BlogmyQuery – BMQ

In a project at work I’ve been working a lot with Ruby (straight Ruby, not Rails). I kind of like it. I’m not sure why exactly, but it feels… friendly.

While I have learned a bit about Ruby, I am not by any stretch of the imagination a Ruby expert. I’ve been (still am) muddling my way through, trying to learn by doing – and by reading. There’s plenty of great reading available for free online for anyone looking to learn Ruby programming, and I’d like to share links to some of the resources that I have found.

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Posted in Coding, Ruby.

A subject I have returned to a couple of times is how to use headings to make good document outlines in HTML documents. See Headings and document structure conclusions for a summary of my reasoning.

Recently I’ve been taking a closer look at how HTML5 changes the way document outlines are created. I’m not entirely sure that I have understood the specification fully, but if I have, I think the new outline algorithm requires you to think carefully when using the new sectioning elements (article, section, nav, and aside) if you also want a coherent document outline without untitled sections.

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Posted in Accessibility, HTML 5.

In Validating HTML5 with validator.nu and the HTML5Validator Extension for Firefox I talked about my solution for validating HTML5 in the browser – without having to do it manually, and without running into problems with pages that are on a local domain or behind a firewall or login. I also mentioned a couple of issues with the extension that I was aware of.

Last week I got an email from Valentin Agachi who offered to help out. Thanks to him, fixes for the issues I mentioned along with several new features and options are now incorporated into the HTML5 Validator extension. Massive thanks to Valentin for the help!

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Posted in Browsers, HTML 5, Productivity.

Every now and then I find myself in a situation where I have a folder (I’ll call it source) of files and nested folders, possibly many levels deep, that I want to copy into another folder (which I’ll call target). target already contains some of the files and folders I’m copying, and it also has files and folders that are not present in source.

Simply copying source to target’s parent folder in the Mac OS X Finder will replace everything in target with the contents of source. This is not always what I want, and in my opinion it’s one of the biggest flaws of the Mac OS X Finder. Not just Mac OS X actually – back in the pre-Mac OS X days there was a utility called Speed Doubler that patched the Finder to add a smart replace option when copying files.

It’s possible to manually open each folder and their subfolders and copy just the files, but it can be very tedious. There are also third party software options that let you merge files when copying, and if you have Apple’s Developer Tools installed there is the FileMerge utility.

However, you can open a Terminal window and copy the files from the command line, which saves you from installing extra software. Since I keep looking up the syntax every time I need to do this I decided to document it here for future reference.

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Posted in Mac.

I’ve been feeling like a dinosaur for not being active on Twitter. I did use it a bit way back in its early days, but realised that it doesn’t “fit� me. I find the chopped up messages with “hashtags�, shortened mystery meat URLs and SMS style language confusing, and I think Twitter conversations are very hard to make any sense out of.

Anyway, people have been asking me about Twitter for a long time, and some have suggested that if nothing else I can use it as a way to let people know when I have posted something new here. An RSS proxy, sort of. So that’s what I’ve started doing.

If you prefer getting updates via Twitter, start following @rogerjohansson. The RSS feed will still be available, of course.

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Posted in Site news.