Jason Pearce

More Peace Corps irony.

Twice this week I received requests from Peace Corps volunteers asking for help in building Peace Corps related websites (either for volunteers or the communities they are serving).

Though I’m flattered, it seems people are forgetting that I got kicked out of the Peace Corps for building websites (e.g. this very site you are reading right now).

But will I help? Most likely, I will. These sites will either assist a local community or provide greater support to Peace Corps volunteers.

After all, I joined the Peace Corps to help others with Information Technology. Sadly, I’m confined to help remotely from the comfort of my air-conditioned home instead of doing so in Guyana under the confines of a bug net.

I know that sounds like a backward thing to say, but that’s how the Peace Corps runs things in Guyana.

Since my bookmarklets didn’t port too well over to bookmarks.yahoo.com, I wanted to leave myself a note as to where I can find and download these tools when I arrive at Lambda Chi

• Web Development Bookmarklets
• The rest of Jesse’s Bookmarklets
• Favelets
• Bookmarklets
• Sitepoint’s Better Living Through Bookmarklets

The web development bookmarklets in particular are quite useful in dissecting a CSS page.

I experienced my first peek-a-boo CSS bug in IE today. I can’t believe this problem has never happened for me. Thankfully, I quickly recognized the problem and remembered reading a solution a while back.

The peek-a-boo bug is when IE reserves space for a block item, say a P, H1, or DIV tag, but fails to display its content. If you use your mouse to highlight the missing content, you’ll find it there. And sometimes, it will reappear after scrolling or resizing the page.

Several folks have fixed this bug by adding “position: relative;” to the element or its parent, but I had already done so when peek-a-boo raised its ugly head. Others added “height: 100%;” and/or “width: 100%;” to the parent element, but I didn’t really like these solutions since I was working with a page that had a fluid width.

A lessor published fix, the one that I chose to use, was to add “line-height: 1.2em;” to the parent element. “Hey, there you are IE (giggle, giggle).”

MACCAWS.org recently published “MACCAWS … Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards,” a white-paper that encourages businesses to invest in standards-based Web sites. As a Web author who advocates Web standards, I pledge to frequently refer others (my clients or boss) to this article in hopes they will understand that adopting Web standards will positively affect business.

For those who cannot find the time to read such a well-written, albeit lengthy, case for Web standards, I pledge to refer them to Bill Merikallio and Adam Pratt’s “Why tables for layout is stupid: problems defined, solutions offered.” This site offers nice cartoons and breaks the explanation into smaller pages.

Lastly, I pledge to follow the New York Public Library Style Guide in all its glory.

I don’t know what software was used to create this Remind Me video by Röyksopp, but it sure is impressive. I’m a Flash novice, so could tell me if it is possible to produce something like this in Flash. If so, it sure is an inspiring example. Neat song too.