jappler.com » debugging

Debugging IE 6 on a Mac

Jen — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:01:02 +0000

What is worse than debugging your web application for IE 6? Debugging your web application on IE 6 when you have a Mac and have to launch Windows…or wait, do you? If you do not want to run Parallels or something similar – check out ies4osx. It is dependent on Darwine so make sure you have that installed too. Ah…now I can debug a little more easily.

Using !important With CSS

Jen — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:36:23 +0000

I am not a “quick fix” or “work around” type of person. When a CSS debugging project comes my way I look first at fixing the problem systemically vs. applying the quick fix. Recently though I was brought into a project with an insane amount of CSS and conflicting styles all over the place. Since I did not have ample time to fix the issues systemically (this was a super stat job) I was forced to use something that would take precedence over the problematic styles already in place to quickly fix the issues.

If you have worked with CSS before I am sure you have seen “!important” used but probably were not really sure what it was. I ended up using a “fixes.css” style sheet which was called in after all the other style sheets and then using “!important” with the styles I needed to correct (override). This was very helpful and if you ever run into a similar situation or have a certain style that you cannot seem to figure out why something is not showing up (“I set this to have a margin-bottom:20px; but there is no margin at all”) try putting in the !important (margin-bottom:20px !important;) and see if that helps.

More information on !important: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/cascade.html#cascading-order

check php syntax errors before committing changes.

Jen — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:23:13 +0000

I learned an important and valuable lesson today. Before committing code to a live server, always run: php – l filename.php to check for syntax errors if you cannot view the file beforehand. Enough said.

jappler.com wordpress update.

Jen — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 20:58:56 +0000

I wrote a detailed process on how I upgraded and cleaned out jappler.com to go from WordPress 2.2 to WordPress 2.3. If anyone is interested in the process, check out my “Updating from WordPress 2.2 to 2.3” blog post on my company blog.

A Weekend Full of Learning

Jen — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 11:27:45 +0000

What a crazy and full weekend! Many thanks to Demitrious for helping me out this weekend with PHP. If you are a beginner, check out Demtrious’s article: Poor Man’s Debugger. This article helped me greatly over the past weekend and I feel like I now have a good handle on what to do when things go unexpectedly.

I spent Sunday working with javascript for another project and found some of the javascript articles on webmonkey to be a big help.

Go PSU and Bears!

[tags]PHP, debugging, Javascript[/tags]