Ok, so let’s say you’re doing image replacement on an unordered list. Since we’re all good boys and girls here, we include the actual text inside the link tag and spin it off the left of the screen with text-indent. Well if you’re a Firefox user (or test with it), then you may recall seeing the border generated around the navigation and going off the left of the screen (see below).

It’s one of those things that I never really thought much about. But last week a co-worker of mine showed me a really simple way of getting rid of those lines. Enter “overflow: hidden”.

For those of you using Firefox, I have two examples below. The first is without the overflow attribute, the second is with.

Without overflow:hidden

• First Item
• Second Item
• Third Item

With overflow:hidden

• First Item
• Second Item
• Third Item

Special thanks to Chaz for the tip.

Ok, change of plans everybody. For those of you who read my last post (I think I’ll go for a walk outside now), you may remember I had a list of items I wanted to accomplish, and that I had decided they were pretty much going to have to wait for the fluffy white of Michigan to appear before I could fit them in.

Change of plans.

I recently accepted a position with the University of Notre Dame’s Web Group. I start Monday. They use Ruby on Rails. I’m a PHP programmer. You see where I’m going with this, right? So I’ve spent that past couple of weeks reading and going through RoR tutorials. It feels like the good ‘ol college days when you slack off for the entire semester and then try and cram just before finals. Well, I imagine that’s what it would feel like. I would never have done that myself. No sir. Much too committed to my college education was I.

Ahem.

But so far so good. As anybody who has studied both PHP and RoR knows, there are a lot of subtle and no so subtle differences. The absence of certain structures (curly braces, semi-colons, etc) are wreaking havoc on how I read the code. After so many years of reading and writing code in a specific way, it can be rather jarring when items you’ve trained yourself to watch for are no longer there.

No worries though. Like anything else, all these differences can be learned over time. In the middle of my glorious, supposed to be living it up in slacker-ville, summer. Ah well. I’ll see all of you Rails folks on the help boards. I’ll be the guy with no tan and word “NEWBIE” tattooed to his forehead. Your help will be greatly appreciated.