Every website that I build ends up being better than the last. Something becomes more efficient, or some new little detail becomes standard. One such detail has been automatically-sizing textareas, similar to Facebook’s. It’s a simple idea: the user types more text, the text area gets bigger. It requires no extra UI, it makes perfect sense as it happens, and it degrades without issue. The jQuery plugin I keep coming back to is James Padolsey’s autoResize.

I’ve also made a habit of having textareas size automatically when the page loads, in the even that there’s already text in the field to be edited:

$('textarea.autosize').autoResize().trigger('change');

More than once, I’ve been stuck having to use images where a logo and/or some type is flattened onto a white background. The goal is to achieve something similar to the “Multiply” layer blending mode, but be able to save a PNG with a completely transparent background and no nasty, pixelated artifacts. About a year ago, I found a perfect Quartz-based app (or plugin, I forget which) that could remove the solid background from an image while preserving reflections, drop shadows, and the subtle parts of an image that have more complicated opacity. Unfortunately, I never bookmarked the author’s site nor did I write a blog post or a Tweet or anything that would have been useful.

After hours of searching for said app, I stumbled upon Mikeal Simburger’s KillWhite, a Photoshop plugin (and 64-bit PixelBender plugin!) that does the same thing. And what a relief. It works just as well as the mysterious app I first used, and even better is that Mikeal is working on a version that will key out a selected color.

Comparison:

We’ve all been there with a WordPress install: “Can’t Establish a Database Connection”.

I made sure that my connection info was correct, and unlike every other PHP app install, I continued to get the error.

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I just wasted about two hours of my life troubleshooting my development server when I mysteriously couldn’t SFTP files. Transmit and Flow both quit on me in weird, somewhat inconsistent ways. The problem: I had lazily allowed VirtualMin to set quotas, one in particular on the user account I was SFTPing with.

Careful with those quotas. And that’s the blog post you’ve been waiting ~3 months for.

1. Retail Me Not
2. Amazon Prime
3. Monoprice

Nuff said.

A List Apart’s first publication, “HTML5 for Web Designers,” is both an easy one-sitting read and a warm introduction to HTML5. I dare you to try reading it and not geek out, even just a little bit, over what’s just around the corner.