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Excella Consulting Presents: Secrets of Successful Portal Implementations

Agenda June 17, 2009 1:00 PM - 1:30 PM Introductions, Greetings 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM Secrets of Successful Portal Implementations by Susan Hanley Where Microsoft Technology Center 12012 Sunset Hills Rd. Reston, VA 20190 See map and/or driving directions We look forward to welcoming you to our Excella seminar!

I’ve been an avid Firebug fan since I discovered it. Nothing in the past has come close to matching Firebug’s ease of use and feature set. Internet Explorer’s Developer Toolbar, in comparison, was unwieldy and lacked all the stuff I needed. 

Scottchallenged me to try Internet Explorer 8 (and Firebug’s counterpart, IE 8 Developer Tools) for a week. After playing with it for a few minutes, I’ve come to the conclusion that…

Developer Tool Features = Firebug plugin + Web Developer plugin + Ruler plugin 

Most of IE Developer Tool’s features are eerily similar to existing Firefox plugins. The IE tools are a bit more usable (like having a button for “Start Debugging” whereas Firebug doesn’t give you an affordance on how to start debugging) but basically the same.

So while I’m happy that I will be able to debug and develop in Internet Explorer now, Developer Tools doesn’t quite deliver that Pacquiao-like KO punch.

When Barack Obama took office on January 20, he issued a memorandum on Transparency and Open Government.

Government should be transparent.  Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.  Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

from whitehouse.gov, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment/

And what does this mean for you? It means that government agencies will be more receptive of using web 2.0 to shed light on their activities. As a web developer, this should get you PUMPED up! I can’t wait to see how web 2.0 will help our government and our country!

I will be talking about how to create jQuery plugins at DC ALT.NET next week.
It will be held in the Motley Fool headquarters on February 25 @ 7PM.

Today I was faced with an unusual task: I needed to find a way to nullify an element's style attribute, i.e.:

<br style="clear: both">

The style's clear:both was causing some unnecessary whitespace. I couldn't change the style attribute directly because it was on a Master page that I didn't have the permission to modify.

I am not sure if there is a way to do this using CSS alone (element style takes precedence over any css class).

My Solution

Step 1: Hide the offending <br> element

// br[style] matches any <br> that has an attribute style
br[style]
{
     display: none;
}

Step 2: Add a regular <br> element after document has loaded

<script language="javascript">
$(document).ready (function() {
    $('br[style]').after('<br>');
});
</script>

Basically I'm hiding the problematic <br> element and replacing it with another <br> without the "clear: both baggage".

So jQuery saves the day! However, I'd be very interested if anyone knew of a better solution to this problem... perhaps there is a CSS trick I don't know about?

My current project involves integrating legacy Prototype code with jQuery. Normally the solution would be to just change all the $(object) references to jQuery(object). However, one of the constraints was I couldn't modify any of the jQuery code, and Prototype does NOT give you any way to rename the $ variable.

I discovered this hack while trying to find a way around this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.2.3.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="prototype.js"></script> 
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.2.3.min.js"></script>

The first two lines were there by default (it was being generated by the Master Page, which I could not modify). Apparently, if you register the external jQuery library the second time around, jQuery co-opts the $ variable for itself. This allowed me to use the $ symbol for jQuery.