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If you've ever worked with CSS, you know what a pain it can be to get things looking right in all of the major browsers (Firefox, Safari and IE). IE is, of course, the major offender, causing extreme frustration at times. With the release of IE 7, the Microsoft dudes made a giant stride in standards compliance, but IE 6 is still hanging around in the fringe (I think the percentage of users on this site is only around 9%). So, that means haxoring the codes to make the site look acceptable in Internet Explorer 6.

When we first launched the new version of the site, we included a notice heading telling users with IE 6 that we suggest they upgrade to a modern browser (IE 6 was released in August of 2001!!). Well, we got a little bit of flack for taking the easy way out. So, I put on my big-boy pants (once again) and went to work on IE 6 compatibility. Here are some of the tools that I used to accomplish this:

Parallels Desktop - A wonderful invention. Let's me run Windows from within OS X. I can test on Firefox (Mac and Win), Safari(Mac and Win), and IE all at the same time!

IE Conditional Comments - I actually have to hand it to the Internet Explorer development team for including these. They knew their browsers would require a little extra attention and some off-the-wall tricks to get things looking right. Just put this in the HEAD of the page to apply CSS styles only to versions of Internet Explorer less than 7:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
  <style type="text/css">
    #custom_style { just:for_ie; }
  </style>
<![endif]-->

IE7 Script - Equally as important as the conditional comments. This script will update IE 6's CSS rendering to be compatible with IE 7. After including this script in the site, it fixed about 50% of the IE 6-specific problems. It even has support for transparent pngs as background images! Invaluable.

While the site still doesn't look perfect in IE 6, it's definitely pretty close. If you see something odd in any browser that you're using (except Netscape, I don't acknowledge its existence), please send an email to support@plexusweb.com and let us know.

Many of the staff here at Plexus are on Twitter. While it's hard to explain to other people (micro-blogging?!?!), we've embraced it as a way to share information, see what each other are doing, and, in some cases, decide on lunch plans.

While perusing an especially interesting query on Twitter's search today, I came across a tweet about using Twitter from the command line. Being the computer nerd that I am, this intrigued me. I did some Google-ing and found a few entries from people who had written scripts to make this possible. The best explanation I found was here. He just wrote a simple shell script that used curl to post a status via Twitter's API.

The code is pretty simple.

curl --basic --user "<User>:<Password>" --data-ascii "status=`echo $@|tr ' ' '+'`" "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"

Just create a file with that line of code, replace the user and password with your account info, save the file as "twitter", put it in your /usr/local/bin directory (Mac), and make it executable. Now you can run the following line in Terminal to post your status:

twitter "Command line status updates FTW!"

For a long time, cron jobs have been a mystery to me. They seemed much too complicated and I didn't understand them. Whenever I needed to create one with our old host, they had a handy gui-based cron job creator. Still not the most intuitive thing I've ever used, but it got the job done. Now that we've switched over to Rails Machine for our hosting, there is no concept of a gui cron wizard for me to rely on anymore. It was time I put on my big-boy pants and learned to write a cron job like the adults do.

Like most things that intimidate me, I found that there wasn't much to it when I actually dove in and starting researching the topic. Now, I consider myself to be, at the least, competent at creating new cron jobs. Below is a description of the formatting of cron jobs as well as a few examples. I'm keeping this post mostly as a reference for myself, but if it can help anyone else then that's great.

Explanation of how a cron job is formatted

 *   *   *   *   *  some command or group of commands
(1)(2)(3)(4)(5)

(1) minute (00-59)
(2) hour (in 24-hour format of course, 0-23)
(3) day (1-31)
(4) month (1-12)
(5) day of week (0-7 where Sunday is 0 AND 7)

Examples

We want to clear the log files at 2am every Sunday morning.

00  2  *  *  0  cd /var/www/apps/plexus/current; rake log:clear

We want to run some rake task every weekday at noon.

00  12  *  *  1-5  cd /var/www/apps/plexus/current; rake some_task

Let's say we only want to run a script on the 1st and 15th of the month at midnight, and only in the month of June

00  0  1,15  6  *  /path/to/script

If you specify both a month day AND a weekday, then the cron will treat it as cumulative and run on both days. The following script will be executed every Saturday and Sunday at 12:00pm, but will also be run on the 10th of each month.

00  12  10  *  0,6  /path/to/script

Not so bad, is it?

Git is "an open source version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency." It's also well-suited for smaller repositories and is very popular in the open source community because of its ability for many people to work on the same project. Git is much faster than most other, more common version control systems.

We're still running Subversion here at Plexus, which has suited our needs spectacularly. Despite its features, I don't imagine that we'll move to git anytime soon, particularly because of its rather steep learning curve. I have created an account with github, a free online git repository hosting service, to help me get better acquanted with git. It definitely takes a little while to get the hang of. It's a lot different than Subversion.

Git resources:

• Git Tutorial
• Everyday Git - basic set of commands
• Git wiki
• Github - free online repository hosting
• Ruby on Rails repository on github

Projects using git:

• The Linux Kernel (after all, git was written by Linus Torvalds)
• One Laptop Per Child core development
• Ruby on Rails

Google announced this week that they will be launching a new service soon called "Knol" (meaning a unit of knowledge). It's designed to be a source of knowledge similar to Wikipedia. Their aim is to allow experts to write authoritative articles covering their areas of expertise. Sounds a lot like Wikipedia, right? Well, with Knol, Google will allow authors to have profiles so the user can know exactly who wrote what. In addition to the accountability of the sources, Knol will also allow authors to place ads on their created pages, giving them a portion of the revenue generated from the ad clicks.

You can read more about it on Google's official blog.