Archive for the ‘Code’ Category

Jun 26
2010

I just posted version 1.3 of TabLinks. It doesn’t fix all of the things I eventually want to fix, but it does do some rudimentary entity encoding that allows you to actually use HTML tags in the templates. I had said that […] would work as a template, but it didn’t. Now it does.

The automatic update is functioning, so anyone with TabLinks already installed should see it show up in their updates, or just update automatically if you have that option enabled. This version should show up as 1.3. If you’re looking for the initial install, you can find it below…

Jun 20
2010

I have most of the websites I work on set up with separate development (usually local) and production/deployment servers. It’s pretty easy to keep straight when I’m first designing a site, but going back later and making changes can cause some confusion with all the refreshing and dealing with caches and all. So I’ve been using a trick to make it clear which version I’m loading at any given time.

All of my local development sites are mapped to .dev addresses, e.g. brettterpstra.dev. I use php to scan the current SERVER_NAME variable for .dev and insert an unobtrusive div at the top of the content if it’s found.

Jun 19
2010

Just a quick hit on this one… when hacking away at the styles of things one probably shouldn’t be hacking away at, embedding images right in the CSS is a handy trick. It’s done by Base64 encoding the image, removing line breaks from the resulting string, and using it to set the background property for the CSS rule.

It looks something like this (truncated):

[…]

The image/png changes depending on the filetype that’s encoded, becoming image/jpg or image/gif, etc…

Jun 18
2010

Okay, this one has a little refining left to go, but it seems to be working pretty flawlessly. I ported most of the code from a greasemonkey script. All I really want to add is a toolbar item that lets you easily turn it on and off, and maybe a whitelist feature.

There are actually legitimate uses for a plugin like this. Seriously…

Jun 18
2010

TabLinks is a quick experiment, designed to meet my own needs. It needs some work, but it does the trick: it copies the link information for every tab open in Safari, and outputs them as a list, based on a user-defined template. You set up your template in the Extension settings, and use the following variables to define your link style:

That’s all there is for now. The default link format is a Markdown reference list, with the references being window#-tab#, so they come out as […]…

Jun 17
2010

This will be the last release of Antique, I think, barring a few minor fixes (follow @ttscoff for updates on this and other projects). You can download it here. The code is completely open source, if anyone wants to continue the project feel free (credit would be swell, where it’s due). I’ll be putting my free time into Instapaper Beyond and other more “legitimate” projects now (although I really would like to do a nice, high-contrast, Helvetica version…). In deference to Faruk Ateş, I’d like to clearly state that this is a hack, and you run a risk (albeit very minimal…

Jun 14
2010

While playing around with Antique, I decided I really wasn’t in love with the ampersands that were included in any of the fonts I was working with. Normally, I’d just run everything through Typogrify and get some handy CSS classes to work with. Working in Safari’s Reader, though, I only had access to Javascript (and jQuery, now).

I set out on a search for an easy, all-purpose solution, but nothing worked as well as I wanted it to. So I did a little scavenging and put together a couple of functions that do the job pretty well…