I got into standards and CSS, so the article is a mini-revelation in terms of form styling.

Basically, if you can think of an instance (and I can think of many) when you wish submit buttons weren’t so bloody hard to style (or differentiate from other inputs without adding classes), read the article.

One of the most simple uses for AJAX is to monitor form input and then let the user know whether what they’ve entered is likely to be acceptable/available (e.g. choosing a username at signup). Even so, there are ways to do it well and I just found one.
I followed a link from the news on Vitamin to the new JPG Magazine site. It’s not a magazine I’d read in the past, but it looked quite cool with some good photography so I went to sign up on the site to check it out more.

The sign-up form is kept simple, to the point and with a helpful login form to one side in case you’re already a member and just a bit confused to end up at the sign-up page. Start filling in the form and the AJAX kicks in: enter your email address and once you move focus out of the email input, a little green tick in a starburst appears alongside with the text “It’s cool”.

Make your way through the rest of the short form and there are a couple more friendly messages to let you know you’re on the right track. Get it wrong and you’re provided hints on fixing the problem.

None of this is hugely new, indeed I’ve used it on sites for quite a while, but I felt JPG Magazine did it particularly well in combination with the simplicity of the rest of the form, so kudos to ‘em.

Writing this from Word 2007 beta on Windows Vista RC1 – how beta can it get?

So far Vista seems pretty good, though I’m having trouble installing updated graphics and sound drivers.

I’ve spent a good portion of my weekend banging my head against the desk after getting the hare-brained idea, following my success in setting up Apache 1.3.x with mod_proxy and Mongrel, to get Apache 2.2 running on my server so that I could then use mod_proxy_balancer and therefore mongrel_cluster.

As anyone who’s ever asked the question “How easy is it to install Apache 2 on a cPanel server?” knows, the answer has always been “don’t bother”. In the past couple of weeks however, CPanel finally added support for Apache 2 in their latest EDGE builds. After a quick bit of reading of the cPanel forums, it seemed people had it working well enough and so I embarked, without much forethought, on the upgrade.

A day or so and many, many hours of frustration later and I have it working, so I thought I’d round up my experience as before to try and save some poor souls the same experience. (more…)

The site was down overnight after I took the leap and started updating to Apache 2.2, support for which has finally been added to CPanel EDGE builds.

Once I had everything installed and updated, DNS was broken. I’ve just been sifting through the CPanel forum trying all kinds of ‘fix’ scripts and in the end, 15 seconds after submitting a support ticket to my hosts I found the solution by way of:

yum update bind-libs

Was some kind of problem that quite a lot of people seem to have had when updating CPanel.

Anyway, seems to be working now - I just need to find out how to recompile Apache to get mod_proxy and mod_proxy_balancer enabled without breaking CPanel (the whole point of this was to get Mongrel clustering).

Found via Ruby Inside, Chris Wanstrath has posted a great round-up of a developer’s options for session management within Rails.

Stefan Kaes’ solution looks like the one I’m gonna go for in the near future.

Something I check on the status of now and then is the ability to have a nice upload progress bar for uploads via the browser. Sean Treadway’s initial example looked great but required special server setup.

Support was added to Mongrel recently, but I never got around to properly investigating as there was no documentation of it, which didn’t help. A random check of the Mongrel site has just revealed they’ve finally added some instructions for upload progress on Mongrel.

I haven’t tried it yet (it’s late, must sleep), but at least there’s a base to work from now.