CSS 101?

I learned a CSS trick today that seems like basic CSS knowledge.

CSS 101?

Share this post:

If you only want to select an element that has, say, BOTH of the classes “first” and “selected”, but not all the elements that have EITHER classm you can just use “.first.selected” (no spaces between the class names) as your selector, and presto, it selects just elements with BOTH the “first” and “selected” classes. Not sure of the browser support, but it seems to work in all the browsers I tested.

Google attempting to take on JS?

Can Google, with its daily stronger foothold in both the browser and search markets, conquer the JS community as well? Enter Dart.

Google attempting to take on JS?

Share this post:

Can Google, with its daily stronger foothold in both the browser and search markets, rise to be a true replacement to pure JS?

Git Tips

We use git for a lot of our projects here at OSB, so here are some technical tips for some issues we frequently encounter.

Git Tips

Share this post:

Accidentally Committed a File

If you accidentally commit files to the repo and need to stop tracking them, the best way is to use

git rm --cached path/to/file

Need to ignore changes to a local config file

This one’s useful if you want to test something locally and have to change some configuration files (but don’t want your changes to accidentally get committed and pushed live) -

git update-index --assume-unchanged path/to/file

After using this command, git won’t try to hassle you about committing changes to that particular file anymore. This won’t affect anyone else’s repo, so you have to do it on each testing machine.

Who Makes Awesome Websites?

A small experiment in SEO for Orange Sparkle Ball.

Who Makes Awesome Websites?

Share this post:

If someone asks Google “Who Makes Awesome Websites?” the first search result is “Orange Sparkle Ball”. With only a few minutes of work and a week of waiting we were able to jump to the top of the rankings for this search phrase.

You can try it out on Google yourself, or click the following link:

Let Me Google That For You - Who Makes Awesome Websites?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here’s wishing everyone a Happy Turkey Day from the Orange Sparkle Ball team. View this post for a Turkey Day Wallpaper.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Share this post:

Here’s wishing everyone a Happy Turkey Day from the Orange Sparkle Ball team. Download the Turkey Day wallpaper from the link below (you may need to right-click and “save as”)

Turkey Day Wallpaper

A New Standard

Ran across an interesting magazine available online that’s part of the post-green movement…

A New Standard

Share this post:

Stumbled across Standard Magazine and have been tied up in the articles and style. Standard is a self-described post-green publication that touches on industrial design, fashion and products without poring over all the green details. I particularly enjoyed the interview with Graypants, a design trio who creates unique light fixtures and furniture out of boxes from local businesses. Be sure to note the pictures of their live/work space - really cool!!

A Look at Long-Lost Letterheads

A whimsical look at celebrity and business letterheads of the past.

A Look at Long-Lost Letterheads

Share this post:

Letters used to be how much of communication and business deals took place before the days of widespread wifi access and full email inboxes. Leaderheady (http://www.letterheady.com/) is a whimsical look at celebrity and business letterheads of the past. A great way to reflect on how much things have changed in how we talk to our clients.

Curls Gone Wild

There’s good calligraphic lettering, then there’s this…

Curls Gone Wild

Share this post:

An old acquaintance of mine recently shared a link to the 8faces website in a post about typography. I am a huge fan of well-designed letters and great typography in general, so I had to check it out.

While the overall design and content of the magazine (judging from the website photos) were pleasing to the eye, there was one glaring thing that bothered me: the 8faces logo. It seems ungraceful, amateurish even, for a publication with otherwise solid, if a bit tame, layout and design. The tameness I can forgive, though, because it really gives the type samples contained within its pages a chance to shine. I just wish they’d revisit their logo.

The current issue (#1) is available as a £3.00 (around $4.80) PDF download (since the print edition is currently sold out).

0 to Product in 72 Hours...

So, what’d you do this weekend? Oh, we just built a new Web Application to get ourselves better organized. No big deal…

0 to Product in 72 Hours...

Share this post:

This weekend, the Orange Sparkle Ball team decided to participate in the Rails Rumble, a contest for folks like us to prove their mettle at designing and deploying top-notch web applications - the catch is that you have only 48 hours to go from start to finish. You’re allowed to do planning ahead of time, of course, but no actual code or image design was allowed except in the designated 48 hour time slot.

The idea

We settled on our choice of app to build only 24 hours before the official start of the contest, giving us only a bit of time to plan ahead before diving in. Our choice? A to-do list and time-tracker that is simple and that we can get everyone on our team to use. Finding a solution to this problem has proven quite challenging, because at the end of the day - some of us (okay, me in particular) never remember to use them. I often find I can’t be bothered to keep track of how long I spent doing something when I could be spending that time doing it.

But being organized is good and helps keep Bonni from stressing out too much, so we needed the perfect system for our needs - one that’s both easy and, this is the important part, FUN. By making a mundane task fun, we hope to change it from a boring chore to an exciting contest. No, we’re not the first to think of something like this, but we feel like we’re the first to take the idea and apply it a corporate, rather than personal level. Why can’t work be fun?

Stay tuned for my next post, where I discuss the process we went through to build an app in 48 hours.

Great Minds Think Alike

#newtwitter is rolling out to public preview now. Guess what it looks like?

(Hint: You’re looking at it.)

Great Minds Think Alike

Share this post:

When I logged into Twitter today (something I do infrequently), I was presented with the option to try the new and improved interface. I decided to go for it, since I always like the latest and greatest anything.

Imagine my surprise to find that #newtwitter has pretty much the same layout that we have on our recently relaunched site: short posts on the left, click the post to get more details on the right.

We were originally concerned that the interface of our site might be too different for people to understand – we’d never seen anything like it before – but if Twitter is willing to try it out, we must be doing something right.