Mac OS X Tutorial – How To Fix “The operation can’t be completed because the item “***” is in use.” error

Ever gotten this pestering error when trying to empty the trash in Mac OS X? I even see this behavior persistent in OS X Lion 10.7, the newest release. I believe it has something to do with Finder’s quicklook function. While relaunching the Finder is always a solution, I wanted to present this terminal based solution as a faster alternative. Read more

Business Cards Wireframe Template for Printing

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now, many apologies for the delay. I recently relocated to San Francisco, and with the never-ending supply of networking events, hacking conferences, and more, I inevitably ran out of business cards and decided it was time for a new design.

Rather than writing a complex tutorial for how to create a print-ready wireframe for your cards, I thought I’d be nice and just give you the files. So, without further adieu, here are Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and PDF versions of the wireframe I used:

Download Business Card Wireframe Templates

If you use these templates, or they help you in any way, please comment below and let me know what you used them for! Sharing is caring!

SEO Guide – The Ultimate Checklist

Like many people in the web development and design industry, search engine optimization (SEO for short) has become synonymous with creating your website.

SEO is a complicated, intangible bit of web design that can really get novices and developers alike quite a headache. It is very important not to get caught off-guard by SEO companies who claim to be able to position you at the first page of Google or other search engines for any keyword of your choice. Rest assured that if someone guarantees you ANYTHING SEO-related, that they are ultimately full of shit.

SEO is not guarantee-able mainly due to the fact that Google and other search engines do not explain how their ranking algorithms work, and therefore, no one really knows what the best tactics are for getting your site ranked.

That being said, there are many things we do know, since Google offers an SEO starters guide, and this particularly useful webpage and many people have performed experiments to help back up claims that Google tends to avoid discussing.

The following is a bullet list of two major facets of SEO — on-site, and off-site optimization. Read more

How To Use PHP Useragent Detection and Internet Explorer Conditional Comments For Custom Styles and Functionality on Websites

So, as I’ve been developing more and more websites as of late I have come across an unimaginable number of cross-browser compatibility issues. Keep in mind that the best solution is always to solve issues with CSS styles that work properly across multiple browsers.

However, as a web developer, there are times when you absolutely have to write specific CSS styles for certain browsers. In this article, I will cover two different methods of doing this.

Useragent Detection using PHP

This first method requires that your website is built using PHP technology. I am testing this on PHP5, but the same idea should apply to PHP4. The code that I use here is documented originally on php.net if you want more information, but my example will take you through everything you need to know. Keep in mind that my examples deal mainly with CSS, but this code can be re-factored to work in a great many scenarios, such as when you want different functionality (can anyone say replacing flash elements with pure HTML/JS on iPad/iPhone?!).

First, let’s look at the $_SERVER variable. $_SERVER is a global array that contains a wealth of information created by the web server, such as headers, paths, and script locations. Keep in mind that there is no guarantee that any old server will have any data in this variable, so be careful with this! The bit of data we care about in this array is $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']. Below is an example of what a useragent looks like:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.102 Safari/534.13

As you can see, there is a great deal of information contained in the useragent string that can be parsed to determine what browser and operating system combination is being used by your visitor. The way I go about parsing the useragent is using the strpos() function.

Read more

How to Properly Use HTML Input Elements with Label Elements in Forms

I still can’t believe how many big-name websites neglect to use this wonderful bit of markup! Read this, and make it a habit. It’s soo easy!

Okay, let’s say we’re marking up a contact form where visitors enter a bit of personal information, such as their name, sex, and which products they’re interested in. I’ll keep this stupid simple: when you’re creating this form, there is a proper place to put the labels for each input element. It’s called the label element. Be sure to use the label element’s “for” property, that way the label knows which input element it refers to.

The reason for going through this trouble rather than just using a div or a span element, is because the browser knows that if a label element with a for property is clicked that the corresponding input element should receive focus. Having the label AND the input element clickable makes for a much larger target to click on. Heck, I’m a web developer, and I can’t even click on radio buttons and checkboxes to save my life! Imagine how my grandma feels! Read more

M3 & GTR Exhaust Porn

I’ve been lagging on new blog posts recently, but for all you car enthusiasts out there here’s something to fap to.