Here’s another to file in the list of things that might one day show up on Google and help someone.

IE8 seems to have a bug in animating height. If an ancestor of the element you’re animating has display:inline-block, IE8 will choke on the animation and not properly grow the element’s height (if it’s set to auto). IE8 might also do some weird things, like redrawing the element to the new height when you click on it or its children or otherwise give focus to the page.

Workaround seems to be setting the display to block (or not inline-block, anyway). I noticed that it seemed to happen when using jQuery UI’s accordion and the old clearfix hack.

Figured I’d post this here for posterity’s sake in case anyone else sees this error message pop up when developing.

If you send a huge URL to IIS (over ~2,000 characters), like a GET with a ton of parameters, IIS will fail with a 500 error and the following message: “the data area passed to a system call is too small.”

If you see that, your URL’s just plain too long. Change your GET to a POST or truncate the URL and you should be fine.

Inject the latest version of jQuery into your page. All in handy bookmarklet form!

Drag the link below to your toolbar and you’re set:
jQueryify

QUICK TAKE: Stay up to date on the latest news from Nikon, producer of much-heralded cameras, scanners, and other imaging

Nikon site ranked #13 in the Top 100 photo sites. Not too shabby.

Maybe this will come up in a Technorati or Google search, so I’m throwing it out.

I had a CakePHP controller called “galleries”. Trying to access /galleries on my server appended an extra “/” onto the URL and redirected me to a 403 forbidden page.

Various Google searches suggested a few things in htaccess that didn’t work and seemed more geared toward site-wide problems but this is a single controller. No other controllers seem to exhibit this behavior and sticking any random controller name in the URL sends me to a missing controller page.

Why does this one, single controller fail?

I ran into this problem last night, and had a hard time Googling a solution, so here’s a brief summary of what I did just in case anyone else runs into it.

I was trying to set up VirtualBox on Mac OS X to share a directory between OS X and my Windows XP virtual machine. Under VirtualBox 2.0.2, here’s how you do that:

1. Open VirtualBox. Make sure the virtual machine you’d like to share with is stopped. This should give you access to “shared folders” setting under the info panel.
2. Open up that shared folders setting, and choose the directory you’d like to share and give it a name. Remember that name, because that winds up being used as part of a network share location by Windows XP.
3. Save those settings, and start up your virtual machine.
4. Here’s the part that took me an hour to figure out: you need to install the VirtualBox “guest additions” on your virtual machine to actually allow you to connect to the share. That’s located under the “Devices” menu item. You’ll be prompted to install guest additions and a bunch of drivers on your Windows XP VM; go ahead and accept all the prompts that pop up on the screen and reboot the VM if necessary.
5. When your VM reboots, head over to the My Computer section and choose “Map Network Drive.” You’ll be mapping a drive with the following format: \\vboxsvr\[your_share_name_from_step_2]. The \\vboxsvr hostname is the standard default set by VirtualBox, so that’s what it should be on your install, too, unless there’s a way to change it.. While you’re here, check off the “Reconnect at logon” box so you’ll never need to do this step again.
6. You’re done.

Tags: VirtualBox, sun, vm

This is definitely in the CakePHP docs, but my random Googling of different terms didn’t turn it up, so I’m adding it here with a few keywords just in case it helps anybody else.

The CakePHP equivalent of Ruby on Rails’ created_at is created. The equivalent to modified_at is modified. Columns with either of those names will be updated automatically when a record is created and/or modified.

I tried stuff like “magic update columns,” “CakePHP created_at,” and “CakePHP created_at autofill” before I finally found this blog post and this CakePHP doc.

Hopefully, including some extra search terms around this content will give someone else out there a hand.

As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only website is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.

Google, Yahoo spiders can now crawl through Flash sites

Score one for Flash. Will this cause Flash adoption to ramp up on major websites, or will it still lag behind HTML’s ease-of-development?

As we all know, one of the biggest arguments for Flash is that it looks the same and performs (relatively) the same in all browsers. “Searchability” was a huge minus; you’d almost inevitably need to create another HTML-based site to stay in the search engines. With that solved, Adobe takes another step towards becoming a really ubiquitous platform, although I still think they need to open source their development tools to really, really take over. (Will all this destroy HTML? Nope. HTML still has Flash beat in the learning curve barrier to entry; you still need to be a specialist to build Flash apps, but a generalist can at least dabble in HTML and build a web application.)

Here’s my big question of the day: if Google spiders deep within your Flash movie and finds some sort of content, how does it provide a link to it? Is deeplinking to content going to be a problem, especially when it may discover content that’s not really part of any state you’ve really considered? If there’s a page 5 levels deep in my HTML site, Google can find the page and a URL for it; that is not necessarily true of the same type of content located 5 “views” off the stage in a Flash piece. Looks like we’ll be embedding deep linking information for various program states into more and more of our Flash apps…

Tags: flash, seo, google

Published over on Molecular Voices and mirrored here.

If you’re like me, you remember when (Hot)Wired’s Webmonkey was the source for tutorials, articles, and ideas on building the web. Ah, the good old days of the late-ish 90s when you had to learn why your <marquee> tag wasn’t scrolling, then visited a site like Webmonkey and learned that you shouldn’t be using <marquee> in the first place. (Before web standards were even conceived, places like Webmonkey and even eVolt started the push.)

Good news then! Conde Nast/Wired.com’s brought Webmonkey back, redesigned it, and wiki-fied it.

Why should you care? Though the content skews towards the basics, it’s still a good place to get up to speed on some stuff you might not know, learn new a few new tricks, and, most importantly, share your knowledge a bit. Here’s a place to put your gigantic wealth of knowledge for the benefit of all web-development kind: you were a kid just starting out once, and you have to remember that, without resources like these, you would never be where you are today.

Plus, they still have the logo of the monkey with the wrench (one of the classic emblems of Web 0.5). Welcome back, old friend!

I’ve spent the bulk of the day getting CakePHP up and running on the www-side of the amodernfable.com domain. Why? Because I wanted to use a framework to handle things like integrating a database-driven portfolio with some static content and learn more PHP (and the Cake framework, which I’ve heard nothing but great things about) in the process.

The CakePHP installation here on Dreamhost was a snap. No real configuration necessary other than setting up my database config file to point to the right spot. I was expecting worse (I know I’ve seen some nasty stuff happen when I tried to get Ruby on Rails up and running before, but this was simple and easy).

Overall thoughts on the framework (from a couple hours’ use): if you’re used to Rails, you’ll know how things work or where they go right off the bat (there are some differences that will catch you, such as default layouts being enforced right off the bat, and I like the RoR approach better that way). Setting up routing was a bit easier than my last Rails attempt. Documentation is easy to find with the right Google search. My object oriented PHP is a bit on the slim side, but, when you’ve programmed enough, PHP is a quick learn; hopefully, the controllers and models will give me more experience there.

It’s nice to have a framework in place to speed things up. Also, I’ve built in Cushy CMS support right into my views, which should make it a snap to update things. I really dig Cushy for doing one thing (managing small blocks of content) very well. Let’s see how well it plays with Cake. (And, there’s two plugs in a single post!)