You’ve got a web project and you consider yourself somewhat tech-savvy, but you know you need to enlist some professional designers and programming nerds to get your site off the ground. For most clients, this is new territory and it’s hard to know exactly what to ask. Here are a few things you’ll want to consider…

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This is one of those awesome bugs that wasted more of my time than I’d like to admit, so hopefully this post can help someone in the future.

The problem: I’m working on a site that uses the jQuery Cycle plugin. The chunk that gets rotated for the slideshow is an HTML list-item that contains another list with nested list items. (li -> ul -> li, li, li). The root li kept getting a background color applied to it, even though I specified that it should be transparent.

The solution: disabling the Cycle plugin’s default behavior of applying a background to the slideshow container element when using IE on a Windows machine with cleartype enabled. Add this little combo to your Cycle options and things should be fine:

cleartypeNoBg: true

The key was mention of this undocumented feature in this thread.

I stumbled across this recently when CocoaMySQL was having problems with a pretty basic SQL import. It’s a great piece of software (for the Mac, of course), it’s much sexier, and it’s free although I think it’s more than worth a donation! If you happen to be working with me on any projects, you may also be interested in checking this out.

Go get it!

I work on more than one Mac. Working from Subversion and checking my email is a breeze, but pretty much everything else is annoying when it comes to sharing data. I don’t want to fork over the money for MobileMe because I’d only want it for syncing. I finally have a simple solution that I’m using to keep my 1Password keychain, Address Book contacts, and Things data all up to date. I first switched my 1Password data to the Agile Keychain format, chose to store the keychain in my DropBox, and I was done! It worked so well I thought I’d try and use DropBox for some other stuff.

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In September, I switched from a Baby shared hosting account at HostGator to my very own slice at Slicehost. It’s been an eye-opening plunge into the world of unmanaged hosting, but the Slicehost support team has played a critical role in supporting me while I get my Slice running smoothly, securely, and efficiently. I’m maxing out a 256MB slice with LAMP, a mail server, DAV, and SVN.

The great relief is that every single problem I’ve had been my own, not the limitations or drawbacks of the hosting company. I was impressed with the responsiveness and offering of my HostGator account, but felt limited by not having DAV or SVN access. Slicehost, at least thus far, has simply followed through with its promise: rock-solid, high-performance service with unbeatable support. They’ve gone out of their way to help me troubleshoot and configure my Slice, understanding full well that I’ve been learning as I go. The risk of course is that your server is yours … to completely screw up. I’ve had a few late-night Postfix/Courier experiments go poorly, but there has always been someone around to help. (Which is amazing — I really mean always.)

I plan on posting some articles with what I’ve learned from my own experience. If you’re starting out with Slicehost, however, PickledOnion’s tutorials are a must.