John Cox

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Interesting

clutch.io

Clutch.io

Clutch is a product page for an AI service that builds and maintains websites from a customer's own content, with changes made by simply asking rather than through tickets or new tools. It pitches pages that rebuild themselves around a visitor's question, sites that can answer and book tours inside ChatGPT, and a design system that keeps updates on brand. The main selling point is its MCP integration, which lets it run from Claude, Zapier, n8n, Slack, Zendesk, Search Console and similar tools, with example automations like turning an emailed PDF into drafted pricing pages for approval, or fixing crawl errors overnight across hundreds of sites. It closes by offering a thirty-minute demo on your own URL.

Permalink aidevelopmentautomation

www.docblox-project.org

DocBlox

The DocBlox blog's page announces, on March 16, 2012, that DocBlox is actually phpDocumentor 2: the old phpDocumentor and the newer DocBlox are being merged, with the first alpha (2.0.0a1) shipping a new "Responsive" default template. Old phpDocumentor 1.x is being retired apart from some closing bugfixes, 2.x will get monthly releases while it stabilizes and then monthly feature and maintenance releases, and DocBlox resources will be rebranded rather than removed. The rest of the page is a changelog trail of DocBlox releases from v0.14.0 (Doctrine Annotations support) through v0.18.1, covering plugins, templating improvements, performance gains, and SugarCRM's adoption of the tool.

Permalink programmingsoftwaredevelopmenttools

phpmaster.com

phpmaster | Using EXPLAIN to Write Better MySQL Queries

A walkthrough of MySQL's EXPLAIN that first decodes each output column (select_type, the join type ranking from const down to ALL, possible_keys/key, rows, Extra) and then applies it to a sample e-commerce schema. With no indexes, a five-table join scans roughly 91 billion row combinations; adding primary keys and indexes on join columns drops that to 4. A second example, a UNION inside a derived table, shows that indexes alone don't help until the WHERE conditions are moved inside each UNION branch, cutting the estimate from about 2.6 million rows to 276.

Permalink performancedevelopmentdatabasetutorial

CSS-Tricks

Flat Icons & Icon Fonts | CSS-Tricks

A running roundup of icon fonts and icon sets from the early @font-face era, arguing that icon fonts beat image icons in everything except being single-color. Each entry gets its icon count, price, and a quick note, from big paid libraries like Pictos, Symbolset, and Pictonic to free niche ones (StateFace for US states, Meteocons for weather, Geobats for countries) and a separate section of flat vector sets that aren't fonts. The most useful pointers are the custom-build tools, IcoMoon and Fontello, which let you pick just the icons you need and combine sets, plus Hieroglyph for generating a font from SVGs.

Permalink designcss3font

openmymind.net

evanmiller.org

How Not To Sort By Average Rating

Evan Miller's piece on ranking items by up/down votes shows why two common scoring methods fail: positives minus negatives favors items with lots of votes over better-liked ones, and the simple average favors items with only a handful of perfect ratings. His fix is to sort by the lower bound of the Wilson score confidence interval, which asks what fraction of positive ratings you can be, say, 95% sure the item really deserves, so small samples are penalized for uncertainty. He supplies the formula along with Ruby, SQL, and Excel implementations, and suggests the same approach for spam detection or "most emailed" lists, ideally measuring positives per view rather than per rating.

Permalink programmingdevelopmentsqldata

Harvard Business Review

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs - Harvard Business Review

Walter Isaacson, writing six months after Steve Jobs's death, draws on his best-selling biography to pull out the practices he thinks any CEO could try to emulate. The saved text gets only as far as the framing: Jobs as the great entrepreneurial creation story, from the garage founding in 1976 through his 1985 ouster and 1997 return, to transforming seven industries and earning a place beside Edison, Ford, and Disney. The actual list of lessons is cut off, so what's kept here is the case for Jobs as a historic innovator who applied imagination to technology and business, flaws and all. It appeared in the April 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Permalink leadershipapplebusinessentrepreneurship

Creative Bloq

snook.ca

Font sizing with rem - Snook.ca

Compares three ways of sizing web text in CSS: px is predictable but blocks text resizing in IE up through IE9, em fixes that but compounds through nested elements (a nested list balloons from 14px to 20px to 27px), and the newer rem unit sidesteps compounding by being relative to the html element. The recommended recipe sets html to 62.5% so 1rem equals 10px, then declares each size twice, in px first as a fallback and in rem after, which gives predictable sizing everywhere and resizable text in current browsers. It includes browser support notes from 2011 (IE9, Safari 5, Chrome and Firefox 3.6+ supported it, Opera added it in 11.60).

Permalink accessibilitydevelopmentcss3font

tylercraft.com

www.danrodney.com

Dan Rodney's List of Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts & Keystrokes

A long, categorized reference of macOS keyboard shortcuts and modifier-key tricks, kept up to date for Sequoia, Sonoma, Big Sur and most other versions. It starts with a key-symbol legend, including equivalents for compact keyboards and Windows users, then covers Finder navigation and file handling, the Cmd-Tab app switcher, window and Dock tricks, text editing, screenshots, Spotlight, Mission Control, startup and shutdown key combos, Safari, Mail, Preview, and miscellaneous items. It ends with the Emacs-style Ctrl key bindings that work in many text fields, with mnemonics for remembering them, which makes it a good page to keep as a cheat sheet.

Permalink productivitytipsmacmacos

Mr Kirkland

CodeIgniter Language File Translator

This is the announcement and install guide for a CodeIgniter language file translator, a controller plus views that the author and Owen Christian built to give translators a web front end for editing an app's CI Language Class files. You set up a master language (e.g. English) and empty, writable "slave" files for other languages, and the tool syncs keys from the master, supports UTF-8 and PHP inside strings, and checks syntax before saving. It covers the v0.5.1 download, a simple drop-in install (with an optional config/translator.php for unusual file locations), and basic usage via index.php/translator.

Permalink developmenttoolspluginscodeigniter

Kickstarter

rails.app by Yehuda Katz — Kickstarter

This is the reward-tier page for the 2012 Kickstarter "rails.app", a project to make Rails 4 friendlier to beginners as well as experienced developers. It raised $51,219 against a $25,000 goal. Tiers run from a $10 handwritten thank-you and a $25 backers-only sticker, to $100 access to an internal feedback list, to $1,000-$10,000 sponsor recognition on the project website, with the top tiers noted as sold out. The page says nothing about the app's technical design, so it mainly records how the project was funded and what backers got.

Permalink programmingdevelopmentopensourceframework

CSS-Tricks

What is Vertical Align? | CSS-Tricks

A walkthrough of CSS's vertical-align property, which governs how inline and inline-block elements like images sit relative to the text around them, and which does nothing for block-level elements, a common source of confusion when people try to center one div inside another. It goes through each value (baseline as the default, middle for icon-sized images, text-top/text-bottom versus top/bottom, sub/super) with examples, then covers table cells, where only top, middle, and bottom behave reliably across browsers. It closes by noting that the HTML valign attribute is deprecated in favor of CSS.

Permalink designdevelopmenttutorialcss3

X (formerly Twitter)

Marginal REVOLUTION

Is Creativity more like IQ or Expertise? — Marginal Revolution

Psychologist John Baer's argument, relayed in a short blog post, is that creativity is domain-specific like expertise rather than a general factor like IQ. His main evidence is that Torrance's own verbal and visual creativity tests correlated at only .06, so the supposedly general divergent-thinking tests measure separate skills, which would undermine much creativity research and gifted-program practice built on them. The practical upshot is that training should draw on many domains to build broad creativity, or stay within one domain to build it there. The blogger is skeptical, suspecting a general component because creativity often combines disparate ideas and can be stimulated by drugs or travel, but he thinks Baer's view is worth taking seriously and links to his two academic papers.

Permalink sciencecreativityeducation