Attention deficit: Adapting your business

"Lists and types of bite sized content that offer immediate reward to an attention and time scare audience typically spread further than content which requires more attention. The attention deficit most of us live with is going to constrain the types of ideas that are profitable."
-Aaron Wall

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CSS: Fixing overflow: hidden in IE

Internet Explorer 6 for windows has been giving me a hard time with expanding fixed width or fixed height boxes (divs) in the most non standard fashion...

The trick would be to apply overflow: hidden to the div to force the browser to hide any excessive content (text, images) instead of expanding the container. But IE6 will not always do as told... :(

I found out today that the trick with IE, is to apply a fixed width or height property to the same container (div) as the overflow property, and then, IE will always crop the contents as expected.

Note: you can specify widths and heights in ex, em or % (not just px). So it's only "fixed" in a relative manner.

PS: In some cases, you may want to consider the non standard IE CSS property word-wrap: break-word; This will break words too long to fit into the fixed width. IE only and non standard...

My favorite Firefox extensions

Here's a quick list of the Firefox extensions I'm using all the time for web development:

  • DOM Inspector
  • IE View (One button to check the same page in IE)
  • ColorZilla (Lets you check colors on a web page)
  • MeasureIt (Lets you measure Elements on a web page)
  • URL Link (Follow a link even if it's not clickable)
  • JavaScript Debugger (well I don't actually use that much but maybe I should)
  • QuickJava (Allows quick enable and disable of Java & Javascript from the status bar
  • Yet Another Window Resizer

Defending the word "suck"

Seth Stevenson tells you more than you ever wanted to know about the word "suck" in Slate (via Anil Dash).

"We could argue all day about whether sucks is an obscenity or not. [...] What's far more interesting to me is the word's utility.

Sucks is the most concise, emphatic way we have to say something is no good. As a one-syllable intransitive verb, it offers superb economy."

Read it though and you'll admit that it would suck not to have the word suck available in daily conversations. ;)

Now, I can't help but remember Adam Curry citing his daughter pushing it to the next level:

"It sucks so bad (that) it swallows!"

Ouch! :>