Posts Tagged ‘CSS’

Chrome Extensions

// March 30th, 2010 // No Comments » // Blog

Default New Tab PageSo while reading one of the many tech blogs, I came across this Chrome extension called “Incredible Start Page” that replaces the standard Chrome new tab (the one with the most visited sites, recently closed tabs, etc) with something a bit more pleasing to the eye, yet also functional. Being the way I am, I immediately wanted to start customizing this to include things like weather, my netflix queue of upcoming movies, twitter feed, etc.

Doing some quick research reveals that Google makes the chrome new tab page easy to change. Just create an extension, give it an attribute of “newtab”: “newtab.html” (link to documentation) and set it to whatever HTML page you want. You can interact with the bookmarks, recent tabs, etc as well as add in anything else you wan to do.

I typically use 3 browsers for various activities:

  • Internet Explorer – for work related activities and testing my personal sites to see how much IE breaks my CSS
  • Firefox - personal browsing at home and for developing websites, reading tech blogs at work (the RSS dynamic bookmarks are wonderful)
  • Chrome - personal browsing at work (gmail, facebook, twitter, etc)

In Firefox, my home page at at both work and home is my iGoogle page. I get current news updates, slickdeals feeds, weather, and all kinds of other stuff that I miss when I open Chrome. I don’t use it as my home page in Chrome because I really like the new tab page functionality. Big icons let me open the pages I read most often very quickly.

The thought of combining the real-time stream of information with the tab interactions of Chrome leaves me wanting to take the Incredible Start Page, rip it apart (you can find the source for chrome extensions in your local machine), and put it all back together with all the bells and whistles I get in iGoogle.

System Configuration Documentation

// December 3rd, 2009 // Comments Off // Portfolio

Reference Data ReportThe problem: While working on client site, it became a daily chore to ensure that all teams had the current system configuration specifications. One line of business would decide to change a product that impacted another line of business all the time. In addition, we found that stakeholders were constantly using outdated reports.

The Solution: To keep all lines of business and technical teams up to date on the current configuration, I created a set of scripts to generate an easy to read report in HTML from the actual system XML configuration files. This allowed business users, as well as technical users, to view product, security, and workflow data models.

The Technology: Created using XSLT and windows batch scripts, the program would fetch the current system configuration files from Rational ClearCase, generate the HTML using Saxon, and then publish the HTML report to a central location. All team members were able to access the current version at all times, saving many hours of wasted communication and time lost correcting conflicts that could have been avoided if everyone was working from the same set of data.