Web Development

I've been using Hostmonster for probably 10 years to host my simple personal site and other random projects that come up.  Shared hosting is a convenient thing and is a great solution for people that want a normal website.

The flex box model, aka Flexbox, will make designing layouts in CSS and HTML a lot easier once it hits mainstream.  How close is it to being widely supported?  It's actually not too bad, with global support at 88.88% as of 3/2/15.  The main issue is with versions of Internet Explorer earlier than 10.  Modern Chrome and Firefox, as well as mobile browsers almost all support Flexbox.  Since this is a new tool that will likely be employed in CSS frameworks of the future, it's useful to know how and why it will happen.  Here are a few good links.

If you've heard of VMWare and virtualization, you might be confused when you visit VMWare and see 100 different products offered.  I know I am.  If you're a web developer and want to easily cut through the noise, use VirtualBox by Oracle.  It's an open source alternative for virtualization and it does pretty much anything you need as a web developer that wants to spin up an environment for testing on your own computer.  It also works on both Windows and Mac computers.

I had an issue with a multi-page form recently where Internet Explorer would go back a page immediately upon hitting the backspace key.  If you accidentally do this while not in a text field you'll lose your form data.  Other browsers actually ask you if you want to resend data when you go back.  The solution was to disable the backspace key on my form page.  I accomplished this with the following Javascript (requires jQuery):