scss posts

Browser support for rgba colors is very wide, basically working in everything but IE8- and really old browsers. In the name of progressive enhancement, it's still good to give those browsers a fallback, the simplest being the solid version of the same color. This can be done by putting the property twice, once with a solid value and once with an rgba value. The non-supporting browsers will take the solid color and ignore the rgba, while the supporting browsers will take both, with the rgba overriding. As an example: color: #fff; color: rgba(1, 1, 1, 0.6);.

To that end, I created a mixin to do this automatically, similar to my remFallback mixin:

For a while now I've been trying to write posts that draw people, such as solutions to specific problems or things that might be called articles. I think I've focused on these types of writings because parts of me want to be bring myself more prominently into the larger web community, help others, get some praise or critique for my work, and perhaps get offered a high paying job from some bigger web firm. I think I got a bit heady when I started getting above 50 visitors a day, peaking at 98. But that flow has dried up and I'm back down to less than 20.

I do like writing those types of posts sometimes, and I'm not going to stop, but I think I'm going to write a lot more smaller and less focused posts that are more generally about anything on my mind. I think I shall call the posts "The Happs" so I don't have to think of a title and to emphasize their lack of a specific topic. The article type posts really take a long time and some research to compose, and I don't have a lot of free time for them. It is often so long between when I do whatever is the impetus for them and when I write them that I've forgotten a lot of the details. I think "The Happs" will get me writing more often and allow me to put out snippets of what might later go into more thorough articles.

So, what has been happening with me lately?

As I've mentioned, at Cogneato we've been building a new version of our CMS using Symfony on the server side. I've spent a LOT of time with Symfony now. I like it and will be using it for some other projects outside of work as well. We've been working on some eCommerce type sites that will hopefully be launched in the coming months, while building the system that all of our sites will eventually run on.

Though I like it, there have been many challenges to deal with, especially with making Symfony work with our old system. We have way too many existing sites with more than enough custom programming to convert them completely to a new system, so we're setting it up so that both can be run side by side on old sites, while new sites will eventually only need the new system. But it has been a lot of effort to get the two working together properly. Symfony is inflexible in some ways, and not well documented in some areas. I intend to, in the coming months, write about my solutions for the various issues we've dealt with.