When Facebook emails you saying “you have notifications pending” in the subject line, but the email body clearly does not show you have any notifications, just others’ status updates.
If you have any pet peeves, feel free to rant about it in the comments below.
The following is a very good video from Marakana, with Damian Edwards, of Microsoft, describing the basics of jQuery. Don’t let the 52-minutes scare you off — it’s a must-see if you’re new to jQuery.
The first half goes into some of the more arcane aspects of JavaScript, including closures, anonymous functions, prototypes, etc. If you’re new to JavaScript, this will likely zoom right over your head.
Don’t worry, it’s not something you need to grasp right away. Once you have some basic JavaScript knowledge, then the topics covered in the first half make a lot more sense, and you should definitely bookmark this video so you can come back to it when you’re ready.
The second half gets into the jQuery goodness. It focuses on the basic usage of jQuery, including selecting elements based on their ID’s, classes, attributes, and so forth. It also touches on assigning event handlers to elements — like onclick functions — as well as element animations and mouse events.
This new year, 2013, is the first year since 1987 to be comprised of four different (non-repeating) digits.
The ASD website is down from December 22-30 for a “relocation of the the district’s IT Department” (their double ‘the’, not mine). Really? Eight days to relocate? Sure, it might take 8 days to move the desks, lamps, staplers, etc. But to move a website only takes as long as it takes for the world’s DNS servers to note the change (propagation).
I recently created a domain name, and from the time I pointed it to my server, it was available in 4 hours. Could’ve been less, but I only checked after 4.
Now, to be honest, behind the scenes it might take a number of hours – or even days – to copy the website from one server to another and test the functionality. But the site can still be live on the old server whilst testing is done on the new. When testing is complete, just flip the switch (change site’s DNS) and after propagation, the new server is, er…serving.
To take a site off-line for that many days is ridiculous. Yeah, configure it so no one can make changes while testing is being done, but to make it unavailable for the viewing public, for that amount of time, is plain nuts.
Oh, yeah. Other pages (besides the home page) generate a 404 error. ASD, it’s simple to redirect all pages to the home page (which explains the downtime) for the duration of the relocation. Very simple.
What is a bookmarklet? It is a bookmark – or favorite for those of you still using that dinosaur known as Internet Explorer. But instead of just taking you to some webpage, it does some action.
A prime example is a Google Search bookmarklet. Simply highlight a word or phrase on a webpage and click your bookmarklet. Google magically appears with the search results for word(s) you’d highlighted.
Try it yourself. Drag this 
to your bookmarks bar. Highlight any text on this page and click your newly created bookmarklet. Cool, huh? Let us compare. Normal search:
That’s a lot of steps. Compare that to:
That’s it! You’ve saved something like, I don’t know, 12.5 steps – I could be wrong, I’m not a mathema…I’m not too good at math.
What if you forget to select some text? A little dialog box pops ups where you can type some search terms. If you don’t type anything and just click “OK”, Google’s homepage opens up.
Bookmarklets are relatively easy to edit and adapt. One that I created and use quite frequently is my WordPress Google search bookmarklet. Say I’m on a webpage discussing WordPress, and I spot the phrase “recent changes”. I simply select that, click my WordPress Google search bookmarklet, and viola! A Google search results page appears with the phrase “wordpress recent changes” as the search terms.
Another nifty one is Google Site Search. It searches only the site you’re currently viewing. Google usually provides more accurate results for a given site than the site’s own search box, with the exception of newly created content…Google only returns what it has indexed.
Come on over and get yerself some cool bookmarklets.
