Radiant Core: Martin Kuplens-Ewart

BrowserSim Updated!

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I first posted BrowserSim to the Radiant Core blog nine months ago. After 110 downloads and reports of the PSD being used by a range of interesting firms I decided to spend the time updating and improving it. I'm proud to announce that BrowserSim is now 1.0!

Following months of eager use in our office, version 1.0 has been updated to a PSD/ATN pairing, reducing the set-up to three steps (and less than 500KB zipped):

Substitute your window title and URL in the appropriate text layers
Run the action for either IE 7 or Firefox 2
Get designing!

Download it now!

Another site launches

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:00:00 GMT

We were very excited to see that our friends (and clients) at Wildeboer Dellelce LLP launched their new site this week. It's a very different looking site for a very different law firm, and has features such as live-filtering lawyer and transaction listings (with obligatory vcard downloads), customised JavaScript market update on the homepage, and plenty of RSS feeds.

I'm especially pleased because I headed up the design and build - call it a little parental pride!

The project includes some interesting technical elements - all AJAX is built using the YUI toolkit; we've added some handlers in place to combat Internet Explorer's difficulties with displaying layers over HTML elements such as drop-downs; and there are a number of interesting cross-links between content areas that combine for great exploration.

browserSim 0.2 - browser chrome for design made easy

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Many web design types use a masked browser chrome to present their design work to clients - it helps provide a context for the visuals being presented.

I personally find it a tremendously useful technique to use from the very start of a design process - it keeps me aware of how the elements I'm producing will sit within the browser, and ultimately of how they'll appear to the end-user.

I've done several versions over the past half-decade or so, but finally got around to doing one with multiple chrome options, layer group masks, etc., which makes it all ludicrously easy to use. Even better, the chrome is nicely drop-shadowed and pretty much presentation-ready!

All you need to do is grab the .psd and use. Instructions are in the first group. If you find yourself making improvements (such as adding browser versions), do ping me!

Fixing an IE 7 bug in mm_menu.js navigation

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 13:15:00 GMT

We're proud (even stubborn) hand-coders, so we don't often get the opportunity to delve into the JavaScript libraries deployed by using applications such as Dreamweaver.

Recently, however, we were contacted with an IE7 bug: a navigation system that was using the mm_menu.js library appeared to be only showing the first word of each option.

At 800 lines of dense JavaScript, this was not going to be fun to debug. Fortune, however, smiled upon us in the form of an invidual named Hiroto, who posted the following on the Cre8asite Forums:

function writeMenus(container) {
    .... some code here ....
    menu.menuItemHeight = menu.menuItemHeight || defaultHeight;
    var itemProps = ''; <= CHANGE THIS LINE TO => var itemProps = 'white-space:nowrap;';
    if( menu.fontFamily != '' ) itemProps += 'font-family:' + menu.fontFmaily+';';
     .... some code here ....
}

You should find this spot around line 163 of mm_menu.js. The change worked a charm. Thanks Hiroto!

Do they still use canoes?

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Many bricks-n-clicks-n-mortar companies offer a free delivery-to-store option. It's a fairly obvious means of bringing an online customer into their controlled environment in which cross-selling, impulse-buying, and all those lovely little retail tricks can be employed.

My experience of ship-to-store shipping is that the sooner the item is ready for pick-up, the more likely I am to be in a buying mood when I eventually arrive. With a day or so between the clicking and collecting, I'm still very much in the flash-my-plastic groove.

Letting your customers have their online orders shipped to your existing stores by leveraging your existing logistics infrastructure is a fantastic idea. It gives them another valuable touchpoint with your brand and gives your staff opportunities to turn a one-off buyer into a repeat customer. Take too long to get the order in their hands, though, and you risk tarnishing their perception both of you as an online vendor, and of your store as a reliable source of merchandise.

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of packing all my worldly goods in cardboard boxes and lugging them across town to my new home. I had all the luck in the world - the cold/snow kicked in just as I returned the rental truck which I had picked up with an extra day at no charge. It was just that type of move. Just perfect.

Realising I needed an iron and a set of pots and pans (I love to cook!), I decided to trawl online to see who had a good deal. HBC.com (the Hudson's Bay Company online store) had both on sale. I eagerly placed my order, and, excited by the possibility of walking up the road (to the flagship store) to collect them, selected the 'ship to store' option. After all, the warehouse is just 34km from the store, so I expected the items to arrive within a day or two.

After six days with no news I contacted HBC.com's customer service department. They informed me that

it takes approximately 14 business days for an
Hbc.com order to arrive at store.

In the end my iron arrived just nine days after placing the order and my pots and pans took the full fourteen. From the time they left the warehouse, they traveled an average of 0.25km/hr. That's less than a tenth of the speed of a beginner canoist.

Maybe they were portaging.

Resolving Tomcat's Hangups

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 12:00:00 GMT

The ritual of restarting Tomcat whenever a new jar is added or an upgrade results in their names changing is, I am sure, familiar to all of us developing Java-based sites.

Over time we've developed a set of handy aliases to handle the regular ups and downs and keeping an eye on Catalina.out, tomcat's log file of choice. Recently however, I've been having to make more frequent search-and-destroy excursions to resolve hanging processes. After a couple dozen repetitions and mutterings about wishing for a one-liner, I decided to navigate the murky waters of command-line scripting.

The result of a bit of munging and googling is a fantastic one-liner (or if you configure it as an alias, one-worder):

ps -auxww|grep java|grep tomcat|grep -v grep|awk "{system("sudo kill "$2 " > /dev/null")}

And because they've made my work so much more convenient, here's my full set of aliases, ready to be dropped into your .profile (all you need to do is define your TOMCAT_HOME):

alias tomstart='$TOMCAT_HOME/bin/startup.sh'
alias tomstop='$TOMCAT_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh'
alias tomlog='tail -f $TOMCAT_HOME/logs/catalina.out'
alias tomgrep='ps -auxww|grep tomcat'
alias tomkill='ps -auxww|grep java|grep tomcat|grep -v grep|awk "{system("sudo kill "$2 " > /dev/null")}"'