Posted October 19th, 2010 in Linux, Ruby
With the numerous versions of Ruby, Rubygems and all their dependencies floating around out there, it can be tough to get your system up-and-running with it giving you trouble. The easiest solution to the convoluted mess is to install Ruby Version Manager (RVM). RVM allows you to install multiple ruby versions and switch between them. It can be a bit of a hassle to set up, but once you get it right it won’t give …
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Posted September 21st, 2010 in CSS, Tutorials
Let’s talk about sprites. No, not mythical fairies or transparent sodas, let’s talk about sprites as they pertain to web design. A CSS sprite is a single image that contains many graphical elements to be used on a particular site. For instance, you may create a sprite that contains all your navigation buttons in their various states (hover, active, current etc.). This cuts down on load time because a single image is loaded instead of …
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Tags: sprite
Posted September 16th, 2010 in CSS
By using the “text-shadow” CSS declaration we can give our text Photoshop-like shadow effects. We can control the offset, blur radius and color of the shadow by just using some simple CSS. h2 { text-shadow: #000 1px 1px 2px; } The above code will give us something like this: Text with a shadow! After selecting the element we want to style, we put in a “text-shadow” style and passed it 4 different attributes. The first …
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Tags: text-shadow
Posted September 15th, 2010 in Linux, Tutorials
Cron allows you to run commands on a schedule and can be an extremely useful tool. Let’s make an alarm clock to see how it works: Before you get started, make sure that you have the necessary packages. You’ll need “alsa-utils”, “mplayer” and of course “cron”. First thing you’ll want to do is open your crontab file for editing so you can tell it what command to execute and when. The crontab file is what …
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Tags: cron
