Just building my first page with the yahoo yui grids css layouts. First impressions are that it's going to be a God-send tool. The one issue I've had so far is that when I set a background-image, it didn't fill the browser screen just the area occupied by my header, content & footer div tags.

Solution is simple, just set the body element to 100% height. In order to make cross-browser development coding as smple as possible, yui applies a 'reset' css set of styles that effectively clears-out any defaults a browser may have against certain elements and that includes body height.

Ben Emson, one of the founders of the rapidappsgroup has recently written this excellent tutorial on RSpec.

I've just noticed someone has come to our blog after searching for the terms in the title of this page. It reminded me of a frustrating hour or so when I first started using rails where the RHTML page I was writing was doing (or not doing) just that. Just in case anyone is having the same newbie problem I'll hold my hand up say it was this:

make sure any embeded Rails code is surrounded by these delimeters:

 <%=      %> #(note the equals)

and not these:

<% %>

Hope this helps.

Ben Emson has just written this article on Desktop Web Applications and Sproutcore. I must admit that my interest in client-side javascript has been waning recently except where it's used in libraries like Prototype & jQuery. Ben's article certainly has refreshed my interest which I'm pleased about, I always have been a fan of javascript as a language so I'm looking forward to using it again without being considered some sort of freak.

We're developing an e-commerce website albert & I. They're really nice people so I'll just give them a quick plug here, they're selling a new range of fashionable t-shirts designed in Paris and made in India using Fairtrade employers.

A few days ago a good friend mentioned the new search engine Cuil along with the presumably manufactured myth of Cuil being a Google Killer. At the time I pretty much dismissed the idea of any challenge to Google as being so ridiculous it wasn't even worth the bother of a quick peek.

Office 2007 introduced a new xml file format for their documents, docx, which seems to have caused some confusion amongst some of our clients. The Docx file format is specific to Office 2007 and doesn't work with other office applications or previous versions of Word. There are a number of ways that docx files can be converted to formats that others understand.

Just installed Drupal 6 onto Dreamhost and hit a few issues which I suspect are common. For the PHP/Drupal fans out there these will seem petty but I'm not a PHP developer but do want to set-up Drupal quickly and easily.

1. Don't use the dreamhost one click install, it will set up a highly managed version of drupal which won't be in your home folder and you won't be able to add modules or themes making it pretty useless.

2. Set up Drupal manually:

Follow the instruction in the dreamhost wiki but bear in mind the following points:

Just dispensed some advice to a client in trouble. It's a little trick that's helped me out a few times before so I thought I'd post it here in the hope others may find it useful.

I added a 'display' property to my job model to determine if that job should be displayed in some graphs on the web application I was building. When I came to accessing that value using check_box('job', 'display') the checkbox remained blank no matter what value was in the underlying model. Odder still, if I selected the checkbox and submitted then the correct selected value would go through so I was getting an end-to-end from view to database it's just that the checkbox control was behaving oddly.