The October issue of Esquire, only a 100,000 issues released, features the world’s first E-Ink magazine cover. The E-Ink display is the same technology used in the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. This is the first time it’s been used in a magazine cover and I must say it’s very impressive!
Are we moving ever closer to that promised paperless utopia?
I’ve been in the job market twice this year and thought I would share with you some of the sites that I have found useful when looking for a job. Perhaps you know of some good sites that you would like to share too?
Smashing Magazine Jobs
This site has a small selection of web design/development jobs. Most are looking for front-end work like: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash and ActionScript. You can sort by fulltime or freelance positions. Most of the listings are from the companies and not recruiters.
Authentic Jobs
Authentic Jobs is another site that features a short selection (maybe 100 listings is all) of web jobs. Authentic Jobs is a targeted destination for standards-aware designers and developers and the companies seeking to hire them.
Krop
A pretty good selection of design and tech jobs, but the Ajax enabled search on this site really isn’t working for me.
Dice
Dice is a huge collection of tech jobs. It’s certainly a place to use when looking for a job. Do note that most of the jobs are posted by recruiters though.
Craigslist
I think Craigslist is actually one of the best places to look for jobs. It has a good selection and most of the post are from the IT directors and not technical recruiters.
Good luck and happy job hunting.
display-inline:block
One of the values for the display property is inline-block and although it has been around for quite a while now browsers have been slow on the uptake which is a shame because it’s just the sort of thing that can be very useful. In this article we will investigate ways to implement display:inline-block in a number of browsers.
If you are unfamiliar with inline-block then its use is defined as follows: “an inline-block makes the element generate a block box that’s laid out as if it were an inline box“.
What this means is that a “block level box” can retain most of its block level capabilities but in an inline environment. This would allow you to align a number of boxes on the same line all with their own width and height much in the same way as floating the elements but having the benefit of allowing inline rules to be applied to them unlike floats.
For example, three or four inline-block elements could be aligned horizontally and centered by using the text-align:center property on the parent. This would automatically center the elements within the available width. We could also apply the vertical-align:property to align their top or bottom edges with each other.
Perhaps it’s best to start with the finished example so you can see what we are talking about. The result is also shown in the screenshot below.
Figure 1
As you can see in the above we have achieved three (apparently) block elements all aligned nicely in the same row. The elements are perfectly centred and they all have their bottom borders aligned with each other. Imagine trying to do this with floats.
The truth is you could not do this automatically with floats at all as you could never align the bottom borders unless you were using fixed heights and then could calculate the margins for each. It is also very difficult to center floats also. With very little code we have achieved this effect so now we will get down to specific details.
I love ASP.NET, but one thing I find extremely frustrating is dealing with the automatically generated ID properties that it places on page elements.
For example, let's say you have a div with an id of "contentTop" like below:
Because you have made the control a server-side control by adding the runat="server" attribute it will now be rendered with a different ID when it hits the browser (view the source code and you will see). It will get rendered as something like this:
This is because ASP.NET generates its own IDs to ensure that every element on the page has a unique ID. Developers that work with JavaScript and CSS will immediately see the problem. This causes difficulty when using JavaScript and CSS which rely on those IDs to reference elements, as they can't easily predict what the generated ID will be. When it comes to CSS specificity the ID selector is extremely useful. In addition, anyone that uses JavaScript knows that getElementById (or one of the JavaScript library ways) is the most popular way to target an element. So why the hell does ASP.NET do this to us? Honestly, I can't really tell why, other than the fact that they must not trust us enough to be able to uniquely ID our elements ourselves.
But I don't want to just complain here, I would like to provide some solutions too.
The solution will be found in the ClientID property of the server-side control. The ClientID property represents the ID that ASP.NET will use for the element on the client.
Using the ScriptManager we place the ClientID in a hidden form field. This can all be done in the code-behind file by using the following code:
Be sure to have included the ScriptManager to your page, like so:
Now we can use JavaScript to retrieve the value from our hidden form fields.
That's it, if you know of another way, please let us know.
Happy coding.
If you're like me you've been staying up way too late the last week watching the Olympics. Specifically Michael Phelps, or Aquaman as I like to call him, break just about every swimming record known to man. Phelps has so far acquired seven eight gold medals, that ties surpasses Mark Spitz who won seven gold medals in 1972.
It's very rare that you get the opportunity to watch the best person in the world do their craft and so I am in awe of him. So in Phelp's honor goes this post and I have included for your listening pleasure the Marvin Gaye version of The Star Spangled Banner. You likely have heard it recently in the Nike Basketball commercial.
