No is an Acceptable Answer

When used appropriately, “No” can be our most powerful tool. Truly powerful “no” users employ it in the following ways: No, but... ... we could always try 'x.' We don't need to be a yes-people or flip-flop on our opinions but we do need to give reasonable alternatives to the desired course of action. Simply saying 'no'… Continue reading No is an Acceptable Answer

Building CSS Transitions with Chrome DevTools

Animation style, acceleration, deceleration and motion are all very important things to consider when designing a user interface. Luckily most of these can be implemented using CSS transitions. One of the easiest ways I've found to edit own transition and animation styles outside of the few keywords that have good browser support such as linear, ease-in,… Continue reading Building CSS Transitions with Chrome DevTools

Loading Localhost from Mac on your iPhone or Android

Testing your local environment against Xcode and Browserstack is great, but they're still just emulators. If you need to test against an actual mobile device it's useful to load your current local environment on a mobile device and do your testing immediately before you push to a remote server. The following instructions are pretty specific… Continue reading Loading Localhost from Mac on your iPhone or Android

Zipping and unzipping files using SSH

SSH into your server Install zip and unzip. CentOS / Fedora / Red Hat: yum install zip and yum install unzip Debian / Ubuntu: apt-get install zip and apt-get install unzip Zip a file: zip new-zip-file.zip file-to-zip Zip all files in directory: zip new-zip-file.zip * Zip a directory: zip -r new-zip-file.zip directory-to-zip Unzip to the… Continue reading Zipping and unzipping files using SSH

Pointing a Subdomain to an AWS EC2 Instance

Continuing on with my Adventures with AWS, I needed to point a subdomain to Amazon Web Services, while keeping my primary domain and it's DNS handled at another host. I would consider this is a relatively common need, you have your primary domain hosted somewhere that is handling your DNS for you, but you want… Continue reading Pointing a Subdomain to an AWS EC2 Instance

jQuery and the Slack API

Disclaimer: You should think twice about interacting with the Slack API using client facing JavaScript like jQuery on a public website because your webhook (the special URL that Slack generates for you) will be public. This means that anyone could post anything in your Slack channel without being authenticated. It is possible to interact with the Slack API… Continue reading jQuery and the Slack API