About this site
This is the personal website of Dutch webdeveloper Harmen Janssen. You can read all about me on the About page. Browse the archive for articles on webdevelopment.
Latest articles
CSS Trick: Remove borders from linked images
posted on 18 August 2009 (10:42 PM)
Here's a nice little CSS trick I cooked up today when talking to @heliumworkx.
You know how you sometimes use border-bottom to style links? Then you must be familiar with situations where there's an image inside a link on which the border looks really stupid. Unfortunately there's no CSS selector that targets links containing an img element, so a sprinkle of magic is needed in order to hide the border.
Testing IE6 on Mac using VirtualBox
posted on 07 August 2009 (10:47 AM)
I recently came across VirtualBox, which is a great app that lets you run virtual machines on your Mac. Surprisingly, Microsoft offers different installations of Windows as disc images for free on their site.
So with these two combined, you have a pretty sweet testing environment. Properly configuring Windows in the virtual machine can be a bit of pain in the ass though, so this article aims to break it down into small, easy steps to get you up and running in no time.
Disable fancy errors in CakePHP
posted on 21 July 2009 (04:35 PM)
Here at work we often go crazy because of CakePHP's "helpful" displaying of error messages.
They are littered with HTML and, even worse, Javascript and provide an often superfluous stack trace, which makes it harder to read the actual error message.
Move current selection to new folder with Applescript
posted on 27 May 2009 (12:33 AM)
I often want to instantly move a selection of files into a newly created folder. The scenario is this: I select a bunch of files in Finder, click a button and *bam*: a new folder is created in the current location containing my selection.
This cannot be done natively, but I wrote an Applescript that does this for me.
Quick PHP Tip: passing by reference creates array keys
posted on 29 April 2009 (06:35 PM)
Another little PHP tip that could save you a couple of debugging hours.
Quick PHP Tip: close your connection between stream_get_contents calls
posted on 22 April 2009 (10:07 PM)
Here's a quick solution to a problem I encountered which might save you some headaches.
Book review: The Pragmatic Programmer
posted on 21 March 2009 (01:41 AM)
David, my fellow nerd at Grrr, whom I highly respect as a programmer, recommended The Pragmatic Programmer as a bible for developers.
So what could I do but pick it up and give it a read?
Eliminate articles when ordering in MySQL
posted on 08 March 2009 (10:06 PM)
When generating alphabetically ordered resultsets from your tables, it may be useful to eliminate articles (the and a in the English language).
The following is a simple method of doing this.
Hello Amsterdam!
posted on 30 November 2008 (12:21 PM)
After a year of working for Dutch Internet Works, I've decided to leave Baarn and join Grrr Medialab in Amsterdam.
Guessing font availability with Javascript
posted on 13 November 2008 (09:28 PM)
Recently I wanted to use an uncommon font in a website, but the site was too image-rich to use sIFR, (loading time made for an uneasy user experience).
I decided to add the font anyway in my stylesheet, and provide a “lo-fi” experience, for people who didn’t have the font handy.
The lo-fi version however, should mimic the style of the uncommon font as good as possible.
Sometimes, though, that’s easier said than done.