Steve@

Too much mail?

Are you an OSX mail.app user who has their email account with google? Does every email you receive get duplicated giving you the multiple blue triangles of distraction?

See, I like mail.app. I know there are fuller featured email clients out there. And I don’t use it for keeping up to date with my rss feeds, but it does what I need it to, in a very tidy manner. But this blue triangles thing has been driving me nuts. Seriously. I clutters up my inbox and makes sorting email very tedious.

Turns out it is possible to get rid of them. And here’s how:

1) log into your googlemail account.

2) click on ‘settings’, top right. Then select ‘labs’ from the navigation options provided.

3) search for ‘imap’ until you find ‘Advanced IMAP Controls’. Click ‘enable’. Save your changes.

4) using the navigation select ‘labels’ and uncheck ‘All Mail - show in IMAP’.

5) in mail.app, select your mailbox in the app, then select Mailbox -> rebuild from the file menu. Et viola.

CSS frameworks: initial review / XCSS / 1st lessons

We’ve been playing with CSS frameworks since before Christmas trying to work out whether they’re an asset or a liability.

A whole host of frameworks have popped up recently and there seems to be a bundle of functionality shared between the main-runners: Nested selectors, variables, mixed selectors and arguments.

XCSS

We threw XCSS at a recent project as our first experiment with mixed results.

Indenting CSS is becoming more popular and I’m a really big fan. It begins to mirror good markup and creates a visual flow to CSS files that aids legibility and is highly aesthetic (I’m a real sucker for pretty code). Clear indenting is critical when using nested selectors.

Using XCSS here at SteamSHIFT has shown up the pressing need for proper team coding standards; at it’s best nested selectors can make the code clearer and elegant, but at it’s worst, it can be impossible to decipher and ugly to look at. This has been compounded by multiple authors adding to the same code on our test project without pre-arranged standards.

XCSS cons:

CSS frameworks tend to work by parsing a proprietary file - style.xcss - into a recognised .css file.

Out of the box, XCSS required going to the xcss.php file path in a second browser window to do the parsing. This is a major backwards step in terms of development time. It could have been automated but we couldn’t muster quite enough love for XCSS to warrant the extra work.

Some variables wouldn’t get passed properly, several colour values set at the top of the document just wouldn’t pass through to the correct attribute properly and on a busy build it was quicker and more expedient to add the values by hand.

Had I got to bottom of the errant variables and the automated parsing I think XCSS could have worked well.

Lessons learned

The question now is can we make a CSS framework reduce our dev time.

If we can nail coding standards then I think ‘yes’. Readable css saves time, nesting selectors saves writing code and variables make changes easy.

XCSS could work well for us with some tweaks but now it’s time for something else LESS.

Apache 404 page

Occasionally we put together a very simple template for a client that does not require the full Kohana wizadry that we normally employ.

Our full Kohana build has the pages already installed and they just need styling but I was unsure how to add a 404 error page in a self-build or off-the-shelf Kohana build. A quick search showed few clear examples, so here’s one:

# Rewrite all other URLs to 404.php/URL
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ 404.php/$1 [PT,L,QSA]

Stick in .htaccess and style 404.php as you like.

TinyMCE bespoke formats made simple

We use TinyMCE for many of our CMS solutions and we often have to create bespoke styles (styleselect) and paragraph formatting (formatselect) for our clients.

I found some info on altering the default paragraph formats in the moxiecode forums but the long and the short of it is, add

theme_advanced_blockformats : “p,address,pre,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6”,

under your theme_advanced_buttons code. And delete the tags that you don’t want. Job done.

Stirling work from Dan

Dan’s done some brilliant work getting the tag cloud working on our new template. Go check out how he did it.