Google just introduced Doctype, a new wiki-style encyclopedia by web developers, for web developers. Looks to be a valuable resource, and has been added to my personal bookmarks. I especially like that they list browser compatibility for all of the CSS properties.

Check it out »

Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

Google Doctype is 100% open.

• Open source
• Open content
• Open to contributions from anyone

Making us nerds look a little cooler…

While doing some grooming of my music library and updating the contents of my DLPs over the past weekend I saw this in my iTunes sidebar, and I thought It’d be nice to share. Some call it an obsession, some call it fanboyism, and I think it is just awesomeness. (But probably more of the first two)

I am a fairly recent “switcher“. It has been a very great and relatively painless experience, but one little annoyance that I had however was that in OS X browsers I couldn’t tab on my keyboard to the drop-down fields in forms the same way I could in Windows. Filling out forms are already such a tedious task, so when I had to take my hands from my keyboard to move my mouse every time I encountered a drop-down it became even more annoying.  I had asked veteran Mac users about this annoyance in the past , but no one knew of a solution. I finally ran across the simple little solution the other day, so I thought I’d share it:

Go to System Preferences » choose Keyboard & Mouse » select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab » then just select “All controls” from the Full keyboard access setting at the bottom as shown in the screen shot below.

You may need to restart your browser before it kicks in. Enjoy!

We’re once again hiring at Barefoot. If you or someone you know is a black belt Rails developer, then please drop us a line.

Barefoot has an immediate opening for a Senior Web Application Developer. We’d like you to have 5 years experience developing database-driven, dynamic web sites. We’re strong in a number of technologies, the primary ones being Ruby on Rails, PHP and .NET. You need to be very strong in Rails, and if you’ve got substantial experience in a second language, bonus points. You’ll need to be able to point us to multiple Rails sites in production. Strong SQL application development experience is also a must. You’ve also got to be at least comfortable with client-side Web development (JavaScript, CSS, XHTML), although that won’t be the main part of your job. You’ll receive excellent benefits and a salary commensurate with your experience. To apply, send your resume, and URLs to recruiting@thinkbarefoot.com.

Emil Stenström recently wrote about his experiences with Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS) entitled, Sharepoint 2007 from an interface developer’s view. This is a task that I am currently undertaking at work, and I couldn’t agree more with his point of view that if you really want a CMS with a custom UI, then you should avoid Sharepoint if at all possible.

I order to progress within this project, I have been forced to revert to the HTML methodologies of yore (table-based layouts in particular), and to write messy code that I am not proud to call my own. I have however manged to produce a somewhat clean Masterpage, and have been able to keep the majority of the presentation coding within the CSS files. Working on this intranet site however, does make me VERY appreciative that the majority of the projects that I’m working on these days are built in Rails.