aaron's blog

I recently discovered the Contemplate (Content Template) modules for Drupal. Wow, is it ever a handy little module. Contemplate allows you to create php templates for specific node types. You can create a template for one or all of the following : Body, Teaser, RSS. The great thing about creating node type specific templates in contemplate is that they are theme independent. You no longer have to create a .tpl.php file for that node type in all of the themes that might be in use.

I was happily coding along today when I noticed a site I was working just looked weird in IE.  An hour and a half later I stumbled across a post on Drupal.org about IE ignoring more than 30 stylesheets.  And sure enough, they did this on purpose : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/262161
 
WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!
 
Ok - decision made.  My next computer will be a Mac.

I recently encountered one of those nasty web applications that can only be created with ColdFusion by ColdFusion developers.  Yikes!  Anyways, the only real way to be able to create web tests for this particular app turned out to be the following steps:
1) Record the test steps with fiddler
2) Re-record the exact same steps with fiddler
3) Use the differences between the two recordings to determine what data to parameterize and what data to get from extraction rules.
 

Ok Google folks, you picked a terrible name for "The Go Programming Language".  Why?  Becuase it is the worst possible search term there ever was!  Try searching for "go mysql", or "go" anything and you get a whole lot of useless results.  Why not just call it gopher?  You wouldn't need to change the logo or anything, and you would make poor ol' Francis McCabe's day.
 

I recently happened across this article that lays out ten principles for good design : http://www.vitsoe.com/en/gb/about/dieterrams/gooddesign
 
As I observe the computing world continually winding itself into a fantasticly complicated mess I cannot help but wonder what the world would be like if programmers followed these same principles.
 

In doing performance testing it is extremely common to encounter situations where your test scripts need to choose a specific link on the page based on some condition.  For example, consider the following table:

Have a client that can't quite figure out what font they want for their website?  Instead of burning time on the trial and error approach, why not ask them to use one of these two great websites to help them pick exaclty what they want:
 
For plain text, try sending them to typetester where they can choose from a list of common web fonts.  Depending on how computer savvy they are, they can then either send you the css to the font they want, or just tell you what options they picked.
 

Maintaining a professional operation without breaking the bank is crucial to freelancing.   I have found these tools to be invaluable to my business and hope that you try them for yourself.  Note that some of the links below have affiliate codes in them, but I am not otherwise being asked or compensated to write reviews for these services.
 

The following class can be used to override the standard IE object in WatiN to run specific tests after every page load.  For example, in Drupal this class can be used to make sure that no error messages appear on any page during the test run.
 

In my previous post, I discussed the basics of using Gallio, MbUnit, and WatiN to test web applications.  In the previous example you could continue to add tests to the class by creating additional test methods and marking them with the test attribute.  However, you could not guarantee what kind of order those tests would run in.  Fortunately, MbUnit/Gallio is a flexible enough framework to allow you to create orderd test suites which is a common need for functional testing.