Even though the Google Closure Compiler is very useful for compressing JavaScript it has absolutely no support for CSS, something that the YUI Compressor excels at. I give you the YUI Compressor TextMate bundle, an almost direct port of the Google Closure Compiler TextMate bundle but with a different compression library.

It has support for compressing multiple JavaScript and CSS files at the same time; just select the files you want to compress and hit ⇧⌘Y.

Requirements

The YUI Compressor bundle requires:

• The YUI Compressor
• Ruby version 1.8.7 or greater (installed as default on Mac OS 10.5 and above)
• and TextMate (obviously)

Please make sure you read the README before installing. The YUI Compressor TextMate bundle is licenced under the GPL Licence. This bundle has only been tested with the latest versions of Mac OS X (v10.6.2) and TextMate (v1.5.8) but should work with earlier versions as long as the requirements above are met.

Get It

• Downloads
• Source

Using this bundle? Got any suggestions? Let me know in the comments!

I’ve been trying out the brand new Google Closure Compiler instead of the YUI Compressor. I’m not going to go into any detail about the Closure Compiler as there’s plenty of information out there already, but I can say that it looks like another solid offering from Google.

Anyway, in an effort to make a pretty good piece of software even better I decided to make a TextMate bundle for it – something akin to the YUI Compressor bundle – so that it’s never more than a keystroke away (defaults to ⇧⌘G).

Requirements

The Google Closure Compiler bundle requires:

• The Google Closure Compiler (not included in the bundle)
• Ruby version 1.8.7 or greater (installed as standard on Mac OS 10.5 and above)
• TextMate (obviously)

Make sure you read the README file before installing. The Google Closure Compiler TextMate bundle is licenced under the GPL Licence. This bundle has only been tested with the latest versions of Mac OS X (v10.6.2) and TextMate (v1.5.8) but should work with earlier versions as long as the requirements above are met.

Get It

• [Update] The bundle is now available via the GetBundles TextMate bundle. Simply search for “Google Closure Compiler” (Recommended)
• Downloads
• Source code

Using this bundle? Got any suggestions? Let me know in the comments!

A common problem when designing for the web is how to create equal height columns. The usual solution is to either resort to JavaScript or CSS absolute positioning, here I will show you how to create equal height columns with pure CSS using the margin, padding and float properties.

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Whilst I was redesigning my blog (what do you think by the way) I decided that what I really needed to finish it off was an ajaxy live search. Now normally I would have looked for a jQuery version, but as I’ve been trying my hand at a bit of MooTools recently I decided to write my own plugin. By the way, if you want to use it on your own site it’s available for download on GitHub.

After a few minutes hacking it together on my local web-server I had a pretty good implementation, even if I say so myself. However, once I’d installed it onto my live server it stopped returning any results. The reason for this? I had WP Super Cache installed on my live server, but not on my local server, and was messing up the JSON output by putting a comment at the bottom. Obviously, the JavaScript function refused to parse it as valid JSON. When I turned WP Super Cache off everything returned to normal.

As a developer this was simple enough to debug and fix, but for the average user who just wants to use WordPress, install some plugins and then start blogging away this incompatibility simply isn’t good enough. Before you know it you’ll end up with your support forums full of posts such as “Your plugin doesn’t work with xxxx, please fix it“, even if you have already stated this issue in your readme and installation guides.

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Recently I’ve been looking at a way to ease the path of deploying PHP applications to my servers. I eventually settled on the excellent Ruby tool Capistrano which is very popular with the Rails crowd. Now, I’m aware of the irony of using Ruby to deploy PHP but please bare with me.

All of my code is stored in the Git VCS with a bare repository on the server, which is what you should be doing as well. Once you’ve got used to managing your code with Git over SSH you will never want to go back to FTP again. Seriously, try it.

My work-flow is fairly typical: clone the repository onto my local machine; hack away; commit the changes and push the commit back to the server. The problem arises when it comes to deploying this code – I could either set up a post-update hook in the bare repository to pull the changes into the web root or do it manually.

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Originally posted at Redflex.

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We’re really excited to annouce our newest product, Hydrogen. So what exactly is it? Hydrogen is what we like to call a “support-centric discussion area”, it is a place where you and your customers can submit any problems, questions or ideas that they may have.

We built Hydrogen for one simple reason, all the other help desk / support applications available are either too bloated or too complicated to use. Customer support should be easy, with the minimum of padding between you and your customers.

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[Update] I’ve recently changed my JavaScript framework to MooTools, hence the rf.Sparks demo isn’t working properly. The plugin itself hasn’t actually changed so should still work perfectly fine on your own site.

This month’s jQuery plugin is one that creates an effect that I like to describe as “sparks”. We are currently using it on the Redflex splash page whilst we prepare for a new product launch.

From a code point of view it is a reasonably simple effect to produce, all we are doing is creating a whole bunch of <div/>s with an image inside them, and then move them about a bit.

For the sake of brevity I am not going to show you the whole plugin code. If you want to go into more detail than I’m going to here download the development version at the bottom of the page. Instead I’m going to dive right in and show you how to use it.

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