MediaTemple started pimping CloudFlare months ago, and I passed on it until today when I got an email announcing that it became a free service. I figured I’d give it a shot, and less than an hour later I’m impressed enough to write a post and share my early review with both my readers.

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I’m not sure why, but in Windows (only!) Firefox 4.0.1 seems to think it’s cool to put a red box-shadow on any input field of the “email” type. Just leaving a note here in case it’s helpful – it’s easy enough to fix:

input[type="email"] { 
	box-shadow: none;
}

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');

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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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.

I’ve been customizing Mark Huot’s Livesearch extension for ExpressionEngine, which combines the livesearch jQuery plugin with an ExpressionEngine plugin for returning formatted query results.

The livesearch JavaScript has a built-in caching mechanism that didn’t seem to be clearing in Firefox. In Safari, IE, and others, valid search results (weblog entries) were being returned as one would expect. In Firefox, old/deleted entries were being returned as search results. In Firefox 3.6.3 (both for myself and my client), the browser cache couldn’t be completely cleared.

The only way to fix the problem was to view the JavaScript file (jquery.livesearch.js) directly in the browser, then hold shift and click refresh.

I also updated the headers to prevent excessive caching in the first place.