Here’s what I took away from the first half of May 2015.
- I discovered a new online tool, transformy.io. My initial excitement was subdued a little bit when I actually used it, though it’s still an excellent tool if your data manipulation requirements aren’t too advanced.
I completely understand the simplicity thing, but I think a couple of options regarding how your data is formatted could have gone a long way to allow more advanced data manipulation.
- I learned that Amazon S3 has somewhat stricter naming conventions for objects than your operating system might allow.
If you’re pushing user-created files off to S3 for storage, you’ll want to verify that it doesn’t have any symbols that S3 doesn’t allow and remove them.
- I fell in love with a CSS compressor. Yup, that can happen if you find the right one!
Let me introduce you to CSSCompressor.com, where it’s not assumed that everyone wants the smallest possible file. Instead, you’re given options on how readable the CSS should be.
This is great if you’re simply looking to kinda minify, but kinda make it maintainable too.
- You gotta add the following to your CSS reset style, if it’s not already there:
main { display: block; }“Why?”, you ask. Because IE doesn’t render the main element as a block element by default.
- PHP has a nice little mysqli_multi_query() function, which is great for reducing round trips to your database. Better yet, it lets you grab the response of each query individually.
I haven’t met it’s equal in another language yet, though I don’t really stay up with other languages.
- I messed around with trying to solve the Close browser / tab event issue. The issue being that the events are shared with a page reload, so it’s difficult to reliably determine if the browser was actually closed.