I'd suggest also asking this question in the Miserable IT Guy thread. Alot of the guys in there are system and network admins, who are probably responsible for their company's website/webserver's downtime. 

woot got a big pay rise from the job i started about 4 months ago. glad i stayed when another job opportunity showed up 2 months back 

Nice one! :)

I'm asking for more money on my next review, I think. 

I'm apparently getting a promo this week. They're gonna try and rifle me on the raise though. Ain't gonna happen boyo! 

good luck to both of you.

i had a bit of luck with mine, putting in alot of hard work, and then we hired someone else who was paid alot more then me but turned out not to fit the role sort of showed how valuable i was to the company. 

I think I have to work a couple more years before I can be promoted to Senior Developer.
So no substantial raises til then. Just normal annual ones. 

Any of you guys have or know where I can find a javascript for validation of international phone and zipcode formats based on a country dropdown? Like, if the user picks Canada then it validates the field data based on the correct format for Canadian postal codes? 

regex validation? 

http://www.gskinner.com/RegExr/ 

whoah, even better link dave. 

There's an FF extension called Regular Expressions Tester that I love and use all the time. 

Enlighten me... I know basically what regular expressions are 'cuz I use them for find/replace operations in my text editor, but what is regular expression "testing" exactly? 

So my buddy Evan who owns a four man web design firm the next county over recently decorated their building for halloween. I'm intensely jealous.

http://www.orangecoat.com/files/images/full-building.jpg 

That's... really cool. 

That's amazing! Good job. :D 

arothman said:

Enlighten me... I know basically what regular expressions are 'cuz I use them for find/replace operations in my text editor, but what is regular expression "testing" exactly?

Testing involves writing the regular expression that you think will work for the kinds strings that you want to match or replace for.
Because they can get so complicated, it's good to have a standalone tester so you don't have to worry about the rest of whatever your using it for getting in the way. 

geodave said:

Has anyone had any experience with website uptime monitoring?

Some of my less tech-savvy clients are increasingly asking for website uptime monitoring, they don't want to worry when the site goes down, or deal with all the support aspects.

I should mention that these are SEO clients, so I don't run the webserver, design the sites, or really manage their site on a normal basis beyond SEO, so I wouldn't classify this as something I should be "doing anyway"

My question is, anybody know of a program I can install on a net-connected box, or a service I can enlist that will continually monitor a site's uptime and send me an email when things go south? Or are all the ones that come up on Google pretty much the same?

I use Pingdom for my dedicated server. I configure it so that clients are copied on any outages 

This Mozilla Raindrop looks like a serious contender for Google Wave.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3488/3996189794_6870de5db4_o.jpg

I like the minimalist interface. 

geodave said:

Has anyone had any experience with website uptime monitoring?

Some of my less tech-savvy clients are increasingly asking for website uptime monitoring, they don't want to worry when the site goes down, or deal with all the support aspects.

I should mention that these are SEO clients, so I don't run the webserver, design the sites, or really manage their site on a normal basis beyond SEO, so I wouldn't classify this as something I should be "doing anyway"

My question is, anybody know of a program I can install on a net-connected box, or a service I can enlist that will continually monitor a site's uptime and send me an email when things go south? Or are all the ones that come up on Google pretty much the same?

We use Gomez for a few sites. They offer comparison reports to like sized sites in their database. Can offer geographic breakdowns of traffic patterns. If the companies are big enough it can help setup their CDN locations to be closer to the 'edge' of their customers. I don't have any hands on experience myself since I don't touch the server infrastructure. However, the reporting and actionable items have been helpful. 

So how do you convince a client that their 11 page word document outlining a "quick insurance estimate form" is anything but quick for a user... I know there are a lot of variables the insurance industry needs to give an accurate quote, but they've already embraced the fact that they wont validate most of the questions in case someone is just too lazy.

I've got so many show/hides for the "yes / no" answers that pepper this form. Seriously.

I've already got the form broken down into 4 steps, anything further doesn't really make sense and just looks ridiculous.

I'm going to try the, "look at the information you've collected from these people with a shorter form, now you have a sales lead - check it out by calling them" approach tomorrow... web development would be so much better if we could just make sites for other web developers.

/end rant 

I don't think you should be convincing them that it's "not quick for a user".
I'm sure they already know that.
Not every from can be compressed into some web 2.0 simplified nonsense.
Nor should they.
Something like an insurance quote does require a lot of information in order to get anywhere near accurate.
They can't expect everyone to fill out the form in it's entirety, so they shouldn't validate every field.
But, for the people who do fill it out sufficiently, it lessens the work on the agents after the form is received.
Either make it a multi-page form, or just realize that some forms are going to be a big mess and look ugly.
You just have to do your best to minimize the ugliness. 

If you can, run through Turbo Tax's form system.
They've done a great job of making something decently complicated seem really simple. 

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1818-stop-following-directions-and-start-designin g 

As if 37Signals ever "Designs" anything 

What do you mean? 

Just that their stuff doesn't really have any "design" so to speak.
Sure, there's layout, and structure and stuff, but I remember reading a post on their blog a while ago talking about how they don't really "design" anything.
They keep it all very simple.
Don't get me wrong, their stuff is great, for what it is.
Some of their other posts are about other designs as well, and they have a good eye for design.
I've just never seen anything they put out be good design beyond good usability.
Like Jakob Neilsen, I just don't put much stock in design advice from someone who thinks in simply usability terms.
Usability is important, but overcoming the challenge of coupling it with appealing visual design is important as well.

I meant no insult to 37Signals or anything.
Was just a passing comment.
I know that a lot of times now everyone considers "web apps" to be websites, and that the terms are interchangeable.
I just don't believe that's the case.
Web apps need to be intuitive and usable first, visually appealing second.
Many other websites need to be the other way around, for any multitude of reasons.
And there's also a slew of sites that fall somewhere in between.

/preemptive tldr; 

Jakob Neilsen on the other hand, can choke on a bag of dicks. 

i asked jibs this already but:
in asp.net a vendor created a program for us that you have to set \\server\printername to print things, instead of just firing a print window
which is a pain in the dick for anyone in the field because it would have to be visible from the server, and not everyone is within our lan
solutions? 

Have the vendor fix their fuckup... 

I really like their design. I think it's in many cases quite beautiful. I don't think things that are used by large audiences lend themselves to anything other than intuitive, beautiful and clean interfaces, and I guess you agree with that. But I would consider their design ethos very thoughtful and elegant. Their homepage alone is a textbook example of an awesome services homepage. 

Like I said, I meant no insult by it, it was a comment in jest. 

egojab said:

Have the vendor fix their fuckup...

they're kind of hemming and hawing about it
jibs says window.print() javascript would work
i'm going to suggest it to the people
problem is they claim to "not have money to pay for support" which is of course not my problem 

basically you set the \\server\printer and then when you click print when making a query in the webabb hit print and it goes to that printer, i don't think it would be hard for him to replace that function with a function that just fires the browser's print window 

<input type="button" onclick="window.print()" value="Print this"/> 

Is this only printing stuff from websites?
If so, as Jibbs suggested, just use js to insert the proper server values.
If not, you'd probably have to set up some sort of virtual print server or something. 

yeah basically the site is a frontend to sql and it just prints stuff off there 

print screen > photoshop > paste > print 

They should make it make a pdf or excel file instead of printing. Then the end user can do whatever he needs to do to the file. 

Is there anything wrong (morally reprehensible) by running a php script via wget in a cron job.

I had 3 cron jobs go south yesterday afternoon but the scripts work fine when you hit them via web browser.
The cron daemon email says "syntax error, unexpected '{'" the line before that is a include to a class file. So I'm guessing that it's something to do with how php is working with that class file in that environment. The php scripts worked fine for months till yesterday so I guess the webhost changed something so hitting the scripts with wget should keep my stuff from getting affected from changes like that in the future. 

No. 

wapped said:

Is there anything wrong (morally reprehensible) by running a php script via wget in a cron job.

I had 3 cron jobs go south yesterday afternoon but the scripts work fine when you hit them via web browser.
The cron daemon email says "syntax error, unexpected '{'" the line before that is a include to a class file. So I'm guessing that it's something to do with how php is working with that class file in that environment. The php scripts worked fine for months till yesterday so I guess the webhost changed something so hitting the scripts with wget should keep my stuff from getting affected from changes like that in the future.

nope, this is perfectly acceptable. Php, bless it, uses different environmental variables under different environments. print_r($_SERVER) will show you.

Your method is a good way of running a php script automatically as apache user. Means that you don't have to give the apache user a shell login, etc. 

set the cron job to access the script via wget or curl. Just set a parameter to delete the resulting page. That way the script and it's variables are set as though a regular browser request was made. 

Are there any programs for dealing with hundreds and hundreds of fonts in Windows? 

I use http://www.extensis.com/ suitcase fusion on my mac. Looks like they make it for PC too. 

Are there any programs for dealing with hundreds and hundreds of fonts in Windows?

There's several.
Extensis Suitcase, which clives linked, might be the most popular, but the windows version is really quite old and seems like the development has been lagging.
Extensis Universal Type Server though, is amazing, I wish I could bring myself to plunk down the $1300 or whatever for a license. You can run it off of a server, either locally or remote, so that you can manage fonts from multiple machines from one single font library. (I currently have somewhere in the neighborhood of 20K fonts, most of which need to be deleted, but at any rate, it's a lot better than keeping that library of fonts on the multiple machines I use)
There are also FontAgent Pro which is pretty good.
I've been waiting for FontExplorerX to come out on Windows (they beta tested it for a while, but never released it, they currently have a mac version)
And I'm currently beta testing TypeDNA, which looks promising, but it only in beta right now, so it's lacking in some features. 

Which do you use at the moment, ego? Besides TypeDNA

Or do you just have all 20k installed in your windows fonts directory? 

Which do you use at the moment, ego? Besides TypeDNA

Right now, this is all I use on my production machine, just because having multiple font managers side by side causes all sorts of problems. On my laptop I use Suitcase. Prior to installing TypeDNA I used Font Agent Pro. Font Agent Pro and Suitcase are both pretty good production ones. I just haven't decided which one I prefer best yet.

Or do you just have all 20k installed in your windows fonts directory?

Oh good god no, my computer would crawl along like a paraplegic turtle. 

My studio switched from Suitcase to the server version of Font Agent Pro and never looked back, it's great. 

For your viewing pleasure.

http://jhische.com/sneakpeek/day-ruining-invoice.jpg 

I don't know if this will be of use to anyone, but I'm putting it out there anyway.

I recently constructed a Flash video gallery/player to enable me to upload home video clips for my parents and relatives to see. Basic video players are a dime-a-dozen, I'm sure, but I also wanted to experiment a little with a different style of control scheme than I usually see, and to try and make the visible interface as clean and simple as possible. This one uses more of a mouse gesture/compass menu method. Again, the readme will help clarify.

Anyway, if anyone can use it for any purpose, I'm offering it up free with no strings.

http://www.deltatraining.com/relic25/VideoGallery.zip

I'd recommend reading through the included readme before playing with it, as it will make more sense.

You can see how it looks/functions on this temporary site:
http://www.deltatraining.com/relic25/index.html