Author Archives: mariya

How to Monetize Your Blog: A Really Dumb Recursive Formula

Sometimes I’m stupid enough to subscribe to some online marketing newsletter. I got two this week from different “marketers” whose content was almost identical. They went something like this:
Want to make money off your blog?? I make $100000000 a week off my blog! Here’s How! Click here for this magic formula! Drive Traffic! Make dollars!
And [...]

Posted in Funny | 2 Comments

“Drupal Sucks” Followup: Drupal Alternatives

First of all, thanks to everyone who read and commented on the original post. If nothing else, I got some (angry) tips for how to improve my Drupal experience when I do have to use it. It reminds me of this bash.org gem: Start the sentence with “Linux is gay because it can’t do XXX [...]

Posted in Design, Technology | 14 Comments

Run IE6, IE7 and IE8 on the same machine

Need to test your site in multiple versions of Internet Explorer? I just downloaded DebugBar and was beyond impressed. With a couple clicks, you can open a url in a single tabbed window with all IE versions 5.5 through 8. Grab it here.
Two years ago I endorsed Multiple IE, but unfortunately they’ve dropped the ball [...]

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Drupal Sucks

Edit: First followup posted.
Are you choosing a Content Management System for your next site? Allow me to throw in my two cents against Drupal. In theory, Drupal is a CMS that lets you control your site out of the box. In practice, it’s a nightmare to configure and maintain.
I recognize that Drupal might work for [...]

Posted in Technology | 135 Comments

What are your shortcomings as a programmer?

What embarrassing shortcomings do you have as a coder? I find that I often need reference material when dealing with:

File permissions (chmod)
Regular expressions (Apache rewrite rules, Ruby regexes etc)

Does anyone else feel the same way? Do you have any good tutorials that can rid me of these handicaps once and for all?

Posted in Technology | 3 Comments

This Week in Brief

I’m all over the web except here these days. Two highlights of my week:

Working with the awesome JuicyOrange to launch the Global Debt Clock for the Economist.  Fun to play with, but it will depress you if you are American or British.
Guest post over on Geek Feminism about sexism on social news sites. Please give [...]

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RubyOnRails.org Parked

Remember to pay your domain fees, folks:

RubyOnRails.org actually showed this for a good few hours. TechCrunch has the full story.

Posted in Funny, Technology | Leave a comment

Trouble with MySQL Foreign Keys?

There I was, coding up a fresh Doctrine schema for a Symfony app, when my plans to implement foreign keys were repeatedly foiled:
SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1005 Can’t create table ‘./mydb/#sql-xxxx.frm’ (errno: 150). Failing Query: ALTER TABLE cow ADD FOREIGN KEY (barn_id) REFERENCES barn(id)
I was using InnoDB, both tables were there, both columns were there, what [...]

Posted in Angry Development Tips, Technology | Leave a comment

Newspapers Unite Against IE6!

A Norwegian client just told me to stop testing their product in IE6, words I could hardly believe I was hearing. That’s because a month ago, a handful of Norway’s major newspapers and other websites posted a warning telling their IE6 readers to suck it. And since most web-wired Norwegians read those newspapers online, it [...]

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Drop Shadow for Text with CSS

My distinguished colleagues at A List Apart already took care of building box-shaped drop shadows. But what if you want the text to have a shadow under every letter? Here are the results of my experiment, which I loathe for two reasons:

You have to repeat the shadowed text when it’s completely unnecessary from a content [...]

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