Personal Blog
Mike Smullin
Husband, Father, Entrepreneur, Investor, Engineer, Artist, and Self-motivated Student currently located in Eagle Mountain, Utah.
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Posts by Mike Smullin
Gridded Layouts and Simplified Markup
Mar 4th
Really sold on gridded layouts lately. Loving the SASS version of 960.gs provided as a plugin for Compass. Albeit, have made some of my own improvements to it so my custom one is a little better. Will share that later.
For now, recommended you check out the following projects:
- Compass; specifically video demo
- SASS markup language; better than CSS
- HAML markup language; better than (X)HTML
- 960.gs, its sketch pdf, and its SASS Compass Plugin equivalent
- 960 Gridder javascript overlay bookmark
- A List Apart: Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid article
- Text Gridder javascript overlay bookmark (my own)
- Sparkup markup language; specifically video demo
- Sparky my Compass-like compiler for Sparkup
Very cool combination for Rapid Application Development (RAD). Especially applied to web design.
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Loading ...IE Tester: Encapsulates Internet Explorer 5.5 to 8
Feb 27th
IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Runs on Windows. If you’re on Linux you can just run it in VirtualBox. Very nice tool to have.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Continuous Integration
Feb 6th
On a daily basis, how many of you: Write unit tests? Perform unit tests? Check that code follows standards? Check that code is optimized with minimal repetition? Checkout, build, compile, release, and publish multiple builds (e.g. development, nightly, staging, production, training, etc.) in multiple formats (pushed live, tar.gz, .zip, etc.) Analyze results, produce, and share reports of all this?
Realize that if you are not, your presence is a high cost to the project in terms of the cascade of poor quality, and additional time you place as a burden on your customers and end-users. (see also: six sigma; cost of poor quality)
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Scored 3rd in NetWars R6
Feb 4th
Yep, I was “numbers“.
NetWars is one of the key competitions in the United States Cyber Challenge. For an overview of the Challenge, please click here to download the description from the White House web site.
Do you really know your way around computers? Do you think you can recover the password from a computer? Take control of a service? Protect the system against other users who might want to take it over?
Netwars is the ultimate online game: an adventure across the Internet. You can play as an analyst, a penetration tester, a defender, or any combination. You earn points by finding keys, moving to higher levels, capturing services such as a website, overcoming obstacles (attack techniques) and protecting resources (defensive techniques). You can see the other players scores and your own points scored, live, or on an overall scoreboard.
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Blueprint: A CSS Framework
Feb 4th
"Spend your time innovating, not replicating."
Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.
Blueprint offers:
- A CSS reset that eliminates the discrepancies across browsers.
- A solid grid that can support the most complex of layouts.
- Typography based on expert principles that predate the web.
- Form styles for great looking user interfaces.
- Print styles for making any webpage ready for paper.
- Plugins for buttons, tabs and sprites.
- Tools, editors, and templates for every step in your workflow.
Of course, Blueprint isn’t the only choice. It’s just the most popular, according to Google Trends:
keyword searches on Google
You may also be interested in 960 Grid System, or Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI).
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