Each year A List Apart conducts a survey targeted towards people who consider themselves web professionals. I have taken the survey each year and enjoy looking over the results to see how my current situation compares to everyone who takes the survey. To take this year’s survey, just go to A List Apart’s Survey Page. The survey only took me about 4 minutes to complete.
If you are interested in seeing the kind of data the survey collects, you can view last year’s results.
Occassionaly my co-workers and I like to go out to eat for lunch. We tend to usually go to the same places in a rotation. One of the places we frequently eat at is Fuddruckers. Some of you may be familiar with it from the movie Idiocracy where it eventually ended up as “Buttfuckers” if I remember correctly.
Since I am pretty frugal with my money, I tend to try and use coupons whenever they are available. My frequent visits to Fuddruckers had earned me a VIP card which was a reusable card that gave me 10% off my meal. I always found 10% off a good deal and never bothered trying to find other coupons.
On this particular day though, I noticed a co-worker had gotten a coupon in his e-mail. He mentioned he signed up for the “Fudd Club” and he received the email after signing up. I proceeded to sign up as well and I too received the coupon in my e-mail.
After we both received the coupon, we took a look at the coupon and noticed that it didn’t seem like a very good deal. The coupon was for a 1/3 pound hamburger, fries, and a drink for “$7 flat”.
The coupon I received in my e-mail from Fuddruckers
We thought the meal was only about $7.50 or $8.00 to begin with and the savings of a dollar wasn’t worth using the coupon since I usually don’t get a soft drink anyway. I decided to still print out the coupon and bring it anyway.
After arriving at Fuddruckers we immediately noticed that the meal the coupon was for was actually $6.99. Basically the coupon was for 1 cent more than the actual meal cost. I then approached the cashier and mentioned that I had a coupon for a hamburger meal and it was actually going to make me pay more than the meal cost. The cashier responded immediately stating that the coupon should have read “$6 flat” instead of “$7 flat”. I figured with my 10% VIP card I could still get a meal for $5.40 plus tax. Not too bad.
I went ahead and ordered the meal and presented by VIP card. The cashier then looked up at me and said my total was 31 cents. I thought I misheard her and asked her again how much. She responded again, “31 cents”. I quickly gave the cashier a dollar and got my change.
When I got to my seat I started looking over the receipt to see how I managed to only pay 31 cents. What happened was the cashier took off $6 instead of charging me $6. That essentially lowered the price down to $1. Then the 10% off for my VIP card was taken off the $7 meal instead of the $1. That lowered the total down to 30 cents.
I soon received my food and started enjoying the best 31 cent hamburger I have ever had.
After setting up this WordPress blog, I noticed the URLs my posts were given were absolutely terrible. In no way did they show any valuable information about what the page displayed. For instance, here is what the URL of my previous post looked like before I updated them “http://www.thetimbanks.com/?p=15″. If you saw that as a user you would have no idea what is going to be on that page.
After going through some of the settings in the WordPress administration, I came across the “Permalinks” section. I have to admit, WordPress makes it really easy to change the structure of your blog URLs. On the settings page there are 4 structures already setup for you to select from and there is a custom option as well. The option I opted for was the “Day and Name” option which shows the date and the blog post title in the URL. Now the URL for the previous post looks like “http://thetimbanks.com/2009/09/22/jquery-custom-selector-for-selecting-elements-by-exact-text-textequals/” which now gives the date the post was published on and the post title.
If you plan on using the custom option you may want to take a look at the WordPress Codex page on using permalink structure. There are some tags on that page that aren’t used on any of the default options that may help you out.
I just finished up writing another short blog post over on my company’s development blog covering a jQuery custom selector I wrote to find elements based on their exact text. There was a particular case where I needed to select elements in jQuery based on their exact text and not on whether the text contained a certain string. That ruled out the possibility to use the built in contains() method.
Lanit Development Blog – jQuery Custom Selector for selecting elements by exact text :textEquals
I recently ran into a method in the Ext javascript library called radioClass. This method will add one or more CSS classes to an element and remove the class(es) from the siblings of the element. I found that this would be helpful in jQuery since I find myself wanting to do something similar.
Check out the blog post on the Lanit Development Blog – jQuery Extension: radioClass() method
I set this site up a few months ago intending on making some posts, but never got around to doing it. I would like to use this blog to post about interesting things I find related to technology. The topic could cover programming, software, hardware, or anything else related to technology. I may throw in a few personal posts here and there just to mix things up.
The first post should come shortly about a little jQuery extension I wrote for work.
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