There’s a few gotcha’s with Microsoft WEFT eot creation tool through. Obviously since it subsets you need to make sure all the letters you intend to use are on the page(s), and also it doesn’t parse the css properly, so things like “text-transform: uppercase” are ignored and potentially needed characters left out. Also the @font-face need to come as the first thing in the document, prior to the main style sheet for them to work reliably it seems. It’s finickiness aside, I actually like the microsoft system, mainly because the subsetting and compression makes the embedded versions of the fonts makes much smaller, so the initial page load times are better on an empty cache.

Anticipated preload – preload in advance before launching a redesign. It often happens after a redesign that you hear: “The new site is cool, but it’s slower than before”. Part of the problem could be that the users were visiting your old site with a full cache, but the new one is always an empty cache experience. You can mitigate this side effect by preloading some components before you even launched the redesign. Your old site can use the time the browser is idle and request images and scripts that will be used by the new site.

For example, an expression doing a faux “max-width” would be recalculated hundreds of times when the mouse moves, even though the result would always be the same. The advantage of behaviours is that you can bind them to specific events, page load, window resize, etc, and in doing so reduce cpu load and improve the performance of your site.

UPDATE: This appears to have been a bug in Firefox, and has been corrected in v2.0.0.5. There should *not* be a space between the selector, colon and pseudo class name. Please disregard the rest of this post

Recently I’ve started using more CSS2 & 3 selectors and properties, including :first-child and :last-child. It’s important to remember to include the space before the colon when specifying these.

If you forget the space the css will still work, but only 90% of the time and without any consistency in Firefox 2, which of course makes it interesting trying to figure out why the page looks fine on first load but breaks after pressing F5! :-S

I’ve finally found an equivalent to Firebug for Internet Explorer that actually works. I’ve been having limited success with the MS Script Editor and Visual Studio, specifically I have to deattach/reattach the debugger after every script error!

Surprisingly considering how much I’ve googled this, I never found
Nikhil Kothari’s Web Development Helper until it was recently mentioned on the ieblog. I suspect the problems I’ve been having are related to me running as limited user account on XP, with things locked down fairly well. So I still need to Runas… an administrator on Internet Explorer to use this extension, but that’s just one elevated process and it works great

Apple have just released Safari 3 Beta for Windows!, which is slightly ironic since I had been spending so much time trying to test stuff on WebKit under Windows recently. This is really good news for web developers, and the mac community in general, since there’s now no excuse not to test sites/apps to the same level as we do with Firefox and Internet Explorer—yes, I’m one of the many that can’t see the justification of buying a Mac to test sites. Safari 3 can be downloaded from the Apple site, go get it here.

Collected from the web and the manual pages:
(updated 5th Feb 2008)

1. Use FSFS for new repo’s, it’s faster and works on network shares
2. Turn off overlays on network drives
3. Doing a Cleanup of your working copy folders after ftp’ing down into your working copy (same files but different last modified timestamps)
4. Exclude .svn folders from virus checkers
5. Disable XP’s “zipfolders” shell extension, you’re using 7zip anyway right?
   regsvr32 /u %windir%\\system32\\zipfldr.dll
6. Set your exclusions to omit useless files, archives and any other files that could accidentally get versioned, when they shouldn’t.
   *.bak *.zip *.7z Thumbs.db
7. Check “Don’t fetch status for context menu option” on the Look & Feel page

Additional suggestions to help stop Explorer & Open/Save Dialog hangs
Under Settings > Icon Overlays:

1. Uncheck “Unversioned Files Mark Parent As Modified”
2. Uncheck everything under “Drive Types”
3. Under “Include Paths” list only the folders of your working copies, e.g. for c:\projects\wc use c:\projects\wc\*. If you need an icon on “wc” you’ll need to use c:\projects\*, but it will then search everything inside projects.
4. All my working copies are in folders called source, so to generate the list to paste into this box I use the following at the command prompt: dir source /ad /s /b > folderlist.txt and then add the * to the end of each line.

If you’re still getting shell lock-ups after trying all the above, commit all your changes to every project, delete every one of your working copies, make new folders and checkout into those. This finally fixed the lockups for me, so I guess working copies made with an older version of subversion were the problem (some of the working copies were first checked out almost 2 years ago).

I’m doing a reinstall on my laptop this week and am saving my firefox config here for future reference

about:config

• browser.backspace_action = 1
• browser.search.suggest.enabled = false
• browser.startup.page = 0
• browser.tabs.tabMinWidth = 40
• browser.urlbar.hideGoButton = true
• layout.spellcheckDefault = 2
• network.http.pipelining = true
• network.http.proxy.pipelining = true
• network.prefetch-next = false
• plugin.scan.4xPluginFolder = false
• plugin.scan.plid.all = false
• plugin.scan.SunJRE = false
• plugin.scan.WindowsMediaPlayer = false

userChrome.css

• #search-container, #searchbar { -moz-box-flex: 200 !important; }

Extensions

• Autocopy
• Firebug
• Flashblock
• IE View
• S3Fox Organizer for Amazon
• Dictionaries