Help Wanted: Web Application Developer and Mobile Application Developer

Ravenglass is seeking two application developers: one Web Application Developer and one Mobile Application Developer. Will consider contract, contract-to-hire, or full-time with salary plus full benefits. Flexible commuting arrangements considered

Web Application Developer Degree in Computer Science or related field required. Must have demonstrable experience with HTML, XML, AJAX, and SQL. Web application development experience in ColdFusion, JSP, ASP.NET, or PHP is also required. Mobile application development experience is a plus.

Mobile Application Developer Degree in Computer Science or related field required. Must have professional mobile application development experience with iOS or Android OS. Web application development (ColdFusion, PHP, ASP.NET) and HTML5 knowledge are a strong plus.

Professionalism and strong communications skills are a must. Apply with resume and cover letter to jobs@ravenglass.com.

Clean layouts and spacing

Here is a fun challenge for those of you who have to deal with specific sized divs that contains dynamic text. What do you do with a div that you cannot or do not want to resize dynamically. Today, I have two solutions for you.

The first and simplest technique would be to use CSS to hide overflow content.

Lets take a simple piece of code.


<div style="width:100px;border-top:1px solid #000000;"> </div>
<div style="border:1px solid #000000;width:100px;">
This_is_an_unbroken_line_of_text!!!!!!!!
</div>

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Using CFHTMLHEAD

Last week one of my team members gave a presentation to the rest of us on Coldbox. We are using this framework for a project and we were discussing the basics of convention and how to work with the different layers - which brought up the question, where exactly is the optimal place to put the Javascript in this?.

I used this opportunity to bring up the CFHTMLHEAD tag, which allows you to place code into the head tag from anywhere on the page. This would allow us to keep Javascript from loading on unnecessary pages and still keep everything componentized. I also thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss basic CFHTMLHEAD usage.

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Basic Page Optimization

Page load time is very important, if a page takes too long to load some users will just leave and may never come back. Below are two tools that I find very useful when doing page optimizations.

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CSS Child & Descendant Selectors

As I continue my work with the re-design of one of our pages, I re-discovered a specific aspect of CSS that I wanted to share.

To fully understand this concept, you must know that a "Parent" element is an element that contains other elements. The elements contained within a parent element are all referred to as "Children".

We are going to explore CSS's "child selector" and "decendant selector". It's all in the name with these two. The main difference is that the "child selector" only affects immediate children of a parent element, whereas the "descendant selector" affects all of the children, grandchildren and lower, of a particular parent element.

Here are some examples:

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Testing in Internet Explorer

As many of us know, testing in Internet Explorer is tough because you can't run multiple versions of IE on the same computer (and the same CSS can render VERY differently across versions).

This is a neat tool that Cindi passed along to the rest of the Ravenglass team a couple of weeks ago. This allows you to test the way JavaScript and CSS are rendered across the different versions of IE, without having to jump through hoops.

http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

I installed it this week because I have been doing some redesign work, with some CSS that might not be compatible across browsers and I am hooked! Testing across browsers was a breeze with this - so compelling that I had to write a quick blog entry about it.

'Til next time, Bridget

Page Numbers in clickable boxes are easier to use

I have to say that I really like the usability of page numbers (or alpha lists) in clickable boxes. They are much easier to use/select than just the one-character links, which are often teeny tiny and too close together. So here is an example of how to clickable boxes with CSS - you just have to define the style, then wrap all the links in a div with the "pagination" class. 

Example CSS: 


/* ------------------------------------------------------- */
div.pagination {padding:3px; margin:3px; text-align:left; font-size:11px; font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;}

div.pagination a, div.pagination a:visited {padding: 2px 5px 2px 5px; margin-right: 2px; background: transparent; border: 1px solid #cccccc; text-decoration: none; color: #004499;}

div.pagination a:hover, div.pagination a:active { border: 1px solid #cccccc; color: #000000; background-color: #dddddd;}

div.pagination span.current a:link, div.pagination span.current a:visted { color: #004499; padding: 2px 5px 2px 5px; margin-right: 4px; font-weight: bold; border: 1px solid #e0d9b8; background-color: #edeadb;}

div.pagination span.disabled {padding: 2px 5px 2px 5px; margin-right: 2px; border: 1px solid #e0d9b8; color: #004499; background-color: transparent;}
/* ------------------------------------------------------- */

Example HTML/ColdFusion code:


<cfoutput>
<div class="pagination">
Port Index:  
<cfloop list="#alphaList#" index="thisAlpha">
<cfif alpha neq thisAlpha>
<a href="#cgi.SCRIPT_NAME#?#cgi.QUERY_STRING#&alpha=#thisAlpha#">#thisAlpha#</a>
<cfelse>
<span class="current"><a href="#cgi.SCRIPT_NAME#?#cgi.QUERY_STRING#&alpha=#thisAlpha#">#thisAlpha#</a></span>
</cfif>
</cfloop>
</div>
</cfoutput>

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