http://blog.lrdesign.com Logical Reality Design: Web Design and Software Development Sat, 26 Jul 2008 01:45:54 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been working a lot this week with sphinx and ultrasphinx on a project that's a fork of Insoshi.    Insoshi is in the process of switching search from ferret to sphinx, and sphinx has been integrated into the Insoshi edge branch. I've had dozens of problems, in fact it's fair to ... http://blog.lrdesign.com/2008/07/fixing-problems-with-sphinx-search/ This is pretty basic and there's plenty of documentation on the web, but this morning I found it difficult to locate with a google search. Maybe I just didn't know the right terms. (searching "git repository change origin" seems obvious to me, but the results were useless.) ... http://blog.lrdesign.com/2008/07/changing-the-origin-of-your-git-repository/ In one of my Rails projects, I maintain a user-visible log of updates to the database by recording entries into a table that looks like this (from schema.rb): create_table "log_entries", :force => true do |t| t.integer "user_id", :limit => 11 t.datetime ... http://blog.lrdesign.com/2008/07/rails-21-gotcha-dont-name-an-activerecord-field-changes/ This morning we launched a refreshed site and an all-new online store for one of my clients, CordobaSzekely Productions. Robert Cordoba and Deborah Székely are dance instructions and multiple-time national champions at the U.S. Open West Coast Swing Championships. They teach West Coast Swing and other dances all around the ... http://blog.lrdesign.com/2008/07/site-launch-cordobaszekelycom/ Sometimes you may want to generate a selector with a fixed set of options.   In one recent task of mine, we needed a selector for an integer 1 through 10, but the client wanted them labeled also with text to identify how the numbers mapped to the words "High" "Medium" ... http://blog.lrdesign.com/2008/06/getting-select-options-in-the-right-order/ It's a scourge that inflicts nearly every website: the dreaded empty page stating "Your search returned no results." Or even worse, the search results page with a header "Search results" and zero content, the footer immediately following the header. This is not only useless, but also confusing to ... http://blog.lrdesign.com/2008/06/using-redirect_to-back-to-improve-user-interfaces/ It's Firefox 3 Download Day!   Go get it, please. I am excited about this, but perhaps not for the same reason most other people were. I am excited because Firefox 3 is the first version to implement the CSS rule "display: inline-block". Inline-block allows you to generate chunks of content of ... http://blog.lrdesign.com/2008/06/firefox-download-day-display-inline-block-day/ Apparently I can't stop playing, because today I built and uploaded a third design for the LRDesign main site: "Blue Art". This one required the IE PNG fix from Twin Helix for IE 6.0 compatibility. I think there are still a few annoying bugs in the stylesheet switcher on ... http://blog.lrdesign.com/2008/05/another-new-design-for-lrdesigncom/ For quite a while I've wanted to decorate the main Logical Reality site with multiple, switchable themes, implementing each with pure CSS on top of semantic HTML markup, a la the CSS Zen Garden. Last night I finally got a start on that, implementing a simple stylesheet switcher ... http://blog.lrdesign.com/2008/05/new-theme-added-to-lrdesigncom/ Looking for used cars on Craig's List, my girlfriend and I found what appears to be a classic web escrow auto scam: Web Auto Trades. An ad we responded to (a used Honda Accord at a surprisingly low price for the mileage) claimed to be using their service, ... http://blog.lrdesign.com/2008/05/likely-web-scam-notice-webatradescom/